Back to the Language Barrier

The reason we travelled everywhere by taxi yesterday was that the air conditioning in the family car stopped working and had to be taken to the mechanic. It eventually turned out this was a symptom of the entire cooling system being broken, but in any case, it was up and running today. Once again, Kelly’s uncle came to my aid, and after I exchanged goodbyes with a good part of Kelly’s family, he drove me to the airport, with Kelly and Yiding riding along to see me off.

 Kelly's father took a picture of us before I departed (well, several pictures, but this was the best).
Taking this picture was exactly as chaotic as it looks.
The chaos has been fixed a little in this picture.

My destination was Seoul where my dad was already waiting for me. Our joint trip was conceived several months ago and was meticulously worked out by my dad while I was cramming Chinese textbooks into my head. After two months of getting comfortable talking to salespeople, airline employees, and hotel staff in Chinese, therefore, I was in a foreign country where Chinese was as good as useless: back to the language barrier for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Southern Delhi and Other Bits and Pieces

Image
On my last day in Delhi, I managed to cross off the last few items on my sightseeing list. I began by packing my luggage, all the while congratulating myself on having remembered to ask the hotel to do my laundry in advance. That finished, I ordered an Uber to Akshardham, a massive Hindu temple east of the Yamuna River. The opening hours of the temple are not well advertised, and when I arrived by the front gate, I learned it was still closed. For a few minutes, I took pictures of the temple from afar, when suddenly an autorickshaw driver approached me. He reasoned with me that since the temple would not open until ten, I had better come with him and see other sights. I had to admit the soundness of his reasoning and gave him my next address.
Read more

India: Day 9 – Independence Day

Image
Tuesday the 15 th was Independence Day. I woke up in the morning to find a scorpion in the bathroom, whom I clobbered to death with a flip-flop. I figured that leaving it alone to go seek help might give it a chance to hide somewhere and threaten us later. I paid off my karmic debt in a few minutes by letting a trapped cicada out of the house. Having lodged itself between a shoe and the door, the insect zoomed off into the garden when I threw open the door and pushed the shoe out.
Read more

India: Days 5-8 – On a tea estate in Darjeeling

Image
I woke up a few minutes after four this morning as Sparsh began to rouse the house for our journey to the train station. Frantically but methodically, we washed ourselves and packed the last of our belongings before loading them into three cars and piling the fourteen-headed group inside them. The ride was smooth. Although I had been woken up a few times that night by the loudest thunder I had ever heard, the roads did not seem dangerously wet, and indeed, it was early enough in the morning that the lack of traffic added considerably to my feelings of safety.
Read more