I have:
- walked back and forth on a main street, looking for the 8th street intersection and finding only 5th and 10th, while trying to meet friends for lunch
- held my breath as I was sure for the 5th time in 2 minutes that the auto rickshaw I was riding in was going to collide with a motorcycle or a bus (but they almost never do), and
- cautiously tried another Indian dish that my friends thought might not be very spicy, only to find once again that it's sure spicier than I like,
all with a pretty steady sense of adventure, but yesterday I had my first strong moment of frustration.
Unsurprisingly, the straw that broke the camel's back was the language barrier. But it wasn't my total lack of understanding of Tamil. I'm not going to understand anything spoken in Tamil; that's just a fact of life. But when--on top of all the technical differences I have to learn about working in the office here in India (What schema do I use for this? Who can sign in to that? What's the password there? How can I do that, if A can't talk to B?), plus the level of concentration it sometimes takes to process the technical details that are just part of this work--once again I listened to a sentence from one of my Indian co-workers that I knew must be in English but from which I could not pick out a single word, internally I wanted to scream. Why do I have to listen so hard to people speaking my native tongue, and still come away convinced that I've never heard any of those words before?
The moment passed, a quiet prayer settled my spirit, and I'm assured that another month or so of listening will make a huge difference in my level of understanding, but I thought I'd share a frustration with you, as well as the fun things.
In other news, that same day saw me at an Indian Pizza Hut for the first time. Yum!
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4 comments:
So what was it that he said?!?!?!? :-)
Hmm. Whatever it was, I didn't understand it. And I certainly don't remember. Probably something about essential contact reasons not being eliminated for the wife because of an outer join or some such thing.
Ya gotta watch out for those outer joins. It also depends on whether the person is left handed or right handed - because then you would have (you can surely see this coming)a left outer join or a right outer join...
I love your stories - they're bringing back lots of memories!
Okay, Frip, I knew there would be a few for whom my comment didn't sound like gibberish. But if you can explain the part about the essential contact reasons not being eliminated, you've been listening in on our Skype conversions!
It's fun having you chime in.
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