THAT'S OKAY, WE SPEAK ENGLISH

When I woke up shortly after one to answer the call of nature I was in a cheerful mood, and ended up having a quarrel with an old friend in Israel over the nature of America and what I really feel about the red states. Which is more or less black and unprintable. He has a more sunny rightwing hippie point of view -- with which I disagree, of course -- influenced largely by events in his part of the world. A form of blinkered worldview which is thoroughly understandable, even if meshune to the point of stark raving bonkers.
He too is a liberal. Liberalish. There are limitations.
And he still likes the Grateful Dead.
Which with I cannot agree.
They suck.

This morning when my apartment mate came bounding out of her room filled with vim and vigour I was asleep again. But the insistent spam calls on my cellphone awakened me, and groggily I answered the third or fourth one with a snarl in Cantonese on speaker phone. To which she contributed. The poor little Indian phone centre drooge probably did not realize that the two languages he heard were not the same. My civilized urban Cantonese, as is most likely spoken by the Masonic conspiracy, versus her Toishanese which is the native tongue of hundreds of thousands of stubborn pissy people who defy the frightful peasants in the interior of America to dish up Kung Pao and General Tzo to a closeminded demographic that seemingly hates everything outside of their narrow transplantee Ulster Anglo ken.
Except cheap food with colours, sweetness, and grease.

Afterwards she suggested that I throw in the phrase 'Satanic blood ritual' to up the ante a bit. Which is 撒但嘅血儀式 ('saat taan ge huet yi sik') in Cantonese, and in any case completely opaque to nice little Hindustani thieves and extortionists in the heart of Gujustan.
It was a perky suggestion. Both of us hate perky.

She does not realize that when she is wide awake she is the epitome of perky.

I told her that if it were in English, the only way the spam-dude would understand it would be if it were enunciated clearly, which would alert him to our actually being able to speak English very well. A completely countrproductive result, you will agree.

In the afternoon yesterday I headed out with two pipes and a pounch of aged Virginia to have lunch and smoke. She was home all day, because it was a holiday, which kind of cramped my style. I decided that given the cold it was a perfect chance to go have claypot rice at a place which specializes in that. Where they speak both Cantonese and Toishanwaa.

All the claypot rice dishes are listed on the wall in Chinese, from which I selected one that reflected both the HK claypot rice paradigm perfectly as well as the home-town Cantonese gestalt: 咸魚肉餅煲仔飯 ('haam yü yiuk beng pou jai faan'). Pork patty with a wedge of salt fish on top of the rice. The claypot gives a nicely crackly bottom to the rice, the combined fragrances perfume the puffed-up grains, the enclosed heat perfectly cooks the pork.

Two techo-geeks at other tables were eating claypot rice while reading their cell-phones.
I noticed that the Caucasian girl with the Chinese boyfriend were each having claypot rice, the two Mandarin-speaking young ladies who later came in did too, the grumpy aged peasant couple likewise. The only person not doing so was the elderly American-born fellow near the window, probably because he couldn't read the specials on the wall. Everyone there seemed to enjoy their food, but one thing that struck me was that though quite busy, the restaurant wasn't typically noisy. What in Chinese is referred to as re nao (熱鬧 'yit naau'). If I had gone to a chachanteng as I originally intended, it would have been lively to the point of headpain with the same number of people. The Chinese have a great tolerance for cacaphony.
Enjoying clay pot rice is necessary down time.
Shut up, I'm eating.


Smoking my pipe later was extremely enjoyable. The alleyways a little further downhill were pleasant, although one of them looked like a garbage dump from the trash that the mahjong parlours put there; the only two businesses that pay for refuse service are the flower shop and the hair salon.


The title of this post is the phrase that all Americans hear when attempting to speak Dutch in the Netherlands: "That's okay, we speak English". Because of how English speakers usually massacre other languages. A good friend will hear it a lot over the next several months.
She's moving there. Today. I wish her luck.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================