June 11. Life is better with an accent
One of my friends in college said that he could imagine a scene that goes like this: an attractive woman sits down beside him and hands him a pistol. She says, in a thick French accent, "I want you to keel zee barteendaire." My friend is so hypnotized by her beauty, and, even more, by her accent, that he robotically kills the bartender and of course ruins his life for nothing.
Silly story, but my point is that Americans are used to accents and fascinated by them. And I suspect that all people find accents interesting.
The nice thing about living in a foreign country, of course, is that you become exotic. That is, you experience the ordinary life in the foreign country as exotic, and the people in the country experience you as exotic. It's a big exotic festival!
The great thing is that, for those who find the exotic interesting, you can say really ordinary things and get an extraordinary reaction. Some people would argue that this is the experience of a "white guy in Japan", but I've been treated as exotic even in my own country...it's all circumstances, and individual tastes...but....it's nice to be able to walk into a bar and tell someone to kill the bartender, if you get my meaning.
11:45:09 PM 
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