American in Spain

We have been making slow, but steady, progress on Nora’s counting abilities. She can more or less get up to about fifteen in both languages, and she’s begun to make statements like “There are three cookies on the table” as well. The other day I thought I’d record a video of her counting to mark her progress, and she did very well, despite manifesting her most common errors.
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Q: Why do Chinese women have two holes in their underpants?

While you ponder that question, let me explain a bit about where I first heard it. I was on a walk around town with my father-in-law, stopping occasionally in a bar to have a glass of wine. The new Japanese restaurant had just opened, and he said, “Hey, why don’t we try out the Chinese place?” One thing I’ve learned from living in Denmark and Spain is that very ethnically homogenous cultures have a very strong sense of “us vs. them” when it comes to immigrants and foreigners in general. In Spain, anyone from Japan, Laos, Korea or Vietnam is considered “Chinese”. Keep in mind that, in Spain, even white collar workers will refer to a hard day of work as “trabajando como un negro“, i.e. “working like a black man”. There’s not a lot of political correctness in Iberia…yet.
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