"But I was just practising..."

Abang was showing me what he has learnt lately from his Mandarin teacher at kindergarten. He was demonstrating how to write the various strokes, and also what they're called. I thought it's pretty cool that he's actually learning something in that class. I did wonder, initially, whether he would be a bit lost in his Mandarin class but I guess not.

Anyway, that reminded me of the time I went to Shanghai with Daddy some years ago. He had some meetings to attend there and so I tagged along. I was so excited, because knowing some basic Mandarin I figured that was a great opportunity to improve my grasp of the language. Even though the trip was only 4 days long, I still managed to pick up a lot of Mandarin - spoken and written - because everything there is in Mandarin.

So I practised whenever I could, with the hotel staff, shop assistants, at the airport, etc. (Not with taxi drivers, though, because that one could *really* get me into trouble. I would just use the card provided by the hotel which has their name and address written in Mandarin, point to it and say, "Go there.") One funny incident I recall was asking one of the hotel staff about the swimming pool. He took us past the gym and then to the pool. The whole place was dark and he had to go find the light switch somewhere. As he was away, I spotted the pool and quite excitedly exclaimed something like "Hey there it is!"

And the hotel staff, in a rather panicky voice, yelled in Mandarin, "No, no! No water! No water!"

I was thinking, like, DUH, we're fully clothed, we're not going to just jump into an empty pool! It turns out that the hotel was so new that the pool didn't even have any water yet. In fact, the gym equipment had not even been plugged in to the wall!

So the other incident, which Daddy will never let me forget, was when we were having breakfast at the hotel. It's your standard buffet breakfast, complete with the egg station where you can order freshly cooked eggs to your liking.

Unlike Malaysian hotels which are halal and have chicken ham and beef bacon bits, obviously this hotel had real ham and real bacon bits, alongside the chopped onions, capsicum and mushrooms. So off I rattled in Mandarin to the waiter, asking for an "omelette without meat, just the vegetables".

Feeling rather proud of myself for practising my Mandarin, I waited for my freshly cooked omelette. Lo and behold, what did I get but a freshly cooked omelette with none of the vegetables and all of the meat which I cannot eat!

Daddy laughed SO loud and SO long and for the rest of the trip kept poking fun at me for "showing off".

Come to think of it, he still does.