Daily Dose of English 180
Slippers
Daily Dose of English 180
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about slippers. Slippers, those are some little sort of shoe-like things that you put on your feet. but they're actually very different from shoes. They serve a totally different purpose. Shoes are meant to sort of protect your feet and when you go outside, they keep you warm, they keep you dry, they often look good. There's a lot of different functions to shoes. They provide you with more traction. Slippers do not really many of those things. Their primary goal is to keep your feet warm and cozy. They're typically made of something that is quite soft, so they cannot get wet. They usually, I mean, that's kind of all, that's what a slipper does. It just bees comfy. They're usually, They don't have a base, typically, like they have like a small sort of sole, is the actual word, a sole, S-O-L-E, that makes it so that they don't just totally break, and so you do have some traction when you're walking around, but the inside is like fluffy and cozy, and they're lovely, honestly. I am a huge fan of slippers, and I'm wearing some right now. I actually wear slippers pretty much all day. I do take them off if I'm quite warm or I'm going outside, obviously, or doing something like that, but I really like having slippers when I'm at home, pretty much wherever and kind of regardless of the weather. If it's really hot, I'll probably just do socks, but pretty much any other time, especially in the winter, it's really nice to have slippers because When your feet get cold, kind of the rest of your body gets cold and you just feel kind of lousy. And I don't like that. I like to feel good. So I have slippers on pretty much all the time. I don't really remember when I started to wear slippers, but I don't think it was that long ago because I definitely didn't always have them. But I don't know, maybe I did. Ow! Sorry, I just took off my slipper and I poked myself with something. Okay. So right now, I'm now wearing one slipper because I took off the other one because I want to kind of tell you about it. So I got these slippers last Christmas. My grandmother gave them to me. She got me some nice UGG slippers. UGG is a pretty, sort of a fancy brand of slippers and that kind of warm, fuzzy shoe. These are, but they're a lot shorter. The typical UGG boots are pretty tall. that were pretty popular about a decade ago, but they still make good solid slippers. And I like these slippers because I have a really thick sole. The sole is made of something foamy and smushy. I don't really know what it is. At the bottom it says sugar sole, but I don't know what that is. I've never heard of that before. And I like having this sole because it means that I can easily clean them. If I get something on my slipper, the sole is gonna protect it, right? It's not like the warm part is all up here at the top where my feet go. And then the warm part is also quite nice. I also like that there's not a ton of internal integrity to the slipper. So it's very smushable and it comes back because I often will pull my feet out just a little bit and sort of, and step on the back of them, right? So if you think about where you put on your shoe, you put your toes in first like that, and then you kind of pull up on the back to let your heel go in. Cause they're pretty, they fit my foot, right? Like they, there's not a ton of extra space. That's what makes them nice for wearing. But I don't always want to have them fully on. So like when I'm sitting at my desk here working, I'll often like take my foot like halfway out and smush the back. which is okay because they have a very pliable, malleable back. So it's not like damaging the shoe. But if you do that with a regular shoe or other slippers, it can actually just start to break down the back of it, which then makes the slipper wear out faster. So I really like that about these, that they don't wear out like that. Other than that, they're basically just simple slippers and I like them quite a lot. They keep my feet warm and not too warm. Yeah. Tip with slippers that I learned, always wear socks. Even if they're really thin socks, you really wanna wear socks because if you don't, your feet are probably going to sweat, and then that sweat goes into the slipper, which then actually makes your feet colder in the slipper, so it doesn't help, and it will make the slipper stink. And you don't want your stinky slippers to be stinky, right? Mine pretty much don't smell at all. Yeah, they smell a little bit like foot, but, by not bad or anything. It's just a very slight touch of foot smell, which is normal because they're on my feet like literally 16 hours a day, which I think is relatively impressive. The fact that my slippers do not smell pretty much at all and I wear them all the time, literally all the time. I also will travel with them sometimes, like if I'm going for a day trip or whatever and I have plenty of space, I will bring my slippers because I don't like being with cold feet. I don't like having cold feet. I've even seen, I have some friends back in Portland who will go to like, if they're going to a house party or something, like they're gonna go to somebody's house and be there for a couple hours, they will just bring their slippers. Because there's like, I don't really want my feet to be cold, so I'll just bring slippers, right? Which I think is great. If I went more places, I would do that probably. However, most places I go here, you keep your shoes on, so there's not really a use for that. But like I said, if I go overnight somewhere or I'm going for a short stay and I can, I'll probably bring my slippers because it's nice. I think that slippers are a little bit underrated. just make life so much nicer. And a good example of that is that my grandma tried to buy me slippers for my birthday, but what happened is that I made a wishlist on Amazon and I sent it to family because it's easier, right? When you say, these are the things that I'd like to have, you can buy them for me if you want. I made the assumption that they would look at that list and then buy something on something else, because I don't really like to buy on Amazon if I don't have to. It's just very handy for sending the list because they have every product ever, right? But she just clicked buy, right? She's like, okay, I'll just get you these slippers. Buy, and didn't check the size or anything, because in my mind, it was like, okay, I want some slippers, not those slippers, right? And so they arrived, and I opened them on my birthday, and I was like, wow, these are really small. And so I tried them on, and they were like a size eight. I don't know, I'm like a 12. So they were really small. I think they were size eight women's even. They were very, very small. And they did not fit my feet at all but thankfully my my ex was there as well and they fit her perfectly and So I was like, oh, here you go You have some new slippers now because they fit her perfectly and she didn't have slippers before I still had some some old ones that were a little bit falling apart that were functional So I kept using my old ones and she got the nice new ones that fit her so well, and so it was a funny little I think that's called serendipity that I'm maybe not sure, but it was a coincidence that it happened to be perfect for her, and so she still loves them. They are wonderful slippers. They're also very basic. Those ones have a bit of a stronger sole as well, so that they're actually, if you wanna step outside a little bit or whatever, they're also good for that. Just make sure you don't bring a bunch of crap and dust from outside inside. Yeah. Anyways, I want to end here with also a funny little story about a Japanese exchange student we had growing up. So I think I mentioned this before, but my family hosted Japanese exchange students when I was fairly young. I think I was probably had like, I had, wow, that's not how you say that in English. I was about 11 or 12 maybe around that time. And he was our favorite Japanese exchange student. His name was Yu, or why Yu was it? And so plenty of jokes, of course, right? You, me, no, you, whatever. And he came and he bought himself some slippers, but he didn't really know the sizing thing. And so he bought some slippers that were way too big for him. Um, and, but he liked them. And so he kept using them, but you could hear him moving around the house because he would go flop, flop, flop, flop, flop, or like, because the slippers would like, every time he stepped, he would, his heel would come up, but the slipper wouldn't move yet. So then he moves his foot. The slipper kind of comes up a little bit, hits his foot and then smacks against the ground. Right. So it creates this unnatural walking sound of like flop, flop, flop, flop. If you've heard what flip-flops sound like, it's that same sort of sound because that's why flip-flops made that sound. They're not connected to your heel. And so that's, I always think of you when I think of slippers. And so that's a funny little story. One of, I think definitely our favorite exchange student who stayed with us, he was so nice, so open as well. A lot of the other exchange students were very homesick. They were very closed off, but he was a lot of fun. He would play with us. Whenever he didn't want dinner, like he was going to go out with his friends or something, he would call us personally and be like, hey, I'm not going to be around tonight. And we're all like, that's totally fine. You don't have to tell us. But he wanted to tell us. He would bring his friends over and we'd have fun, just big meals and chat. And his friends were all super nice. Just a wonderful experience. And not to say the other Japanese exchange students were bad guests. They just weren't as fun. They weren't as good of guests, if that makes any sense. And so if you ever go to stay with a family in another country, try to be engaging and fun. Even if you don't feel like that's who you are or that's your personality, they will enjoy it a lot more, I promise. unless they're really boring, but that would be too bad. Anyways, that's everything that I have for today in this episode. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something. And if you own slippers or like slippers, let me know down in the comments below what you like about your slippers. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of Daily Dose of English. Have a good one. Bye.
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