Okay I wanna have kids. Because cooking for one person is just too wasteful. I'm the sort who likes home/self-cooked food.
Anyway, that was a random thought that had been following me since this morning. Haha. Things like this happen - some thought will pop into my head and I would think: How do I blog this? And that thought will follow me until I blog it. =)
This morning I talked to a Russian girl (from Moscow) who lives two doors away from me (I see her quite often at the washing facilities) - she's also from the Chinese faculty (!) and has a Chinese name (!!). We conversed purely in Mandarin. Later, my roomie Xiaoyun and I went to lunch together and as we were returning to the dorm, a gorgeous blond girl with an Afro-American looking guy asked us about the general direction to a canteen. She talked to us in Mandarin and XY told her that she could speak to us in English. She said, smiling, “我不一定是英国人。” (I may not be British.) This "OoOPs!" alarm went off in our heads and it turned out that she's French. We don't know if she was offended, since it felt natural for us to speak to Caucasians in English, but obviously Chinese is really the common language here.
The cultural diversity here is truly amazing, and like XY said, it felt really weird to be speaking to the Caucasians in Mandarin, but the fact is that a lot of them speak better Mandarin than most Singaporean Chinese. That's something for us to think about.
13 years ago
