Last weekend we woke up to the
beautiful sound of the fire alarm again. Practice really makes
perfect and this time our room was not the last to evacuate. We rose
quickly and woke up our roommates who slept through the alarm. The
atmosphere was relaxed and I even tried to locate my cardigan, not
wanting to go anywhere without it.
It was a false alarm once again. A
marijuana dealer had visited us in hopes of lucrative business in the
backpacker community. However, no business contacts were established
and frustrated by this turn of events the guy put the fire alarm on
on his way out. I have no explanation as to why no one was interested
in his merchandise. I wouldn't say no one uses that stuff here.
Anyway, after the alarm it was very difficult to get back to sleep.
Luckily that's not something that rarely happens here. There is
always someone coming in or going out and the noise of the opening
and closing door is enough to keep me awake most nights.
On Monday the boiler broke at work. We
went home early because there was nothing we could do without steam.
The problems continued well into Wednesday and we did 10 hour days,
trying to manage all the orders. There is still a chaos waiting for
us on Monday, though. It's kind of depressing to think that it will
probably take at least another week to clear the mess.
But Mondays are also somewhat good now
because that's when I go to the language school to study Vietnamese.
It really gave me a surprise to notice how ill prepared people are to
study a foreign language. I mean, in Finland every pupil/student has
to study at least two foreign languages, English and Swedish/Finnish
(depending on your mother tongue). In addition to those mandatory
languages many people I know have also studied German, Russian,
French, Spanish etc. Even the days of my grandparents there was
interest in the study of languages. So, we learn how to study a
language quite early in life and later on, for many it is already a
routine. Not here, no. Everyone participating in the course is grown
up alright, but their ability to build even a simple sentence, such
as ”my names is x” is close to zero. They try to learn every
sentence by heart without trying to understand the actual meaning of
the individual words. Too bad it's impossible to learn by heart every
sentence of a language. It would be far easier to just memorize the
words and understand the basic grammar but but.. So if asking
someone's name poses such a difficulty, what's going to happen when
we (hopefully) move on to the more complicated stuff? I'm starting to
be afraid we'll be stuck asking the name and nationality for the
entire duration of the course. That sucks.
And finally, there was some humor to be
found this week, too. It seems like clothes with ready made holes are
fashinable now. I'm sure they'll sell well in Australia, the country
of people who constantly complain about not having any money. What
could be better than looking like a beggar and paying a couple of
hundred of dollars for the look? Seriously, this is probably one of
the richest, highest earning countries on the Earth but it's cool to
pretend you are poor. Get real.
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