Saturday, November 8, 2008

A funny wake-up call

Around 12.30pm on Friday "morning" my phone started ringing, since I was meeting my friend's friend Vivi at 1pm I had already woken up from my alarm but I was still only semi-conscious so this became really confusing for me. The conversation went something like this:

Girl on phone: Ni hao.
Me: eeeh, hello?
Girl on phone: Ni hui bu hui shou putonghua? (do you speak Chinese?)
Me: eeeh, bu hui shou (eeeh, no?!?)
Girl on phone: Wo shi Luqi de pengyou (I'm Luqi's friend)
Girl on phone: Tjing tjong tjing tjong (I couldn't understand)
Me: Ni hui bu hui shou yingyue? (do you speak English?)
Girl on phone: bu hui shou (no)
The conversation kept going for a bit with her speaking Chinese and me saying "tin bu dong" (I don't understand). After a while I tried to ask her to send me a message and I think she said the same thing in Chinese, something about gei ni which means give you, and a few minutes after I got a message in Chinese, which my phone can't even show and I wouldn't understand anyway. I replied with some mix English and pinying (Chinese written with western letters) and I never got any reply.

I asked Luqi about this and she confirmed it was her friend, first it seemed they didn't know each other that well but after the confusion lay down I understood that it was a close friend of hers, just that she didn't know she couldn't speak English.

I actually met the girl later when I was out with Luqi and she was a bit embarrassed about the whole thing, but it was really not that big a deal in the end.

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