Cross-cultural Understanding

An e-mail I sent out to a select group of my contacts, figured it would work as a blog entry as well, so just copied and pasted:

After class today a group of us went to lunch together at a place we frequent just off campus in a little alleyway near the metro stop. This group consisted of two German guys, three Japanese guys, a French guy, an Austrian guy, a Japanese girl and me. Because not everyone speaks a common language except Chinese, and everyone's Chinese ability is different, we usually use a mix of all our languages to get our points across. It's actually quite entertaining, but as you can imagine, a lot of things get lost in translation or mixed up and misunderstood.

After lunch, we headed back across campus to Gongguan, the main hub of transportation, food, shopping and entertainment for the district that the university is in. On the way, I was walking with the Japanese girl, Nana, who is a classmate of mine. As we approached the front gates, we saw that the guys had gotten a ways ahead of us, and since we didn't know where they were heading, we called out to them several times. They didn't appear to hear us, and after several more attempts, Nana finally yelled out, "Shuai ge!" a sort of slang term which literally means "handsome guy."

Every single one of the guys immediately whipped their heads around to look at us, and Nana and I nearly fell over laughing. Trust a group of guys from around the globe, who can't even understand one another at lunch and don't hear their own names being called, to respond instantly to an indiscriminate call of 'Hey, handsome!'