Day 2 of My Skype Adventures Okay, so now that I'm a veteran of Skype, I bravely add more strangers to my list of exchange partners. I had to work yesterday so that put a bit of a damper on things. One of my students brought his girlfriend to class and they decided to sit together immediately. I'm like "No ... if you want to stay in class, you have to sit separately and you have to take part in the class." She goes "Err, can't I just sit here and listen?" and I reply "Nope! If you're going to be here you have to help me out by conversing with my students." She reluctantly agreed just so she could be close to her lover. Sigh ... the beauty of young love. I digress. Yeah, so I came back late from work because I was helping out a former student who speaks barely any English with my um ... what's the word for it, with my Elementary Chinese. It was rather painful akin to a dentist visit but without the drilling. I mean, how can a person live in HK for 6 years and not pick up any Cantonese? So, my first conversation of the day was with this gentleman from Beijing. It turns out we're actually from the same minority ethnic group known as the Hakkas. And like me, his grasp of Hakka was barely non-existent. This was because he moved to Beijing at the tender age of ten and had little opportunity to grow the dialect. Anyway, he proved to be quite an interesting fellow. Again, I can't remember what we talked about but he did introduce me to his mother which was nice. Um, yeah, he helped me quite a bit with my sentence structure as I tend to do literal translations in Chinese. So to you, I say "hěn gāo xìng jiàn dào nǐ." I forgot the word for dào and thought it was dàn which means egg while delicious makes literally no sense. The second and final conversation was with a lady who really understood what language exchange meant, which was a refreshing um ... change. She would take turns talking to me in Mandarin and correcting me and asking me questions in return. She seemed to really relish the role. Once again, perhaps embarassedly, I can't remember most of what we talked about. It was mainly what you would classify as small talk. The stuff of everyday conversation which we spend 90% of our time on and maybe about 10% on more serious conversation. This lady is driven to excel in her vocation of choice and it's good to meet someone so dedicated. Ps. I have decided not to add names of people I talk to but to just refer to them as a gentleman or a lady.