Remembering one’s name, and future calamities

1. The strangest thing happened to me last week — I inexplicably remembered how to write my Chinese name. Out of the blue, all 50 something strokes of it came back to me. I can’t remember the last time I managed to write my full name in Chinese, must’ve been years. Now I’m practising like crazy, determined not to let it get away from me again.

2. I also have a secondary motivation to relearn my native language — I have recently met a very impressive Japanese woman who is not only bilingual, but she has a smattering of Cantonese as well. By comparison I would say I can speak a “sprinkling” of Cantonese. I just can’t stand people who are good with languages; especially when they are also fun to hang around with. *sigh*

3. The weather has really started to turn cold now, regularly dropping to low single digits at night. It has been raining a bit lately, and with the wind it’s getting very miserable out. I’ve had plenty of Brits and Canadians make fun of my inability to deal with cold weather (The bastards, I never made fun of them when it was hot…), but even they now concede that it is cold. I’ve had conflicting reports of how much snow to expect during January and February, but that doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that it snows at all. I’m kinda excited about living in a city that snows — since it’s been about 15 years since I’d seen snow — but even the thought wears off after a few minutes. Coming back from Indonesia into a white Hiroshima is going to be hell.

4. Speaking of which, I have finally paid for and received my tickets — rock! I’m am looking forward to this trip, dicing with death and all that. Really, it’s not that crazy to go climbing erupting volcanoes and all that, right? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?

5. Uh-oh. Jinxed myself good now.

Comments

  1. i understand the disliking of people fluent in 2 languages, i kick myself on the train that i don’t speak russian (not that my mother speaks it anymore), and why on the train you are thinking… its when that smelly Ahole sits next to you that you think it would be great to speak something uncommon so that you could ring someone up and bitch about them, might sound a little shallow, but it is a fantasy, i have had some dodgy train rides

    Comment by caz — December 10, 2006 @ 8:47 pm

  2. Oh, I know what you mean, but what you want to do is to tell them in English that they should bugger off :)

    Comment by JohnK — December 12, 2006 @ 1:56 am

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