One time this man approached me in a bar talking in Spanish. So I assumed he was Spanish and we started speaking, we had a whole ass conversation and at some point he was like. So what part of Spain are you from? And I said well I’m Italian actually. What part of Spain are you from? And he was like. I’m Greek.
One time I was in Argentina and I was so tired of trying to speak Spanish because I’m not very good at it lmao so I broke into exasperated English and the retail seller girl quickly understood me and engaged me in conversation. We talked for a while, she introduced me to a makeup brand, and then I decided to buy it. While she was packaging the purchase, she asked me if I were from the US or perhaps the UK and I just said “oh no I’m Brazilian hahah” and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in clear Portuguese, “I’m Brazilian too”
When my dad went to China on a work trip, his Mandarin speaking wasn’t great but his listening was fine (his first language is Cantonese) and he encountered a German guy who had moved to China to work. My dad knew how to speak German because he studied it in university (but wasn’t great when it came to listening to new vocab he hadn’t studied before), and the German guy knew Mandarin because he lived and worked in China, so they had a conversation where my dad spoke to the German guy in German and the guy responded in Mandarin. I’m sure it confused a lot of their coworkers who just saw the Asian guy speaking German and the white guy speaking Mandarin.
Some years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company that had a service depot in China. One of the engineers from the main office here in the US spent most of his time at the depot. The problem was that he didn’t speak *any* of the various Chinese languages, and no one at the depot spoke any English.
They all, however, spoke Spanish.
When I first moved to Japan, I spoke very very basic Japanese and no one spoke English in the small town I was living in. Luckily my host sister had just returned from a year in France, so instead the first few weeks in Japan I spoke pretty much exclusively French. Sitting in that old airport lounge, jet lagged and overwhelmed, she was the only one to keep me sane and I still treasure that memory, 15 years later.
I feel like so many of us have wanted to see professional athletes, especially Olympians, ‘swap jobs’ to see what skills would transfer. This is great because a diver and a gymnast teach each other the basics of their trade, and it’s scientifically of interest, it’s all for science, there’s nothing about fit men or accents, it’s just, it’s science, okay, it’s sports, it’s athleticism and science and
Gorgeous! And an example of true cultural exchange between two artists from two cultures collaborating.
Also - did I mention gorgeous??? Holy heck!
“While the designs retained the robe’s traditional shape, the fabric used in the creations are sourced primarily from Senegal and Nigeria, according to Nigerian site Konbini.“
“Yasuke was a samurai of black African origin who served under the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1581 and 1582. The name “Yasuke” was granted to him by Nobunaga, although why and when is unclear. His original name is unknown - or, at least, there’s no record of it (none that’s been found at this time); so it is unclear if Yasuke is a Japanese rendering of his previous name, or a wholly new name granted by his lord.”
