This is our newest house guest Spike. We have him for the next 6 months. So far he has been with us 36 hours. This is what we have learned in that time.- Spike can cry pretty darn loudly at 4:30am when he realizes his owner is missing.
- Though he was raised by Americans, Spike was born on the streets of Hong Kong and therefore, not only does he not understand a lick of English, he speaks Cantonese instead Mandarin, leaving us at a complete loss.*
- Spike likes to hide. 5 hours after his arrival, we needed to leave the apartment and we realized that we had not seen him for about 2 hours. Wanting to make sure he was all right before we left we commenced an apartment wide search... and found nothing. Knowing he had to be around somewhere, we tried again.
Then we saw this.
Can you see the lump in this picture?
Sneaky kitty
*These comments are from Cara and based upon her poor understanding of both Mandarin and Cantonese. Michael in no way endorses these 'facts'.
China has many different languages. Mandarin is the official language of the country but in Hong Kong the predominant language is Cantonese. These languages seem very similar in that they use the same characters, but not only do they pronounce the characters differently, Cantonese has 5 tones as opposed to Mandarin's 4. So just because you speak one does not mean you can understand the other. It seems to be similar to the difference between English and Spanish although Roman letters are pronounced the same and characters are not.
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