April 2013
I had a nine-day holiday in Russia - Saint Petersburg and Moscow - There were a lot of beautiful historic buildings. However, Russian rarely smiled or showed any kind of facial expressions.
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| Kolomenskoye Wooden Palace, Moscow, 2013 |
Their mother tongue is Russian and they do not understand Cantonese. Sometimes I like going to places where people do not understand my language, so I can say to my friends what I like without any dangerous being understood.
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| Peter & Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg, 2013 |
I had imagined that as English is a language throughout an international. It would be understood by Russians and I was excited that I would be able to speak with them in my fairly simple English. However, I discovered they could speak very little English, spoke it worse than me.
When I ordered some hot water in a restaurant, the waiter did not move, so I thought I had spoken too fast, I spoke slowly and used only simple words - hot, water, aqua. Some waiters never responded and others just walked away, some spoke to me in Russian waving their arms, giving me a blanked expression, but I still did not get any hot water. I knew it was time to learn 'hot water' in Russian. The pronunciation was something like 'keep-it-dot'. These magic words sometimes did not work, I thought it must be my bad pronunciation.
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| A restaurant in Moscow, 2013 |
For the last two-days of the trip, I lost my voice. I could communicate with gesture and this did work. I made signs when every I wanted to know a price in dollars, or ask for clothes in my size, what I wanted to ask for direction, order drinks or simply say thank you. To my surprise, they smiled and were very helpful.
So I learned that after all, we do speak the same language, sign language.
