Lost in Translation
Okay guys, this one needs no introduction ...
... does it?
Curiously I had a moment of total identification when she
really got going:
'Please give me cock'
'Oh please give me cock'
'I want a cock'
'Please give me a cock'
'Ask them the price of cock'
No racism intended - it goes both ways, as I was to prove with my less than fabulous Mandarin more than once in my year in China.
The fact that you can speak any Mandarin at all is extraordinarily impressive! Though I suspect you didn't need to ask if the attractive young man smiling at you had any cock...though perhaps asking "please give me your cock" or even the price of such a transaction were useful phrases during your year in the Celestial Kingdom.
ReplyDeletehi Paul
Deletemy mandarin is so bad it doesn't bear thinking about - with all the free time i studied over the winter of my year in China i surprised myself at my minutely slow progress. people kept saying Mandarin is a lifetime study - cold comfort to the enthusiast i'm afraid
curiously behind a wall on the northern extremity of tiananmen square itself, there was a shall we say 'meeting place' for gay guys - where one would have thought all these phrases ('i want cock', and so on) in Mandarin would have come in handy. but just being there and foreign resulted in the equivalent of 'i give you cock' and there were rather a lot of these offers. there was one journey back to the friendship hotel with three other 'i give you cock's in my cab and no 'cock costs yuan'. i'm surprised how often one has these lovely moments in one's travel life.
there was the time in the minaret of a mosque in Cairo ... but perhaps that's another comment.