Butler Trio

Was playing Scrabble Online on Facebook (WoW is more alluring to Rudy than I am) with a woman from Hampshire.

Her: Where are you from?

Me: Singapore!

Her: This must be a good test of your English!!! ;-)

Me: The official language in Singapore is English! I just passed my GCSE A-Levels done by Cambridge.

Her: Well done you! Wish I had a second language, bit late now at 62!!

At this point I gave up trying to indicate that England is not the only country where people speak English. (Then again, the gibberish that comes out of the mouths of Americans and Australians doesn't sound like English either. KidDinG. Comic relief!)

Seriously, even after saying I did my A-Levels (which is part of the British education system), she still assumed it was with English as my second language and that I am a native Chinese/-whatever language it is she has ingrained in her mind- speaker. And also despite me already saying that English is our official language.

Guess people who don't live in UK can't possibly speak English as their first language! No sireee, we all speak xxx language, and are forced to learn English because it's the only way we backward folk can survive in this globalized world!

In her little Hampshirean world, England is probably still the only superpower in the world (which was a title England only partly shared circa like... Stone Age. Okay pre-WWII). News of the rapidly rising influences of China and India (and let's throw in Russia, to be less antagonistic) may not have reached her yet.

Bored of talking about this, lest it becomes a really sensitive topic or something anyway. In conclusion, I naively thought the days of people going "Oh is Singapore in China?" whenever I explained my origins were long over, but I guess not.

P.S. I am making a baseless assumption that she thinks my first language is Chinese. Of course she could actually think I speak say, Swahili, but that would be even more retarded.

Photobooth:

This was one day when I happened to be at my bus stop waiting for Rudy, and was amazed that I had access to Wireless there!

Alright, going off to ensure all the Fs in the "for" of Death Cab For Cutie in my Itunes library are uppercase, just noticed they weren't. I'm stubborn about the titles/names that way!

Which reminds me, the other day the band at Hard Rock played a Paris Hilton song. Last I checked, she's about as near to rock as I am to discovering a cure for AIDS (optimism always!). But maybe that's just me.