¿Estás hablando chino?

Are you speaking Chinese? It’s a universal joke. I think I may have heard of it when I was in the States, but I think Bolivians find it much funnier, or maybe I’m just exposed to more awkward / I have no idea what you’re saying moments when I’m here. Anyways, I find myself using that phrase whenever I am trying to sound out something in Quechua that I know makes no sense and someone just jabbers something that I totally don’t comprehend, or it’s also useful when we are trying to say something in Spanish and we find ourselves horrendously mispronouncing it (Pat’s nemesis is “ojalá” which means “only if / I hope!” I think 90% of the time it comes out as “aloha” for her, I think subconsciously she may be missing the beach in Florida and thus projects some type of Hawaiian vacation fantasy on her Spanish). I had one particularly funny incident today when I was chilling with Vivian in the tourism office and she showed me a solicitud from a web design company that they are considering going with for designing their website for tourism (woohoo! work for me, I’m supposed to translate it into English!) and there was a whole listing of services that the fees included. I have realized, for going to such a nerdy computer-oriented school like CMU, I am pitifully uninformed when it comes to computer matters. All I could really distinguish was that it included something with Dreamweaver, Linux and Flash…and I know vaguely what those are…and the rest…I have no clue. Note, if any of you computer science, web-designing (I mean beyond a website with like 3 frames about ice cream, Steph) friendly friends out there want to help me, I would like to send you the list if you can tell me what it all means (send me an email! Por favor!) Anyways, so Vivian is not too up-to-date on computer jargon either so she said something about “it’s in Chinese” and at that point I think I had gotten a little lost in my “you’re speaking too fast so I catch every other word” haze so of course my immediate reaction was…I speak a little Chinese, maybe I can figure out what it says. And then I realized she was using the “it’s in Chinese” saying…I think the phrase is so much more useful down here because it is very unlikely that the person that you are talking to knows any Chinese. I think I’ll start using “are you speaking Quechua?” when I go back to the States because that will be my obscure language equivalent. Anyways, we had a good laugh and then I taught her to say a few things in Chinese and my one Taiwanese phrase “jia beng” (umm…can you use pingyin for Taiwanese?) that I know. Very useful. I should just run around town speaking some Chinese and when people don’t understand they will say, are you speaking Chinese? And I can say, why yes, I am speaking Chinese!