Yesterday’s post I mentioned being able to read the Chinese writing in a videogame. Well it doesn’t stop there. One great thing about learning Chinese is being able to just read everything around me. Granted the long hours of studying are frustrating and sometimes even infuriating but they are somewhat worth it when I am outside and pass by something I’ve passed by hundreds of times, only this time to be able to read what it says.
It almost feels like I’m discovering a whole new world. Taipei is filled to the brim with shop signs jetting out from buildings. Pick any street and you will just see a mass of signs and different heights lining both sides. When I first came here I thought it was odd that a city would have tons of signs which meant nothing. Yep that’s right, because my eyes couldn’t read them, my brain would sometimes think that it must be that way for everybody and it would take me a second to pop back to reality.
Well now it’s great to be able to read all those signs, feels like almost like I’m a real Taipei person now. It’s not just signs, I’m reading everything I see. I stare at all the new notices and information on the elevator’s walls in my building. I read the things on people’s t-shirts as I walk by. I read the construction notices around building sites. When I’m on the bus I even read the words on the helmets of the scooter riders next to the bus.
It’s not all great though. Sometimes this can lead to some pretty dangerous or awkward situation. Where I may be reading something and not paying attention to where I am going. Or I will be trying to read something on a shop window only to realize that since I’m there so long (I’m a slow reader) that somebody in the shop things I’m staring at them. But perhaps the most embarrassing moment is dealing with what is in the photo.
It’s the writing above the urinals in the subway stations. Once I was at the urinal reading this, and it took me a bit longer than it should cause the hard part witch Chinese characters is that one can be almost exactly like another one with just one tiny little stroke difference and that makes it a completely different word. Also different fonts make certain characters look much different than other fonts, so much so that it can seem like a completely different language. So yes even though it’s just a short few sentences, I was staring at it for awhile, well after I had finished doing my business.
It wasn’t until I finished reading that I turned around and notice that there was a long line of people behind me waiting to use the urinal. I was going to explain but I figured they just were in a hurry to do what they had to do and weren’t interested in how proud I was of myself. But that’s ok, they have a good story to go home and tell their family about the foreigner who after finishing just stood in front of the urinal staring at the wall for awhile.
