Otherwise?

I have been doing a lot of teaching this week. Some days I have been teaching 4 classes. It is both fun and frustrating.

I am still surprised on how hard it can be to communicate with other person even though we are both speaking English. Some conversations are peppered with alternating "What did you say?" from the American, and "Come again?" from the Namibian.

In Namibia, they have a form of English they call Nam-glish.

In Nam-glish, if you ask someone:

How are you?

They might say:

Good, thank you. Otherwise?

In this case, "otherwise" means --> "And, how about you?"

Real Movies

Last night, we had some Namibian guests at our house to watch a little of the African Cup (soccer).

During the game we started to talk about movies. Our guests were confident that Rambo was a movie about real things, that is, the actions portrayed in the movie really happened.

We discussed a list of 12 other movies with them. All twelve were fictional movies that they had thought portrayed real events. Our guests believed that we had strange magic and wonder fighting powers in America, and that it would be nice to go to America and get some of that magic.

After we discussed the movies, one of our Namibian friends asked us if our fighting in Irag was real.