Speak the same language

April 2013



Kolomenskoye Wooden Palace, Moscow, 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.



Peter & Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg, 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.

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.





A restaurant in Moscow, 2013

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.   

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.