5) Language Refresher

Ironically, this holiday proved to be a refresher course in German (yours truly's german is still crap) - quite funny to hear those guides explaining (quite erroneously at times) those tourist attractions to some very befuddled tourists . The chinese (it was golden week holiday for them)were fascinated by how quickly some of those tour guides spoke, but to many tourists, it was rather garbled. The locals seemed to assume very weirdly that yours truly was variously Korean, Japanese and HongKonger judging from the language and seemed amazed when yours trult spoke english - kinda like those students who spoke english very slowly at university to yours truly whom they assumed didn't speak any english (and the next step in that evolution was assuming yours truly was american - don't start teasing...)

Considering that yours truly's Chinese was barely passable in Beijing and considered pretty good in the other cities , mebbe it's time to watch more Chinese programs