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I’m going back to Melbourne this week.

I’m so looking forward to leading a bit of a normal life for a while and working out what it is I want to do.

Daily life in Hefei is just too bizarre, not at all possible to make rational decisions while here I have decided.

Yesterday the intercom rang and I ignored it, as I usually do if I don’t recognise the person.  Just a few minutes later my visitor was back with a guard, ringing again.  I like and trust our lovely guards so answered just in case he had something important to tell me.  The conversation went something along the lines of:

Hello?

Is anybody home?

Umm… no, there’s nobody home.

Ok (hangs up).

I’ve no idea who it was or why he enlisted the guard for help.

Not long after that, a girl from the washing machine company called and fired off a very rapid bunch of questions I didn’t understand a word of. Our washing machine has been “fixed” a number of times recently and each time I have got what I assume is a follow up call from the company to check all is well.

Generally once the caller realises I am clearly not fluent in Chinese, they ask a few simple questions, I give a few simple answers and I am left feeling quite impressed with my ability to hold a phone conversation in Chinese.

After a few attempts at answering”Washing machine, good” to each of yesterday’s long incomprehensible questions and not succeeding in making my caller go away, I decided instead to reply to each question with long English phrases.  Strangely enough, she wasn’t put off and we had quite a long conversation about who-knows-what.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under life, china, craziness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.