Hello, Ni Hao

Tonight for dinner we went to Hot Chic. Yes, it sounds very high class, doesn't it. It's a hole in the wall diner that serves a variety of food, but we go there for the Chinese. It's located at Singa Plaza and we typically taxi there and walk back.

As we were waiting for our dinner to be brought to our table (in no particular order and not all at one time), the boys saw out the window the local older gentleman that we like to call "the Hello, Ni Hao guy" (to fully appreciate this, you must say "hello ni hao" with a deep and rattling smokers voice and you must shake the tin can to get the passerby's attention). And they of course said (out loud), "look, it's the Hello Ni Hao guy!" Those of you who are reading this in the SIP area know the guy that we are talking about. We had not seen him for a while, as we normally see him in the Singa Plaza area around Franco Papa (the bakery, a.k.a. Papa Roaches) to around Starbucks. When we would see him outside the bakery, we would give him a coin (1Yuan) and be on our merry way. This may not seem like an important siting, but since he is "older" and walks with "help" ~ although the boys have said that they see him "walking" without his walking stick ~ it was good (is that the right word) to see him. So if he is "handicapped" or if that is just part of his routine to get a yuan, one will never know.

On another note, we may be starting our "beginners" Chinese language lessons next week. The woman from the Boland school emailed us tonight and I will be finalizing our class plans this week. It will be good to get into a setting to learn in an organized way as opposed to flying by the seat of our pants and hoping that the locals know English. I now have a better appreciation of non-English speaking people in the US. I believe that those people do try to learn the language if just to get by, but as with learning any language, it can be a very daunting task. So I ask you, the next time you hear something that does not resemble English and it upsets you (or doesn't), think of us in China with 6 billion of our closest friends speaking Mandarin and the four of us not being able to find our way out of a paper bag!