Wednesday, January 04, 2006
2 strange men and a book.

Well today I was confined at home, to welcome the cooker-hood delivery guy and the electone repairman who were scheduled to come at 2 most stupid times of the day. Cooker-hood came whilst I was still sleeping, so the guy had to see me in my most ghastly state.

The electone guy?

He's just too disgusting for me to say anything. He told me he'd use the toilet. 10 seconds after I heard the door lock, he came out. I didn't hear a flush, I didn't hear the tap on, I didn't hear squat. I entered the toilet (after he left) and it was as ghastly as how cooker-hood guy saw me this morning.

Since I couldn't go out [for the MS marketing meeting (gawd, I'm so going to get kicked out of MS Marketing)] , I went scouting around the house for things to do and I found this library book my sister borrowed. Well, with my sister, its a well-known fact that when she borrows a book, it just means she feels sorry for the book being stuck in the library and wants to take it for a little sightseeing. She never reads it. At most she'll read the back, the first 3 pages or so and then she leaves it all over the house.

The other time she was being more compassionate towards these poor library books, she borrowed 3 of them.

me: Why'd you borrow so many?

her: Oh I want to bring them to Turkey, so you know, can read in the plane cos its a long flight, and probably read before I sleep or in the bus...

me: -rolls eyes- really? Well I'm going to just bring one. (pointing to DVC by Dan Brown) You wanna bet not? I think you're going to sleep on the plane, and in the hotel room. You will bring 3 unread books, and come home with 3 unread books.

her: Tsk, no la, who said? (matter-of-factly) I WILL read okay!

me: okay.

Whilst I finished my DVC on the bus, I thought her 3 books did enjoy the cold turkish air, visiting Troy and whatnots.

So anyways, this book that I found on my study table was admiring my room and making friends with my laptop etc etc before I parted them and started reading it. Its called "They Think it's all Over" by Joel Snape. Well its a story of this English boy, Dylan who has to host a German exchange student, Rudi.

Well its a classic "I'm English and my country is better than yours" VS "I'm German and my country is cleaner than yours". Well Dylan speaks mediocre German, very much like mine, whereas Rudi speaks fantastic English and is a complete weirdo.

So there's a part where Dylan rants about how frustrating (yet easy) the German language can be, and I found it interesting/could identify with him.

"...reading it? That's fine... Speaking it? Not too bad. As long as what I
have to say isn't any more complicated than.. "I like reading and going
swimming," then it's no problem at all..Writing it - again, not too bad. It's all about smudging your 'der's and 'die's so nobody can tell whether you've got the masculine/feminine bits right or not. I mean, its a pointless system anyway - who got to decide that hairdressers are
'masculine' and onions are 'feminine'?... But understanding it? That's
absolutely impossible. I mean, I understand all the words individually, I know
what's supposed to be going on, but this is what I hear whenever we try a
listening comprehension exercise.

"Guten Tag.""
"Guten Tag. Ich germangermangerman."
"Ah, also germangermangerman? Oder germangermangerman?"
"Germangermangerman."
"Danke schon"
"Bitte sehr."

Honestly."

Haha! I totally know what this poor boy's talking about, man.

I don't get the gender thingers too!

Okay Happy Day people!