I'm 99.9% sure I told the lady to dry clean it. I had looked up the words on the internet and on my phone translator. I then practiced saying the words and had the phone ready to go with the readable Chinese symbols! The problem is when I told the lady at the counter I wanted the suit dry cleaned she nodded and started rambling off some VERY FAST sentences. Once that happened my confidence was shot and flustration, as I'm calling it, set in. Flustation is my new word and is the combination of I'm so flustered that I can't think and my brain turns into panic mode.
I managed to pick out a few words of what she was saying and I'm pretty sure she was asking for my phone number so I start rattling off the numbers
"yi, san, jiu, san, si, wu, qi, yi (yao - she corrects me - damn I'm flustered again) jiu, ling, yao - shit no that's not my number, jiu at the end!"
She reads it back so fast my brain can't even begin to process what's going on so I decided the best case was to just counter surf on my belly so I could see her computer. Only the last number needed to be corrected so that was a success. Whew. She keeps rattling on and on. What? I say in English. San shi liu kwai.... that's money, 36 RMB only? I counter surf again to make sure I'm hearing her correctly and yep the screen says 36! $6 for dry cleaning for a 2 piece suit, really, that can't be right, that's a steal I'm thinking to myself.
She hands me a piece of paper, rattles something else off again and I start to walk out the store. CRAP, I have no clue what day it's done. I turn around and say "na tian"... yeah that means Today, I'm so brilliant, she points to the receipt there are numbers in English 6/5/13, whew, Monday I can pick up the suit.
I'm really hoping that for $6 it's been cleaned. Actually for $6 I hope it comes back in 2 pieces and is the real Calvin Klein I dropped off vs some knock off Kalvin Clein suit they replace it with.
After that some studying was in order!
After that some studying was in order!
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