Ha! Chinese level one completed! The best part of it - I met a great group of people who manage to inspire me every time, and the most enthusiastic teacher ever. Crazy enthusiastic, actually.
So she takes us to the Big Bowl, a restaurant in the not-so-big China town of Vienna. And we are prepared, we have studied our nice phrases on how to order food and drinks, gone through the thanks and goodbyes and the napkin requests, and the bill and all that. Equipped with little post-it notes, lesson scans and all all the dictionaries and apps our phones can hold. We are READY.
Until we see the menu.
Menu is in Chinese. To be expected, we are in a Chinese restaurant, right. Menu is ONLY in Chinese. To be expected, our teacher instructed them to give us that. But, to get to the point.
Menu is illegible. Truly. Totally. Illegible.
The waitress comes, and she is genuinely entertained by our struggles to order drinks. Yet, we score a small victory and we get what we want. It doesn't really matter that pretty much all of us are drinking the same thing, right? Just similar tastes. :) The hard part is still to come. The menu is still in Chinese. There is a thought slowly getting into my head: I will have to skip dinner tonight.
But then, ha! There is Pleco! There is a way, let's just write down all those characters from the menu and at least see how they are pronounced. So we can order them, of course. Hunger is stronger than Chinese, we can do that! Did anyone say we need to also understand what we are ordering? Details, important thing is, we ordered! Our teacher is recording our attempts to pronounce the dishes we (randomly) selected. I am assuming for blackmailing purposes. But we are happy, food will come.
And it did.
I got a "field chicken" （田鸡）. You know, one of the characters I recognise - 鸡。Only it's not a chicken. It's frog legs. One of those moments, when you are glad you grew up where you grew up.
I actually love frog legs.
So she takes us to the Big Bowl, a restaurant in the not-so-big China town of Vienna. And we are prepared, we have studied our nice phrases on how to order food and drinks, gone through the thanks and goodbyes and the napkin requests, and the bill and all that. Equipped with little post-it notes, lesson scans and all all the dictionaries and apps our phones can hold. We are READY.
Until we see the menu.
Menu is in Chinese. To be expected, we are in a Chinese restaurant, right. Menu is ONLY in Chinese. To be expected, our teacher instructed them to give us that. But, to get to the point.
Menu is illegible. Truly. Totally. Illegible.
The waitress comes, and she is genuinely entertained by our struggles to order drinks. Yet, we score a small victory and we get what we want. It doesn't really matter that pretty much all of us are drinking the same thing, right? Just similar tastes. :) The hard part is still to come. The menu is still in Chinese. There is a thought slowly getting into my head: I will have to skip dinner tonight.
But then, ha! There is Pleco! There is a way, let's just write down all those characters from the menu and at least see how they are pronounced. So we can order them, of course. Hunger is stronger than Chinese, we can do that! Did anyone say we need to also understand what we are ordering? Details, important thing is, we ordered! Our teacher is recording our attempts to pronounce the dishes we (randomly) selected. I am assuming for blackmailing purposes. But we are happy, food will come.
And it did.
I got a "field chicken" （田鸡）. You know, one of the characters I recognise - 鸡。Only it's not a chicken. It's frog legs. One of those moments, when you are glad you grew up where you grew up.
I actually love frog legs.
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