12 Months of Mandarin

Re:12 Months of Mandarin by jmyeet on Friday October 04, 2024 @02:50PM (#41744411)

So ~20 years ago I went to Kuala Lumpur. For those not knowing where or what that is, it's the capital city of Malaysia with a population of ~1.8 million people. It once held the title for the world's tallent building (ie the Petronas Towers). So this is a modern city not that far from Singapore.

I happened to catch a train to one of the shopping centers while I was there so this was the mass transit system in a relatively modern city. This boy of 7 or so kept gawking at me. He was with his father. I looked up at him, curious, and his father said in passable English that his son has never seen a white person before.

That was quite a surreal experience for me, particularly given the environment.

I can't imagine what it must be like in rural China with few Western visitors.

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Re:12 Months of Mandarin by grecy on Friday October 04, 2024 @04:30PM (#41745293)

> his son has never seen a white person before

I drove a 4x4 right around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019.

It was quite common in West Africa to drive into a village where the kids would run away terrified and the adults would explain the kids had never seen a white person before, and they thought I was a ghost.

I drove across an international border where the border guard had been working for 3 years and had never seen a foreigner.

It's fun getting off the map.

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Re:12 Months of Mandarin by unethical_ban on Saturday October 05, 2024 @04:38PM (#41752703)

Hey, the jeep guy!

There was a guy who rode a motorcycle from San Francisco to Barrow AL about 2014. His and your blogging were the source of some fun what-if dreams of mine back then.

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