The other day he spoke rapid-fire Vietnamese at one table, kept an eye on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg speaking on TV with the local news and demonstrated for an American customer the proper way to eat noodle soup.
Just a few tables away sat men roughly the same age, wearing guayaberas, speaking rapid Spanish.
It's the same feeling she gets when she passes Mexican families on the street, speaking rapid slang-filled Spanish, or when Puerto Rican construction workers catcall her with words she doesn't recognize, as if they were speaking to her from a parallel universe, one she should understand but just doesn't.
Mr. Tian, 38, is no slouch: he speaks rapid-fire English and holds a Ph.D. from Texas Tech University.
At work on Monday morning, the two Brazilians who sit next to Lucas Shanks were speaking rapid-fire Portuguese.
The 37-year-old Foucan is instantly approachable and engaging, and within minutes is speaking rapid-fire, French-accented English about his belief that free running can help a person to find "their way".
The militiamen punched, grabbed and shoved Khalid, a Sunni, but he stood his ground, speaking rapid-fire Arabic and English, and somehow we got the groundskeeper back inside the walls.
In fact, there was a team, the New York Cuban Giants, made up entirely of African-Americans who would speak rapid-fire, accented gibberish to each other on the field to convince white crowds that they weren't garden-variety black Americans.
She began speaking rapid-fire Mandarin with her co-supervisor.
