Before I bought the bad apples last night, I went out for dinner at a tiny little spot by the market. When I walked in, I was greeted by these 3 giggling teenage girls who were all dressed in the same pink sweat suit. I immediately knew that this was going to be an interesting dinner...
Throughout the dinner they were either sitting at the table next to me (sitting in each other's laps of course, good lord I do not understand Chinese women) or standing together off in the corner. Everytime I looked up I caught them staring at me and they would start giggling again. I tried to talk to them a little during dinner but unfortunately they are the kind of Chinese people who can't understand anything you're saying! So a Chinese lady at another table who could understand me was translating for them. This happens to me ALL the time where the person I am addressing can't understand me and someone else who is not in the conversation does and helps out. I asked one of my Chinese English teacher friends about this and she told me that perhaps some people are not very clever, lol! What I think is that some people get nervous when they're talking to a foreigner or something and put up a complete mental block. Eventually, since it was too difficult to communicate, the girls came over with a piece of cardboard that had some Chinese written on it. I was like are they serious, they really think I can read this. Then I saw QQ on it so I figured they wanted my QQ number/name but I don't have one. So then one of the girls said telephone in English. I was like oh great...so I wrote it down for them and hoped for the best. Five minutes later the girls came back and asked me what my name was in English. I told them, and then they produced another piece of cardboard which had "what's your name?" written in English- they had prepared for my answer, haha! I wrote it down for them. When I got home after my apple shopping I noticed that I had 2 new text messages from the girls. They proceeded to text me all night and one of them even called me this morning while I was in class. Oh my god...what have I done! Half of the texts were in Chinese and I already told them last night that I couldn't read Chinese! Well I saw them again today when I was trying to get my money back for the apples so I said hi and told them again that I couldn't read Chinese. They of course did not understand, but some random group of Chinese people walking by did and they told them what I said. And so the cycle repeats itself again...
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