The English Table

            I now have only a little more than 1 month left in Macau. I don't think I'm ready to leave the life of being able to travel around and meet so many cool people that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to meet back at home. Of course, I'm happy that I'll be with my family again, prepare for my senior year with my school friends, and eat a lot of American food, but I do feel like an era of my life is coming to an end. A pretty short era actually, it's only been 5 months. At this point, I'm scrambling to make sure I do whatever I still want to before I go home, like skywalking on the Macau Tower, going to Guangzhou, going back to Hong Kong, and going to a theme park in nearby mainland. So much to do in such little time, I hope I can accomplish it. But let's get into what I really wanted to talk about this week: the English Table.
            Whenever you want to meet other people in a casual setting, the cafeteria is usually the best place for it. However, the problem that I had while doing this when I first came to Macau is that the default language spoken by the students outside of class is either Cantonese or Mandarin, so I can't exactly jump into the conversation without becoming a burden and making them switch to English for me. Before coming here, I didn't think about this boundary as something that would be a problem for me, but it does sometimes makes meal times a little lonely if I'm not with other international students.

            Luckily, my residential college has a program during dinner three nights a week where a designated area is set up and everyone is encouraged to speak English. Some people will still often speak in Cantonese or Mandarin, but they are all open to talk to those of us who can't. I go to the English Table all the time, and I've made quite a few friends there. But I think that the main reason why some of the students sit there is because of a few incentives, like the fact that there are free snacks like cookies and chips and drinks (our cafeteria doesn't have any beverages, weird right?). I'll be honest, that's also a big incentive for me 😄. After some of us have eaten, we'll usually play some kind of game. Most recently, the program leader has been bringing Scrabble with her, but I don't think she realized how much of an advantage I would have at the game! I think some other residential colleges have English events like this, but ours is the only one that I know of that has a schedule like this. We typically get an average of 6-8 people, it's a good size for just hanging out.
            I don't like writing such short posts, but I figured that this would be a good thing to talk about since I really didn't expect the language barrier to seriously affect my ability to get to know the local students. If anyone else is studying abroad in a country speaking a foreign language, I would recommend getting involved in something like this, it's makes interacting with students a lot more comfortable. Next week, I'll be very busy preparing for the university's annual international food festival! Now, I don't really cook. And I've never made food for 150-200 people before. But you can hear how well that goes next week! (pray for me.)

再见！

TL;DR: T-minus one month left, let's talk about my saving grace at mealtimes: the English Table.