We’ve been on a short trip to Toronto over the weekend, visiting my wife’s old friends, one of whom is now spending a week in her hometown.
We’ve been to Niagara falls, downtown Toronto (ex-world-tallest CN Tower was amazing, and Cosa Loma castle was fun), had a BBQ at their wonderful house, and even enjoyed Cantonese style Dimsum, too!
I didn’t know that the Chinese culture brought by a large number of immigrants has penetrated so deep into the city, finding a lot of Chinese-style restaurants and supermarkets on the streets.
Bot of our friends actually have Cantonese roots, which makes their cultural background very diverse. The conversation and languages were also diverse, ranging from Cantonese and English, and even to Mandarin and some Japanese, switching from one language to anther even during single sentences. It’s a pity that I’m all thumbs when it comes to Cantonese, and always motivated by linguistic diversity but never had time to master it. It’s still pleasant to my ears just listening to them speaking and enjoying the tonal language’s melodies and exotic vowels.
Anyway, we really thank Diana and Niki for their hospitality and fun. We’ll definitely be back soon!
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About the Author
Masato Hagiwara currently works for Rakuten Institute of Technology in New York, as a Senior Scientist. Have worked on search technologies at Google, Microsoft Research, and Baidu in the past. Expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Also a lead translator of the O'Reilly book "Natural Language Processing in Python." A native speaker of Japanese. Good command of English and Chinese (Mandarin). For more information, see About Me.
