Pardon Me?

I was asking Doug for some help with pronunciation on the few Chinese words/phrases that I know. As we were practicing, I told him that I often confuse the words for “goodbye” and “green beans”. Goodbye is “zai jian” and green beans is “si ji dou”. This lead to us creating many hypothetical situations involving me mixing up the two while I’m confidently throwing out my limited Chinese vocabulary. They usually went something like this: “Oh, thanks for inviting us! We had fun. Green beans!” We got a pretty big kick out of this. I don’t think there could be any funnier vegetable that I could have mixed up with goodbye.  Now we’ve gotten into the bad habit of substituting “green beans” for “goodbye” at every possible chance when we’re with each other. I’m just waiting for this to come back and get me. Some night, after a nice dinner with important Chinese people, I will undoubtedly mix the two up and embarrass myself. Oh well, until then…green beans.