Lost and found in translation

Hanging out with my uni friends is always a novel experience. We're a pretty random group of people, although on the surface we appear relatively homogenous: Chinese, skinny, glasses, backpacks...like a lot of other pharmacy students. But "Chinese" is a rather broad category when you think about it. We're not huge as far as groups of friends go, but between us we cover the ABC-Honky spectrum pretty well, and we can never seem to hold an extended conversation in less than three languages. We all grew up in different countries, and there's a nine year age gap between the oldest and youngest person...but somehow we all ended up in Sydney, starting a pharmacy degree at the beginning of 2003.

Last night we went out to celebrate my 19th and Shirley's 28th (she doesn't look a day older than 18 though :p) - we went to Green Box for karaoke (sooo asian) and had dinner at a sushi train restaurant. As we have done so many other times, we sang songs in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and talked over dinner in various combinations of English, Cantonese and Mandarin. And as usual, I didn't understand a third to a half of what was being said the first time round, the same jokes had to be repeated at least twice.....

Sometimes I wonder why we choose to do things like that, and how we all ended up hanging together...you would think that the first thing you look for in friends are people you can speak the same language as....I mean, if you were most comfortable speaking a certain language, then you would most likely hang out with other people who were most comfortable speaking that language too...right.....?

But you know what, I really enjoyed myself last night. It was cool. (Especially the purple cake!) And I realised that friends....they're people, that when you're around them, you know you can just be who you are, and it's alright. Even if it's different to the rest of them. And you don't feel you have to try hard at being something you're not. No pretentions. No fakeness. You can think the other person is weird....but, you know, it's alright. You're alright with it, and they're alright with it....it's just alright.

Yeah, this is corny, and I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't really know how to put it. It might sound kind of obvious...but I don't think you can always get that with people. It takes time. And you know it's real when it's there even though you don't see each other that often.

OK, that's it. I should stop blogging about stuff I can't express properly in words.