Pre-Christmas Dinner with Neighbours...

Our neighbours are all taiwanese... and so they all speak mandarin... And I for one, don't understand mandarin, only extremely limited excerpts of it. So tonight my parents cooked up dinner and invited the neighbours over to our place. They are all pretty old might I add. My brother wasn't home as per usual so therefore I was the only youngling/teenager at the table. The only interesting thing for me was the food pretty much, cos I barely understood the conversations. Normally I can fit right into conversation of "adults"/elder people, but with a defining language barrier it was not possible, and so I was pretty much zoned out for the later 2/3rds of the dinner. During the first 3rd of the night though, I attempted to understand and surely enough I understood the topic that was, at the time, currently in conversation. From travelling to the cost of airfares, to shanghai holidays, etc. etc. etc. But what made it rather depressing though is that when every single person, that is significantly older than you, has asked you whether you have a girlfriend yet... I understood all those parts in mandarin, but one of the neighbours (who could actually speak english) asked me that question in english as a direct question, what can you do but have a hysterical grin and shake your head? It is depressing because it seems as though it is like a measure of reputation relative to age. After that the conversation continues in mandarin and my mum says that I don't have one because I seem too "childish"... I'm assuming she thought I wouldn't understand. But yeah... I've lost the direction that I was trying to head for this blog. But either way... It is rather depressing to hear that question from so many people so frequently... I might have blogged about it before, but I think I spoke about how whenever people talk about my brother's wedding when I'm around the question of "When will it be your turn?" inevitably rears it's ugly ass into the conversation.

O well... *sigh*...