Didn’t know that didja? Part II

My friend who was ask­ing me all those ques­tions yes­ter­day leads such an inter­est­ing life, trav­el­ling all over the world, meet­ing really inter­est­ing peo­ple and hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with them.

I will be writ­ing about her encoun­ters with Bali beach boys and NGO vol­un­teers who work as hotel chauf­feurs to fund their NGO activ­i­ties. But the hour, it is late, and I have to clock-in at the fac­tory early tomor­row morn­ing. Why is the hour late? Because my friend called ear­lier to tell me she just realised there was this lit­tle known lan­guage or Cre­ole known as Papia Kris­tang, which appar­ently is spo­ken in Malacca and Singapore:

Cristão (or Papiá Kris­tang or sim­ply papia, i.e. lan­guage in archaic Por­tuguese) is a Cre­ole lan­guage based in Por­tuguese spo­ken in Malacca, Malaysia and in Singapore.

And, we also had an argu­ment about how ‘bar­rage’ was pro­nounced in ‘Marina Bar­rage’. She called it ‘bar­rage’, as in a ‘bar­rage of artillery fire’, while I called it ‘bar­ridge’ as in ‘bar­ridge rhymes with por­ridge’.

And because we liked talk­ing to each other so much, we took a long time before we decided to set­tle the argu­ment with a look up at dictionary.com. I was right, as expected, but nei­ther of us had watched the news on the telly to know how CNA and Chan­nel 5 pre­sen­ters pro­nounced the word.

Then we went back to talk­ing about the Por­tuguese and she said, ‘how come we don’t know that many Por­tuguese?’ I said, ‘Gort! We have Ver­netta Lopez and all the other Eurasians on telly and radio, and we have the de Souzas and the D’Almeidas, who made their for­tune har­vest­ing gutta-percha which was used to insu­late tele­graph wires’.

Then my friend got sleepy and said, ‘hey, let’s talk again tomor­row, do you know where I can get good Per­anakan food? I don’t, cos I no longer have a fin­ger on the pulse of the nation’.

I’ll have her fin­ger on my pulse!

I couldn’t turn down his impas­sioned plea, so Vic­nan, you’re it:

If I try very, very hard, I can adjust my spec­ta­cles with my tongue