The mall across from my house decided to celebrate this special day by hosting Speed Dating - yes, in the center of the mall. Somewhat funny if you ask me. You're celebrating being single - but lets set you up. But I suppose you do have to be single to fairly participate in Speed Dating.
At first I planned to simply watch my chinese-Canadian friend participate because she speaks chinese. But seriously when else do you have a chance for such entertainment?!? The official criteria to participate were to be single, and to be a good looking male or female. It didn't say you needed to speak chinese, and I obviously fit the other criteria, Sooooo YES, I did it.
Sunday afternoon we showed up, signed up and got 4 free EGGS. Yes, eggs. Convenient since I ran out just the other day and these are very good quality I'm sure. (My first hard-boiled egg is now cooling as I write this and I'm sure I will thoroughly enjoy it very soon.)
Then we sat and waited in front of a stage for about an hour while a host led little games that of course I did not understand. Lucky for us though my roommate showed up with my Chinese-English Dictionary and my chinese-canadian friend and I got ushered off to a TV interview. TRUE STORY. Such are the benefits of being the white foreign face in the crowd. I sure hope my foreign expert perspective gets lots of air time.
The actual "Speed Dating" portion didn't start out super well. As usual, there were more girls than guys and the first guy who sat across from me quickly moved over to sit across from my chinese-canadian friend instead because well, she spoke chinese. Turns out he could speak a bit of English as he had recently been to New York so the three of us spoke a little.
To be honest I think the fact that I can barely speak any chinese and they can often not speak that much english makes it pretty safe. And safe is good because I'm not interested in a chinese husband. I don't say that to be mean or rude but I just figure being male and female is different enough and I'd just rather share the same cultural background with someone. So when one of the guys asked me if I wanted a chinese man I honestly replied "nope."
Another good question: "why are you here if you can't speak chinese?" - because it didn't say you HAD to speak chinese.
I learned my conversational chinese is TERRIBLE - not that I was pretending before but seriously I stink. However, I did get to use one super helpful phrase I know "wo xi huan ni de huzi"(I like your mustache) with one guy. I also got to use my more practiced "I like to play soccer and I like swimming," which is clearly important to be mentioned. Actually to be honest, I was impressed that more than half of the guys knew enough english that I could talk to them about at least something.
I learned from an engineer that the fighting between China and Japan over an island is basically about oil. Something I didn't know.
Oh and I even had 2 people ask for my email. In english. (also safe) AND when I mentioned to one guy that it was great that we got eggs because I had just ran out of mine, he gifted me his as well. What a lucky day - a total of 8 free high quality chinese eggs.
A pretty successful afternoon of entertainment.
1 comment:
vThank you for being so brave and attempting Chinese conversation in a somewhat pressured setting. I appreciate your courage and the free eggs which I used to make delicious muffins.
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