Half A Sentence At A Time

Last week I ate at a Chinese restaurant. I don't do that very often, but every 6-12 months or so I get a little crazy in the head and go sniff the sweet n' sour sauce.

The two ladies behind the counter looked like a mother-daughter combo. They both smiled. One said, "For [garbled] to go?"

Her accent was too thick for me. The other stepped forward to give it a try. "[garbled] here or [garbled]?"

Both of them had such thick accents that I could only understand about half of what they said. But, if I combined the comprehensible bits... "For..." "...here or..." "...to go?". "For here or to go?". My eyes lit up. "Oh! For here, please."

"What [garbled] you?"
"[garbled] can get for [garbled]?"
"Sweet n' Sour Chicken, please."

"You [garbled] with that?"
"[garbled] want egg roll [garbled]?"
"No thanks."

Then, one of them hit me with a sentence that I understood fully and yet not at all. "Why you so happy?"

"Well, I guess I don't really have any reason to be unhappy."

"Yesterday, had [garbled] long faces, [garbled] causing [garbled]."
"[garbled] construction workers [garbled], mad [garbled] trouble."

It took a while to piece the whole story together, but the day before I came in they had a group of grumpy construction workers angry-talking and tracking in a bunch of mud. The fact that my shoes were clean and I wasn't frowning was a welcome surprise.

So, I got lunch and I made two new friends, I think. As I was leaving they both said "[garbled] you!". I'm choosing to believe that first word was "Thank."