RSS - Posts
Our friend Tess arrived in Brisbane the other day, bearing gifts for me and Justin. One of those gifts was a book we’d forgotten in Portland, a guide to cycle touring in Vietnam. I’ve really gotten into reading guidebooks recently, because I find it so useful to actually know information before I need it. (Fact: I used to travel with guidebooks but never looked at them until the trip was over.)
So I opened the guidebook and started reading it somewhere in the middle (Another fact: I usually begin books, all books, in the middle, flip to the end, and then wind my way back to the beginning if I’m really interested.) The middle in this case was a list of useful phrases, in English and Vietnamese.
I was sounding out and laughing over some of the suggested Vietnamese translations until I got to the phrase, “Do you sell condoms?”
Now, I believe this is a genuinely useful phrase to know. The problem is I can’t guess at how to pronounce “condom” correctly in Vietnamese because I have never heard it said out loud. I know that the Vietnamese is written right there for me to read with all the diacritical marks and everything, but my ability to read in Vietnamese is at about the “Duck, Rabbit, and Kitten are friends” reading level, and Duck, Rabbit, and Kitten don’t usually know squat about prophylactics.
