Wan-Goh-Wah

My Cantonese is about to improve immensely over the next few months - at least the verbal comprehension part of it - as I live with an older Chinese couple. They can understand my English but sometimes they just speak Cantonese to me and I pretend that I understand what they're saying. I would rate my Cantonese speech and language development at a 3 year old level. In situations like these I'm glad I have my charades skills to fall back on. Wikipedia states that 52% of people here in Wan-Goh-Wah are ESL which puts me in a minority group for language.

The second leg of my flight was unremarkable. I sat next to an old guy who slept most of the flight and snored loudly. At least he didn't have that "old person" smell. Combined with the rattling of the plane (I thought the wing was going to break off mid-flight with the amount of noise that was coming from it) and the two very unhappy babies that happened to be in my section, it was a pretty noisy 11 hrs. Lucky for me I can sleep through a hurricane if I'm tired enough. I watched Shutter Island and only managed to get through 60% of Invictus before passing out. Probably the most disappointing part of the flight was when the flight attendant gave me the Asian breakfast despite me saying, "I'll have the omelette please" in my perfect Canadian English. I still ate it but I would much rather have had the eggs/hash brown/muffin over the watery congee/pork-floss/salty 'n spicy-cabbage-salad-thing/hard boiled salty egg.

I must have looked real suss in the airport because I was approached on 3 separate occasions by the customs/police officers. It's probably because I was traveling alone and hauling 50+ kg of stuff into the country. None of them knew what abalone was.

I've pretty much unpacked and settled in. Met up with "Ocho" Ang for lunch that included sweet potato fries. I think I might go with him and visit the Evangelical Chinese Bible Church in Burnaby tomorrow morning. I had a look at their 'Statement of Doctrine' and it appears to be okay. I'll probably hitch a ride tomorrow. Not sure how easy it is to get to by bus so that may influence my decision of whether to continue attending.

Hoping things warm up here because it's a lot colder than Brisbane despite it being close to summer here... I'm really starting to love Brisbane's year-round-shorts weather.