Hindi...Sort of...

My Hindi is finally starting to come along after a year of Urdu and 2 months (almost) of being in India doing langauage classes. Why now do I think this? Well..

This weekend, while the rest of my roomates were in Amritsar which a town where the central temples for Sikhs is located, I stayed home. I would have gone with them but i neede to save some money for bills and the like at the end of the month. Anyway, it is really easy to get cheap food delivered to our house so I decided to order in. The roomates and I have been collecting menus form restaurants around our area so I picked up one form a place that was close and had good food. Amy, the only other roomate who did not go, also wanted to order. I called the restaurant confidently; we had ordered in from many restaurants before. How could this time be differnt? They picked up and I asked my perenial question: "Aap Angrezi bol sukta hai?" (Do you speak English?) "Nahin" (No). Uh oh...

So I had to use my limited Hindi. The order was a complicated one because we kept asking for things and they said that they didn't have what Amy wanted. After some bumbling around and probably completely butchering the langauge as well as any pride I had previously about my Hindi skills, the food was ordered. In a strange way I felt rather accomplished. Ording things on the pone in another language can be hard! One can't see the other persons mouth and there is no visable body language, so one has to rely purely on one's knowledge of the language. It turns out my knowledge is limited but I can get by.