How do you find a ready answer for commonly asked questions about your travels?
Speaking to a taxi driver is easy. He (occasionally she) is likely to ask:
1 Where are you from?
2 Where are you going?
3 What do you think of my country?
Answers
I have a list of good things about the country. Alternatively on a first trip, I have a list of the places I hope to visit.
If not I can ask for advice. Where can I find an expensive restaurant? What is the one local dish I should try? Where can I buy clothes and shoes and hats? Are there any landmarks I should see?
At a Toastmasters International speakers' meeting we practise impromptu speaking, selecting 'table topics' from the table or a bag or envelope. Popular subjects include travel. I decided to listen to other people's answers and write out my own.
Stories
Questions I have heard recently included:
Which country would you most like to visit?
One girl said, unexpectedly, she would most like to go back to her home country and visit her home, which she had not seen for a long time. (Classic case of homesickness?)
The name of her town was one nobody knew. After she finished her two minute description of how much she wanted to go back and see the people and places, we, the listeners, were still mystified as to where it was, or any reasons why we should want to go there, or anywhere which had similar emotional pull on ourselves.
One of the first questions to ask yourself is, what's in it for my listener? What can I tell them which will be useful to them? They are all thinking: What's in it for me?
The table topics master was sufficiently intrigued or puzzled to prolong the meeting by asking her, after she should have finished: 'Which country are you from?' 'Where is the town?'
The answer was five miles north of - some other place nobody knew. (We still did not recognise it.)
He asked her: Is it in the north or south of the country?
I thought about where I would like to visit. What popped into my mind was: in which continent? Listeners at that meeting were from Asia. Would they like to hear about a nearby country which they might visit? Or somewhere in Europe or the USA?:
Burma -
but I know so little I can't talk about it interestingly for even two minutes.
Vietnam - likewise, I know too little to talk about it extensively.
I love the white national dress, introduced by communists and about 100 years old, seen in paintings and photos, but they all wear jeans now. I often visit the Vietnam Toastmasters club in Singapore. The club meets conveiently at Cairnhill Community Centre near Newton MRT station.
My husband says the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, is in the north. Saigon is in the south. Also in the south is the Mekon delta where you take boat trips through the peaceful countryside and lunch on freshly caught fish. The famous Khu-chi tunnels outside Saigon where the Communists built underground cities to hide from American bombing. The tunnels get smaller as you go lower underground, very claustrophobic.
Iceland - likewise, I know little. It has ice; ancient history; strange stories about mystical creatures.
Ukraine - where an ancestor of mine came from. When I researched it for my novel based on family history I discovered that one of its local characters from history was Masoch whose books inspired Sado-masochism.
My Answers
Which city would you most like to visit?
Ukraine
I would most like to visit Ukraine. One of my ancestors came from there. When I tried to describe the city in a novel based on my family history, I had to research it.
A more usual question to travellers is: Where are you from?
I remember when I had an au pair girl from Yugoslavia, she recited many times what she had obviously been drilled to say about her country: Yugoslavia is .. with ... and ... (Numbers of people, languages, landmarks and so on.)
Population Statistics
It helps to know the population of your home city, county, state, country, continent. Maybe a comparison:
Population of:
New York ...
USA ...
London, England ...
Great Britain ...
Singapore ...
My table topics question
At the Toastmasters meeting I was asked: What have you learned about yourself when travelling? (Or: Is it true that travel teaches you about yourself?)
My answer was:
At home in your own country you are just like everybody else. You don't realise how different you are from the rest of the world until you travel.
When I was a teenager living in England I didn't feel particularly English or British. I just spoke English like everybody else. Then I went on holiday to Greece with a group of French youngsters. An English girl who I would have had nothing in common with back home became my bosom friend on holiday and we found we had so much in common. We shared jokes about the food. What no baked beans for breakfast. What I fancy is baked beans on toast. We could speak to each other in English.
It wasn't until I visited America and Singapore that I made another discovery. Not only was I an English person who spoke English, I discovered that I spoke British English. Singaporeans often ask if I am from America, or Canada or New Zealand. To them a person with blonde hair and a fair complexion who speaks English could be from any of those countries. I now know that I speak British English, not American, Australian, nor Singaporean English.
(If I were to exaggerate for a humorous speech, I would say, I speak Singaporean already, no more British English, la. I am not American (like some of you guys, from near Noo York; y'all know I'm not from the south, with a Dolly Parton drawl, Texas and the south.)
See population statistics in next post.
Author
Angela Lansbury author, born and bred in London, lived in Rockville, Maryland, also a Permanent Resident of Singapore.
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