Learning The Lingo

After not going to bed until about 6:30am we had a bit of a lazy day. We didn't even get up until gone 3pm and with the rain fast approaching we needed to try and find food without getting too wet. We went to a local bar called SOULed Out and ate some very tasty oysters followed by beef noodles. A lot of the time when you get noodles or rice over here they give you chilli, garlic and soy sauce in a little dish on the side so you can spice as required. When we first arrived the chillies were going uneaten a lot but as time has passed you start to need them to give it a kick. Bish is going to struggle to cook curry which I consider spicy by the time I get home!

As I'm writing this I have actually realised that it was today we went into the city centre for shopping and pork and in fact yesterday we just sat around and watched movies before we watched the football. Anyway, imagine what I said yesterday here and we'll all be ok 80) I'm writing this blog a few days behind most of the time and it's hard to keep up when I haven't really had to pay attention to what day it is never mind the time of day.

So, once we'd got back from the city and watched some more Lost, Rich and I decided we were getting a bit peckish again and fancied some curry and egg rotis. Doug was feeling lazy and didn't want to trek out in the heat with us to get food and decided it would be easier to tell me how to say our order in Malay. Most of the guys that work in the cafes here do speak basic English but they get very confused talking to us because we use so many words that they don't understand. We have been working hard to drop the unnecessary words and more recently I have found myself speaking in a kind of broken English even when I'm talking to Doug and Rich which is a bit weird.

Anyway, with my lines written on an envelope in my pocket Rich and I headed out to Spicy Kitchen to get some food. Ordering went ok at best but considering that what I was ordering was pretty basic they still found parts of it hard to understand. The main problem is that I don't say my vowels properly, for example, "Kari ikan" is the fish curry to dip your rotis in and when I see that written down I want to say it as "carry ee-can" which is totally wrong. The "a" sounds are more like in the word "car" so "car-ee ee-carn". The guys at the cafe did seem to appreciate the fact that I was trying to speak their language but the problem is that once one of them doesn't understand you, they get someone else, and when they don't understand you another one comes along so you end up with three or four guys listening to you trying to speak Malay which is a bit unnerving.

After finally getting to the bottom of what I was trying to say, the food was cooked and we headed back to the apartment to eat. I explained to Doug what had happened and repeated what I had said at the cafe. He didn't stop laughing at my accent for a good five minutes.