Comments on Not A Ballerina: A Travel Blogger's Life: Those awkward times when you only half understand ...

Who you gonna call ... ghost bastards! LOVE it, Ci...

2012-01-13T10:23:46.736+08:00

Who you gonna call ... ghost bastards! LOVE it, Cindy.

I lived in Japan for almost 5 years and I'm tr...

2012-01-13T10:22:19.205+08:00

I lived in Japan for almost 5 years and I'm trying to decide which funny language story to post here! One of my jobs was teaching English to groups of adults in the evening. One class was on swear words which are important to learn so you can avoid them. The Japanese don't have swear words in their language as such. Only insults. After explaining 'bitch', one student asked what the male equivalent would be. When I said it was 'bastard', he lit up and said, "Oh, is that like Ghost Bastards?!"

Oh Sami - a "huge gay" - I'm glad yo...

2012-01-09T21:34:06.404+08:00

Oh Sami - a "huge gay" - I'm glad your cousin knew about the differences, or who knows what he would have thought!

It is always amazing to me how much accents and dialects can vary - and often even within the same country - I guess it's amazing to me because in Australia the English doesn't vary much at all between the regions.

In the Azores islands (in the middle of the Atlant...

2012-01-09T21:23:30.065+08:00

In the Azores islands (in the middle of the Atlantic)the people speak Portuguese, but with such a strange accent, that I, although Portuguese had a hard time knowing what they were talking about and kept on asking them to repeat. My husband who was born there, but raised in Mozambique, so doesn´t have the accent, was also at a loss, so I didn´t feel that bad.

Also in Brasil, where Portuguese is spoken, they sometimes have different meanings for the same word. Once we were in a queue in Rio and I was saying to my cousin(a Brazilian)that the "queue" (bicha) was huge. He gave me a strange look, but knowing about the differences explained that "bicha" means "gay"!

Ha ha, thank you Kate, this is a gem!! And I feel ...

2012-01-09T13:22:27.339+08:00

Ha ha, thank you Kate, this is a gem!! And I feel instantly much better :-) I wonder if your Koeln friend has been repeating this story over the years?!

I'll put you out of your misery. While in Goe...

2012-01-09T13:15:08.282+08:00

I'll put you out of your misery. While in Goettingen, university city of science and discovery, I found one statue of the guy who discovered the chemical composition of urine. I thought this very amusing and so decided to tell my German friend from Koeln. I had forgotten the guy's name so refered to him at the "Pipi-Mann". Cue look of horror on her face. I had just called him a willy. :)