Flashcard Hell

Damn. For a few months, I got sucked into the flashcard trap thanks to the great Anki application. I was so impressed, I went and made flashcards for all the Korean and Japanese vocab and grammar I studied. Inputting all that took a lot of time and effort and could lead to a debilitating case of carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyways, after things cooled down, I realized that I ignored my own advice about relying on flashcards. They are good for learning the building blocks of any language, ie the alphabet/characters, but beyond that, they serve little purpose since it doesn't provide context. It would be far easier to randomly stick my finger in a dictionary and see if I know the definition; at least I wouldn't have to input anything. Anyways, unless there is a big test I'd need to study for, I think I'll have to limit my flashcard use to individual Chinese characters.

Books: Wasting Money, Space, and Time

One thing that I used to have a problem with was buying books and never getting around to going through them. It was such a pain in the ass since I used to lug those unread books with me whenever I moved (I move a LOT). Since then, I've been able to control myself by actually reading the books before buying any others, not only for my own education, but to also lighten my luggage. In any case, I was going to write more on it, but I coincidentally found an article over at Sinosplice that covers it far more eloquently than I ever could. You can read it here.

No Sweat Cantonese (Review II)

Right after I finished "A Cantonese Book", I went right into "No Sweat Cantonese" for another go. Everything I said in the first review still holds. The only difference is that I've been in HK long enough and have gone through some other materials enough to get a better idea of what they were trying to explain. It felt less like a book to learn from and more like a practice book for the stuff I learned elsewhere. Anyways, I got through the entire book this time and it was a lot less frustrating. Probably because I just got finished with "A Cantonese Book" and it was tough to consider "No Sweat Cantonese" as a serious source of Cantonese education. It would be like playing basketball with a five year old. I'd get some practice dribbling, but wouldn't break out in a sweat. This is an especially appropriate example since I suck at basketball. As I mentioned in my last review, there were a couple of useful tidbits here and there, but nothing worth the price of the book.

A Cantonese Book (Review)

I picked up this package when I first arrived in HK. At first, I was pretty disappointed that the box was much bigger than the book and 2 CD's that were included; deceptive marketing and all that. Anyways, overall, I enjoyed the set. It didn't cover much, but I did feel like I got a decent grasp of what there was. First the good stuff. Everything was written in characters. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I had romanization when it is not accompanied by the corresponding characters. There were also plenty of chances to learn to read and pronounce and practice the different grammar structures. There were also a variety of exercises. I'm not sure of how useful they are, but at least I never got bored going over them.

Now for the bad. This book is pretty thin with some big fonts. In other words, it doesn't go over much. A lot of the grammar wasn't very clear and seemed to go for the learn by intuition approach. I've been around enough textbooks to get an idea of what they want to get across, but for someone starting out fresh, I can see how they might get frustrated. Another point of contention is that there were no translations given for the example sentences. I was about 98% sure of the meanings, but that last 2% does a lot for peace of mind.

I don't think it is the best book to learn Cantonese from, but I do think it is a good book to start from, especially when considering the lack of variety and quality in other Cantonese materials out there.

10 Things I Love About Hong Kong

In no particular order, except for #1.

10. The best online banking system ever.

9. Low cost and variety of transportation.

8. Being able to find anything you might need or want.

7. Little or no overt xenophobia compared to other countries I've been in like Korea or Japan. In HK, if you can pay like everyone else, there is no exclusion in products and services.

8. Outside of some brusque sales clerks, I think Hong Kong has some of the friendliest people in the world.

7. Contrary to belief, if you know where to shop and don't insist on living on HK island, HK can be an extremely inexpensive place to live.

6. While other places claim to be international, they are left in the dust compared to HK who comes closest to reaching that ideal.

5. Most movies show up on VCD almost immediately after their theatre run.

4. People in HK tend to be more practical.

3. Winters are like Autumn, my favorite season.

2. Light shows and fireworks every night.

1. THE FOOD. Dim sum, seafood, Middle Eastern, Greek, Mexican, American, Pizza, Japanese, Korean, Shanghainese, Malay, French, Spanish, Indian, Thai, Szechuan, vegetarian, healthy, steak, burgers, hot dogs, Turkish, Greek, Vietnamese, whatever. It is ALL here!

10 Things I Hate About Hong Kong

In no particular order, except for number #1:

10. Being harrassed to buy suits, watches, or getting my fortune told every time I go to TST.

9. The hot muggy weather that makes your clothes stick to you like sweaty saran wrap.

8. Weekend crowds.

7. Having to wait for an hour to eat out because you didn't make a reservation.

6. Mini-busses that seem to accelerate when they see pedestrians on the street.

5. Long ass lines at the ATM machines.

4. When your laundry can't properly dry because of the high humidity and they get that mildewy smell.

3. Toilet paper being sold in indiscrete packs of 12 or 24 rolls.

2. The freezing indoor air conditioning that make it necessary to take a jacket with you even on the hottest summer days.

1. Getting dripped on with that nasty water from the air conditioners mounted on the outside of buildings every time i walk on the street.

Anki (Review)

Anki is a cool little app. I found online. It is a flashcard program made specifically for Japanese. Automatic kana input, statistics regarding the kanji you have stored, detailed graphs on the progress. Good stuff. However, the program can also be used for other languages or topics. These last two months have pretty much been dedicated to input (2,500 Japanese words and 1,700 Korean words) and review. Took a lot of time, but worth the effort since it helps with retention. This program also uses spaced repition, which is the best way to commit things to long term memory. The extra advantage, though, is that you can decide how far you want to push the next review for a particular word. All it requires is being honest with yourself. This is definitely the best flashcard program I've found. You can download it at http://repose.cx/anki/index.html

Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center: Korean (Review)

*Disclaimer: I took this course in the Summer of 1995 so things have proabably changed a lot since then.....or not.

This school is run by the military and provides language training to all branches of the armed forces. In my case, I was enrolled in the 63 week Korean course. Korean is considered a Category III language, which, in military lingo, means damn hard. Classes begin at 9am and finish around 3pm if I remember correctly. There are about 30 students per section, each section broken up into 3 classes of 10 students each, and roughly 5 or 6 teachers per section. The books at the beginning were pretty mediocre and were obviously produced by the lowest bidder. But the materials do improve as the course goes on.

This was a crash course in the language in every sense of the word. There was no stopping for anyone. If you fell too far behind, you would be put into another newbie section. Quizzes were given at the beginning of every day on material that has NOT been covered in class meaning that you had to study 80-100 words a day on your own time. Teachers would rotate every hour and this is a big point; the quality of teachers really was not consistent. My favorite was an ex ROK Colonel, who I'm sure considers the Geneva Convention to be mere suggestions (who knows how many bodies he's buried?). His primary pedagogical tools were fear and intimidation. On the other end of the spectrum, there were teachers who couldn't speak English (I think immersion only works when you are IN the country, otherwise it is just frustration) and teachers who subscribe to the 'read straight out of the book' school of teaching. I'm pretty sure that the majority of the instructors do not have a background in Korean language education. The only requirement was probably being a native speaker.

I was young at the time and in my 'I don't have to study as hard as everyone else because I'm Half Korean' phase, so I will be the first to admit that I definitely could have done more to learn the language, but even still, I thought the course was poorly organized. I really felt that the teachers didn't communicate with each other so one class was getting criticized for not knowing words that only another class was taught.

Also, there was a considerable gap in our language. After graduation, we could say integrated circuit of electricity (회로선), to establish diplomatic relations (수교하다), and landmine (지뢰), but wouldn't be able to say 'the rabbit went up the mountain' or 'no ice, please'. I guess it is understandable considering the purpose of the course, but there have been many who went to Korea afterwards and couldn't hold a normal conversation.

The main problem was that the course was pretty unorganized overall in comparison to the way other languages were taught. Rather than improve the course to increase the number of qualified linguists (enrolling 10 soldiers to get 10 linguists), they dumped as many students as they could into the course and hoped for the best (enroll 500 soldiers to get 10 linguists). This is not to say that I did not learn anything. To the contrary, I learned a lot. But I wonder how much more I could have learned if the 63 weeks were put to EFFECTIVE use.

An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (Review)

I am a big fan of books published by the Japan Times and this is no exception. The cool thing about this book is not it's long yet manageable readings. It isn't the immense amount of useful vocab and grammar that is guaranteed to come up when conversing, reading, or listening to Japanese. What makes this book so great is that it helps students read Japanese without depending so much on the furigana. All the readings are written with furigana-less kanji so your brain learns to adapt, but the pronunciations are just a few pages later in the vocab list so that you can look things up quickly. By the end of the book, I got this warm fuzzy feeling knowing that I CAN read Japanese.

I should clarify that last statement; you won't learn to pronounce every kanji, but your eyes and brain will have been trained to read without depending on the furigana as a crutch. Kinda like having that first shot of hard whiskey without gagging on your way to becoming a full-blown alcoholic. This is important since you will eventually have to graduate to tougher materials that don't cater to the kanji illiterate. It is slow going sometimes, but well worth the effort. This is an excellent book to graduate to from the Genki series.

Integrated Korean: Advanced Intermediate 1 (Review)

There is a significant jump between the Intermediate books and the Advanced Intermediate books. Up until now, the previous books were pretty easy going, but this next one really upped the ante. The dialogues and readings are a lot longer, the vocab for each chapter is pretty extensive, and the grammar comes at you non-stop. This book covers a variety of topics that go beyond the usual beginner blather (The weather is really nice, isn't it?) and covers a lot of ground in terms of vocabulary and grammar. In other words, this book really starts getting into the nitty gritty. The English sections covering culture has also been removed. Probably in order to make room for all those pages of vocab and grammar.

Complaints are the same; random unintroduced words scattered here and there throughout the book. But then again, it could just be my lack of retention from the previous 4 books. Anyways, all in all, I really enjoyed this book; it really allowed me to begin sinking my teeth into the language.

Holy 시옷!

Last week, my Korean ability was kicked hard in the proverbial nuts. I've been told on more than a few occassions that I talk fast to the point of being unintelligible. I've been making a conscious effort to slow down and enunciate, but I still slip into warp speed on occassion. On one of those occassions, I was speaking with a native speaker who said I needed to slow down. I slowed down and said with a little sarcasm, 'is this slow enough?'. Imagine my shock and awe when she said my Korean still sounded wrong. 15 years of study vanished in an instant. The earth opened up beneath me spewing fire and brimstone. My world was caving in on itself. My ego smashed into a bloody pulp like That Yellow Bastard's last meeting with Hartigan, but red.

Hiding my sudden desire to kill cute and fluffy bunnies, I said, "Oh? What's wrong with it?". I came to find out there are two unique features of Korean that I had been completely unaware of.

The first one is that the first syllable of every word is drawn out just the tiniest bit more than the following syllables. If Korean was morse code, it would be dash dot dot dot. All this time, I had been speaking it dot dot dot dot. I guess that first elongated syllable gives the listener that extra beat to register the word.

The second point regarding my Korean inadequacy was a little harder to nail down. We were using the word 고맙다 as an example. No matter how I said it, she said it sounded like 꼬맙다. It was seriously driving me crazy because I couldn't hear a damn bit of difference between how she said it and how I said it. I asked her that if my 고맙다 sounded like 꼬맙다, then how does my 꼬맙다 sound. She said it sounded like it was a hard 꼬. What the hell? This is basic Korean 99 (even easier than 101). If I got even the differences of ㄱ, ㄲ, and ㅋ wrong, then my Hangeul house of cards was crashing down hard. Of course she couldn't tell me what I was doing wrong. As a native speaker, it just comes naturally to her so she never had to think about the why's and the how's. After some infuriating practice, I had an epiphany. In the beginning, I learned that ㄱ was like the english G, ㄲ was sharp and unaspirated, and ㅋ was aspirated. It turns out that in Korean, the regular ㄱ is mildly aspirated, almost as if you are sighing lightly while pronouncing the syllable, giving it a more 'fuller' sound.

I practiced with various words and syllables to make sure I had it correct until she gave every word I tried a 'perfect' or 'great' and that my American accent had considerably become less noticible. The skies cleared, the angels began singing, and all was right with the world again.

But thinking back to the 'American accent' comment, I can understand the first point since, in English, my natural reaction is to speak fast and it does seem that the syllables are spoken pretty quickly in the first place. But regarding the second point, I thought about it a lot and it does seem that my hard consonants tend to be clipped and unaspirated, but since I don't know any native English speakers in HK, I don't know if that is just me or consistent with all native English speakers. Oh well, I'll keep that in mind so that I can ask around during my next visit to the States.

The Myth of Monolingual America

I often hear from people that only America doesn't treat second language learning seriously or they are too dumb to learn anything other than English. However, I don't see this as a matter of intelligence, but as a matter of enviornment, perception, and arrogance.

Regarding environment, frankly speaking, America historically never had a need to learn a foreign language. We have two huge oceans on either side of us, Mexico to the South, and English speaking Canada (sans French Quebec) to the North. Is Bill Bumford from Kansas or John Smith from Delaware really going to need to learn to speak German, French, or Spanish to succeed in life? I don't think so. Besides, as English is currently the business language of the world, Americans can be rest assured that while we are not learning any languages, the rest of the world is trying to learn ours. That being said, if you look a little closer, you will see that there are a lot of bilingual folks along the Southern border with Mexico. Once again, it is because of the environment. People speak Spanish and English because of the close proximity with Mexico. Same thing as with Florida and its Cuban American population. So in my eyes, multilingual Europeans are not smarter than the average bear, but because most European countries are surrounded by other countries; it is the environment that they grew up in that made them multilingual. Not all that different from people who grew up in Souther California, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, etc. A prime example of this is Hong Kong. The territory used to have a very high number of excellent English speakers due to British annexation, but ten years after the handover, it is easy to see that the number of English speakers has decreased considerably in favor of Mandarin Chinese. It is all about the environment.

Perception, on the other hand, is also a huge factor. People tend to see Americans as white, blue-eyed, and blonde. They fail to understand that Americans are not one ethnicity, but a hodge-podge of cultures from different countries. So Johnny Nguyen from San Jose who was born in America, lived his whole life here, and speaks perfect English is not considered a real American. What I'm trying to say here is that there is a HUGE population of people here with ties to Asia, Africa, Central and South America who are bilingual and are just as American as our brothers who's families immigrated from Europe. An ABC or a Kyopo is no less American because being American has no relation to the blood that flows in your veins. It is just a misconception caused by people who don't understand the differences between nationality, ethnicity, and upbringing.

There is also a lot of arrogance going around on both sides of the fence. People who claim to speak English because they took it in school and did some tests. I once knew a French guy who was teaching English; problem was that every time he spoke it, it sounded like he had a xxxx in his mouth (for any family members who might be reading this, xxxx means food). My experience is pretty limited to Asia, but it always seems to me that for every good English speaker, there are 50,000 who don't have the skills no matter how many years they spent in school. Knowing how to say hasta la vista and yo quiero taco bell does NOT make me a Spanish speaker. And for every great English speaker, there are 500,000 who are not. In short, I don't think that Americans are dumber than other people in terms of foreign languages, I just think that a lot of those other peoples are not as smart as they think they are.

However, arrogance runs both ways. America's problem is that we are under the false impression that we make the world go round and English will always be the language of top dogs. English may be the language the world runs on today, but I think that Chinese will soon take over the throne. Being rest assured that everyone in the world is trying to learn English is fine and all, but it is arrogant to think that it will always be like that. Americans need to see the advantages of learning a foreign language. We should take the initiative now and at least TRY to learn a second tongue. And the smart bet is to make sure that the second tongue is Mandarin.

I think it is irrational to think that America lacks the intellect to learn a foreign language. That is the knee jerk response of unintelligent people. It is simply the result of environment, perceptioin, and arrogance. However, I agree that America fails to see the importance of multilingualism and that ignorance, I believe, will hurt us in the future. As a wise man once said, a cunning linguist is skilled with his tongue.

Name Change?

I think I need to change the name of the blog. I am studying Cantonese and am making improvements, real or imagined, but I don't think I have enough experience with the language yet to be able to talk about it with any insight.

The Mattress

I moved into a new apartment a couple of weeks ago and one of my first purchases was a mattress. Since I didn't intend on spending an outrageous price for a new one, I decided I'd get one used. HK has a lot of foreigners coming and going so it is pretty easy to get something fairly new at a reasonable price. I went over to geoexpat.com's classified section and found a promising ad. Less than a year old and needs to be moved quickly.

I went over and met this nice German lady who was moving in with her English boyfriend. In the end, I bought the mattress and a tv set. We arranged to have the movers they were using to also drop by my place to move my new purchases the next day. Anyways, I met up with them the next day and we took a taxi to the fellow's apartment to wait for the movers. While we waited, we chatted a bit. There is something about an English accent that makes even a Harvard graduate feel intellectually inferior (not that I know what it's like to go to Harvard). We could be talking about porn and I'd still feel like I didn't have the academic qualifications for the topic. I was the George W. Bush to his Tony Blair. This may be the first and last time I compare myself to Bush......

Anyways, the movers were late so the boyfriend called up the movers and told them off a bit in Cantonese. I was impressed.
The movers finally arrived and unloaded the couple's belongings. The deal was that I would ride with the two movers to my place so they could unload the mattress and tv. Despite my best efforts to get a window seat, I ended up in the middle seat between two hard-working (read BO) movers wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. It was a very quiet ride as we didn't have anything to say to each other. As I was breathing through my mouth and trying to think of something, anything to say, I became thankful that HK was so small and that it takes about 15 minutes to get to anywhere.

We arrived, they unloaded the mattress and tv, and I watched a movie on my brand new tv while lying on my brand new bed. Good stuff.

WTF?

I'm back in the states for a bit and went to fill up the car with gas. $3 per gallon? I knew prices were high, but I guess it doesn't quite hit you until you have to spend your own money.

象=Elephant=象

I read a comment on a forum somewhere about whether or not it was beneficial to memorize vocab/grammar from your target language (TL) to your native language (NL) or from your NL to your TL. In other words, should I study that an elephant=象 or should I study that 象＝elephant. Tough question.

A lot of people associate this problem with the differences of active learning and passive learning. Specifically, that by forcing our NL programmed brains to think of a word in a foreign language is far more active and therefore more efficient than doing it in the other direction. I disagree. The degree of activeness or passiveness in the learning process depends on the presentation. It takes just as much thought process to translate a word to your NL as it does from your NL to your TL. In addition, learning from your TL to your NL is far more practical (assuming you are living in an area that speaks your TL) in the sense that everything you read or hear will be in your TL. TL to NL best reflects the process your brain goes through when immersed in an environment that uses your TL.

There are also many who argue that studying from your TL to your NL inhibits your speaking ability. To some extent, I do agree with this since the process runs reverse when we translate what we want to say before we speak. However, the words we use in conversation is only a small percentage of the total words we know. In addition, that small amount we know can cover a lot. In other words, since my NL is English, I would like to know the meaning of scarlet, crimson, ruby, flushed, ruddy, etc. when I read or hear it. But for all intents and purposes, just saying red when speaking is good enough. The same applies to foreign languages.

So far, the only exception I've come across is the Heisig process. For the purpose of learning to write Chinese characters, he makes valid points. I mean how can you learn to write Chinese characters from memory if it is write there in front of you to copy? I know first hand that this works because if given the keyword, I can write from memory 2042 characters. But AFTER learning to write, I found myself having trouble recalling the keyword when I come across the character. Of course I could work out the story, but that takes a little too much time when I'm trying to get through some reading. I just prefer not to think about rabbits jumping out of holes and running around trees when I'm reading a news article. I'd rather have my brain recognize the character as fast as possible. I really do think that in the case of characters, it is better to start off with NL to TL but then finish with TL to NL.

In any case, whatever the direction, any study is better than no study. If you do it often enough, retention will happen. However, when the dust settles, I believe you get more out of studying from your target language to your native language to better train your mind for the environment you are in.

Sticks and Knives

Last week, I joined a kali/arnis/eskrima club in HK. For those who don't know, it is a Filipino martial arts where beginners start with sticks, advance to knives, and then graduate to bare hands. I've been interested in this for a long time and have been trying to find a place to learn for quite some time. No luck in Korea and Japan where Filipinos are not exactly very high on the totem pole. I finally found a place in Quarry Bay. Filipinos in HK are not exactly treated well here either and most (including Thais) are hired as domestic helpers or laborers. But during the weekends, when they have their day off, they all gather and you might as well be walking in Manila (or Bangkok) no matter where you are in HK. So it wasn't surprising that out of all those thousands, at least one guy was teaching Arnis.

Anyways, I went down there with a buddy of mine to check it out. It was a HOT day and I just came off of a business lunch so my clothes were way to heavy to be practicing in and I was soaked in sweat in no time. Anyways, he introduced us to several weapons, my favorite being the wiked little kerambit. Afterwards, he taught us a few locks and drills with the baston and for some reason I was the guy he was demonstrating on. I'm guessing it is because I was relatively taller than everyone else so it offered more of a challenge from a technical point of view. Anyways, it wasn't easy being on the receiving end of a bitch-be-good stick. Hits were hits, choke holds choked, and joint locks extended those joints a few degrees more than they should in the opposite direction. But I guess that means this club is not watered down which is cool. After all is said and done, I had a hell of a good time and will keep going with this.

Queesine

I pride myself on being able to eat everything. I've tried live squid, lung, grilled intestines, chicken feet (the little ones AND the big claws; you can also pick your teeth with the nail), snails, alligator, etc. Nothing gets you closer to a people then being able sit down and share a beer over bowls of whatever the local flavor is. Except for insects, I have never backed down from a meal.....until I came to Hong Kong.

At first, I wasn't all that daunted. I had the obligatory dinner where the locals try to get you to try stuff. Noodles with octopus ink? Give me seconds. Chicken feet? A good swig of beer will help that down. While I am admittedly not a fan of chicken feet, I can still handle it and I wasn't fazed.

After living here for awhile, I start noticing things. At the supermarket, they were selling live turtles. That in itself didn't bother me as turtle soup and turtle shell are considered pretty good. I've even had jelly made from turtle shells. What bugged me was the live toads I saw in the next bin. Now some of you will probably say that eating frogs is quite common and is a delicacy in France. However, if, like me, you think frogs and toads are pretty similar, one look of these nasty critters and you will see that they are worlds apart. While frogs are small, cute, (usually) green, and give you warm nostalgic feelings from when you were young playing along with Kermit on TV, toads are big, ugly, warty creatures who's appearance justifies their place among the ten plagues of Egypt. Looking at these things, I couldn't help but think of Chet's demise in "Weird Science". Anyways, looking at these slimy gobs of nastiness jumping and climbing over each other and imagining them stewed on someones plate, I felt a new sensation. My stomache was churning.

However, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I met my biggest challenge. Some friends invited me out for some hot pot. Among the ingredients, chicken testicles. I'm not one to back down from a fight, but there was no way I could handle chicken nuts. I've had chicken hearts before and these nuts were easily two or three times bigger. I'm not a chicken expert or anyting, but the chicken could be the one animal in the world who's nuts are bigger than their hearts. Those things were almost as big as mine and, not to brag, I'm the proud owner of pretty impressive pair.

Anyways, any delusions of grandeur I may have had about my ability to stomache anything have been shattered. Hong Kong has humbled me.

Getting Lucky

A friend of mine is really big into astrology. Funny since she is in university to study forensics. Anyways, having my year, month, day, and hour of birth, here is my fortune:

I will be successful in either entertainment or coffee or other fire-based businesses (whatever that means). I will be pretty rich and I will most likely get married when I'm 40. My wife will be from the year of the dog which would make her either 23 or 35. You can guess which one I'm shooting for. I'm also going to be a very nice boss and that I should be careful not to let people take advantage of my goodwill. And I'll be living for a long time.

All in all, pretty good news. I'm not a very superstitious person, but every little bit of luck helps. Yay me.

Can You Hear Me Now?

A few weeks ago, I went to Pacific Coffee down by the Avenue of the Stars. It's a touristy area, but for some reason, the coffee shop isn't packed like everywhere else in HK so I go there pretty often to study. After a while, I got up to use the free internet they had over there to check my mail. I took my cell phone with me because I was expecting a call and because petty theft is pretty rampant, especially in these tourist traps. Anyways, I placed my phone next to the keyboard and was checking my mail when I heard a huge crash. I peaked around a corner and saw an old lady lying on her back in front of the ladies' room with her arms, legs, and cain flailing like a beetle turned on its back. As LifeAlert's "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" ran through my mind, I rushed over there to help her. For your reference, little old ladies are very difficult to pick up from the ground. They are fragile enough so that you can't pull them up by their arms for fear they will tear off like wings on a fly. And you can't pick them up from the back because they are heavier than they appear. Anyways, some others who I am guessing are family members rushed over and in a blur of Chinese said thank you and they'd handle it...at least I'm pretty sure that is what they said. In any case, it's obvious they have more experience picking up fallen little old ladies.

Seeing that everything was good, I went to the computer to log off and then found a seat. I reached for my phone to see if anyone called and my hand found...nothing. My phone was gone. I checked my pockets, around the table and chairs, around the computer I was using. Nothing. I found a pay phone and called the number. The phone was disconnected. It all became clear. I got jacked. What I don't understand is why. It was honestly the cheapest and most insignificant phone you can find and could probably be bought from the change you find inside your couch. Anyways, I was still pissed about it. It's the principle of it all. It must've gotten jacked while I was helping the old lady. Anyways, the moral of the story is don't help little old ladies.