What a day. I have a cold and am always irritable when my nose is stuffed up. My girlfriend woke me up early for a ride to the train station and I missed out on several hours of sleep I had been counting on; today was a very important Spanish exam day.
Tangent: I've been trying to convince my university to let me test out of my language requirements. They finally were persuaded, and I spent the last two days trying to re-learn the Spanish that I picked up in Argentina over 10 years ago. All things considered, I think I did pretty well, but a lot can go wrong with language tests. What if I got all the words right but the accents wrong? What if I got the verbs right but used past preterite instead of past imperfect tense? We'll see how they choose to grade it.
Anyway...I'm sick and its cold and its a sunny day - back to my morning story about Taiwan's friendly people. On a OCD infatuation I felt I needed a bigger TV, and last night I found a used one (huge) for $150. Did I need it? No. But it seemed like such a good deal! So, today I was trying to figure out how to buy speakers for it. This is something people do. They buy speakers for TV's. I have a set of old speakers, but I was willing to buy new ones.
I went to RT mart, the nearest supermarket, and asked in my passable Chinese. "I have this (TV) and I have that (Speaker) I want use together, how can I use together? What do I have to buy? The first guy in the electronics department answered my question and I said OK, but then he said "Wait" and he went to ask a co-worker. (The problem is that TV speakers don't plug into TV's, they plug into sound-boxes that plug into TV's. Or - they have a little green audio plug like computers, but I didn't think my TV has that. So the answer I got was "impossible. Can't do it." That's a silly answer. Of course I can find a way to connect speakers to a TV. And he read the incredulous look on my face as incomprehension - so he went to find someone who spoke ENGLISH.)
First, he brought a loud, sociable co-worker whose English was much worse than my Chinese and I ignored her. Then he brought a woman who was married to a man who lived in California and spoke some English. (I think they used the broadcast system to say "will anyone who speaks English please come to the electronics department?")
I explained to her, in Chinese, (but slower this time) what I wanted, and she passed that along in Chinese, to the crowd of employees gathering. They gave her answers (the same ones that I heard before) in Chinese (which I understood) and then she translated into English (how helpful.)
Then her husband came along who spoke English very well. At this point it would be rude to refuse his help so I spoke to him in English. We chatted for awhile about the USA, I asked my questions again but more specifically, and got the same answers (but was directed to another store at least) and thanked everybody for the help and left.
YES - Taiwanese people are extremely HELPFUL. They want to FIND HELP FOR YOU. But they often lack the confidence, self-esteem and competence to listen to you and help you themselves. To be fair, my Chinese isn't great. Even at the other store, the employees kept saying "Maybe this...but I'm don't understand what you want." However....the problem was simple and pretty clear. I had two physical objects to point to and gesture with, as well as lots of cords to dangle emphatically. Anyway....
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