Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Shopping in a foreign country is no fun

I find it so inconvenient to buy things from the vendors and small shops in other countries because most of them do not speak English. It is so hard to make them understand what I want and usually using sign language gets me nowhere.

The other day, I wanted to buy a pair of earrings. The earring is very cute with white cake and a tiny strawberry on top. I wanted a brown one because the white cake looks too tacky. I have a pair with chocolate donuts so I thought it will be fun to have chocolate cream cake as well.

I asked the lady who handmade the earrings but she just doesn't understand. Finally, I gave up and buy the white pair. How nice if we have some system to translate languages like barcode scanner. Just say something into the machine and it translates automatically to the language it was intended. Of course, we can do so with online translation but not with verbal languages.

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