My coworker Kole brought it to my attention that I've developed British question intonation. I didn't notice it myself, but now that he's mentioned it, I hear that it's actually different from how I used to talk. Americans go up at the end of questions, but Brits go up all the way to the second-to-last word, and then they go down again. Kole gets really annoyed when he hears me speak like that, because he says I'm a traitor to Americans, and he thinks I'm putting it on on purpose to impress Mike. First of all, Mike isn't perceptive enough that he would notice if I was trying to impress him with my accent, and second of all, I'm not skilled enough with different accents to be able to pull off intentional impersonations. So it's not on purpose, and it's pretty scary to know that in just 4 months I was able to completely change my question intonation! Pretty soon I'll have a Manc accent too :) It will be interesting to see how much British slang I've adopted as my own, whenever I end up back in the States everyone will have to see if they can still understand me! Kole does comment every so often that I should use American words instead of British words, but being surrounded by so many Brits makes it hard not to pick up slang, especially since they have SO MANY funny slang words!
On a different note, tomorrow is, of course, Valentine's Day. I only got one Valentine card today from a student (a girl, 15). I don't have anything romantic planned with Mike- we're going to our new favorite restaurant, a Chinese place with 7 different kinds of laghman, and maybe we're getting tattoos (well, he's getting one, maybe I am). He's getting the Kyrgyz yurt roof opening (like on the Kyrgyz flag)- you can see it here: One of his students told him where a tattoo place is located, but since students are almost 100% of the time wrong, who knows if the place really exists. I got him a Christina Ricci notebook because she's his favorite actress, and a silly little 3som card. We're not big celebrators (we still haven't gotten each other Xmas presents!)
Today was payday, and we were worried that we'd get paid in som because the exchange rate has kept going up and up and up. BUT, exactly today it went down, so we got our dollars! It will be stupid to get paid in som, because then when we go to leave Kyrgyzstan we have to change it all back to dollars.
Mike and I are busy applying for new jobs for August/September... we're now looking at Thailand, Taiwan, Bulgaria, and also Prague. Many many jobs haven't written back to us. I was pretty against going to SE Asia, but then I realized how depressed I am here in winter/coldness, so being steps away from the beach would be amazing!
Time is FLYING- weather is warming up (not that it really was ever cold to begin with), birds are chirping, and hopefully spring is coming! My Russian teacher this month is amazing, so maybe at some point I'll finally begin to speak conversationally.
Happy Valentine's Day!
1 comment:
I'm telling you, Cambodia is your best options in SE Asia. They won't hire you on-line, but you'll get a job within 1 or 2 days. You save a tonne of money. Thialand sucks. The reason the Europeans won't get back to you is you're not European. They won't hire you.
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