My departure date has backed off a bit; it is now about five weeks away instead of two. In the intervening weeks,
I'm to absorb as much as I can about the production process and workflow
of the show I'm being assigned to. They're going to throw me into a lot of meetings as an
observer.
Meantime, on the language front: I've been trying to get used to the Mandarin "language" (I still can't quite believe it's a real language) by listening to the tapes in my car. But today I learned from one of my coworkers, who
has already spent some time at our Hong Kong studio, that I will have to learn Cantonese;
apparently, reports of widespread English usage among our employees in
Hong Kong are greatly exaggerated.
Wonderful.
So I cranked up the iPod
and started playing the Cantonese language lessons I had given up on
weeks ago. And I've decided: it's not just harder than Mandarin; it's WAY
harder than Mandarin. Forget hamsters and frying pans; this sounds more like a cat choking on a squeeze toy while coughing up a fur ball. As the random-sounding, alien gargling sounds
spilled out of the iPod, I just sat there, stunned. I tried to imitate
some of them, but... man. This is going to take a while.
