118 – VIP – Wealthy Friends
In this ESL podcast we talk about a being rich and all of the things you can do with money.
This is a
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July 30th, 2011 at 9:46 pm
That’s an interesting topic: who picks up the tabs when a group goes out.
I’m a bit surprised to me to hear that it happens to Canada too. I’m talking about the situation in which one person pays for the whole group. Some things are similar despite the culture differences. Normally, when we go out, each person/family pays its share, unless it’s about a birthday party or an anniversary. Of course, most of my friends are Romanian expats and we try not to mix money with friendship, who pays and who doesn’t. It’s clear who pays. This is happening in Canada. The situation changes when we are visiting our home country. We, the expats, picks up the tab most of the time, for the following reasons:
1. First, the life in Canada is a bit easier compared to what’s happening in our native country.
2. Second, we like to pay because we like to give a good impression. It’s a saving face thing. We show “we are successful”.
3. Third, some friends know how to manipulate or butter up some of the expats in order to obtain various advantages. I sometimes suspect we are a bit of a mean rogue country, hahaha…of course, generalizing is an unhealthy habit.
4. Fourth, Tom from your example reminds me of a type of people I met pretty often in my native country. They love to drop a few a grand here and there because this gesture shows they are the “Alpha Man” of the group. It reminds me of my brother a lot, at least in the past. Even though he wasn’t rolling in money or loaded, he has always been a successful innovative businessman compared to many. He doesn’t pick up the tab out of obligation. He does it because he enjoyed the whole attention. It’s just the way he rolls. He’s a smart lucky bastard! He doesn’t take after my father in this aspect, because my father is the reliable prudent type and in some ways, I take after him. I take after my mother too, and I hate when I become aware of it. Nobody tells me, I just know! My husband hates me when I tell him he takes after his old man too! It’s a weird feeling; we all want to be greater than our parents!
Nice lesson!
August 3rd, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Hi,
I enjoy your stuff very much. Having heard already over 150 Podcasts, I’d now wish to recap a bit. I know, you keep mentioning cool expressions over several diaglogues. But nonetheless, maybe it would be a good thing to have the chance to hear it all over once again – in much less time, that is.
So why don’t you record the dialogues in an extra mp3-file, allowing your listeners to create playlists with just the dialogues for quick revisiting all the stuff? Maybe even you got it already – then don’t hesitate to put the dialogues’ mp3s onto the site!
Personally, I WOULD FIND THIS REALLY HELPFUL!
While I’m at it, I’d like to suggest a topic for your podcasts: a long time ago you did a cast on native pronunciation. I found that really helpful. My suggestion is now to focus on a grammatical phenomenon called ellipsis, meaning when parts of speech or even whole words are omitted in daily speech. I encountered this a number of times and I think getting an overview on this topic could be helpful for your listeners.
Keep up the good word, guys!
Michael