Look, I live in Astoria. Which, for those of you who don’t know it, is in Queens. For all the bottoms of Manhattanites’ noses that I see when I say that, I can proudly claim to live in the most diverse borough in the city and certainly one of the most diverse concentration of people in the world. And that’s a source of pride, because, hey, I’m a diverse peoples too. How many people do YOU know who are second-generation Irish-Belgian/Greek by way of Brazil, Egypt, and Africa? Oh, and Argentinian, if you want to get place of birth in there? If I belong anywhere in New York City, it’s in Queens.
This is my caveat, then. I appreciate diversity as a quality in a neighborhood, I love Astoria because of it, and I usually don’t mind the graceless clumsy dance of language that happens when people try and speak to each other in this common ground we call English. Usually, someone either speaks English well or they don’t, and I adjust my responses and expectations of clarity accordingly.
But this was just weird. I called my local Post Office to get a firm quote on P.O. box sizes and prices, and to find out what ID they needed, before I headed over. The gentleman that answered the phone was certainly foreign, but very clear and precise.
At first.
As the conversation wore on, it was like his comfort with the English language was fading right before my very… ears. When we started talking, his accent colored every fifth word, maybe. By the end of the conversation, all I was catching was “Fnummphh Sninsnin Gblarr PHOTO Tweennnk”. This isn’t, like, a phonetic translation of what he said, mind, but you get the general idea. And the more I politely misunderstood and asked for him to repeat himself, the faster he went!
It was touch-and-go there for a second when I forced myself take a deep breath to avoid laughing. I couldn’t help but imagine that somewhere on this hardworking, gracious gentleman’s person, there was a meter like on a camera battery, that was running very quickly from TOTALLY INTELLIGIBLE to GARBLED PANIC. RED! RED! RED! I had managed to literally exhaust his supply of English! Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
Going in to pay for the box and secure the code should be fun! And before you get all bitchy and self-righteous, I do mean FUN. Towel of Babel, AHOY!
I have found personally, when dealing with people for whom english is a second language, when things get more technical and/or complicated, the accent will grow more prevelant. Thank goodness I have an ear that allows me to understand those with heavy accents, or else I think I would be screwed.
Anyhow, not to sound all stalkerish or anything, but I’m going to be in Astoria in August. We should totally hang out.
Most diverse collection of people in the WORLD? Umm… no. New Yorkers seem to forget about the rest of the world. Like Europe, where I’m from. Everyone I know is a wacky mix of about 10 different countries.
R, respectfully, just because there are other incredibly diverse places in the world doesn’t make Astoria any less of a singularly diverse neighborhood on the spectrum of world neighborhoods. There are far more homogenic neighborhoods in the world than there are diverse ones, and in the pantheon of diverse cities, NYC stands among them just like yours in Europe, and Astoria itself is the most diverse in NYC, making it, like I said, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world. I’m not excluding Europe.
Nor am I forgetting it. It’s difficult to accuse ME of being culturally narrow-minded, R.