Went to get a new cellphone yesterday. One thing Alison has on hers that she figured I should get is a dictionary. Admittedly without spending $500 or more it's unlikely to get a dictionary that'll actually give the pronunciation for any of the words you find, but at least if you can translate from English into Chinese characters then you can look stuff up and wave your phone in someone's face in any dire situation that calls for it. It was pretty time-consuming because the display units are nonfunctional and it took the employees a while to run off to some mystery location and retrieve a real one each time we found something promising.
We looked at one LG phone that had a dictionary that wasn't as, say, standard as one typically expects dictionaries to be. Some entries would give you the translation to Chinese; some would just give the English pronunciation (and some arbitrary characters to approximate that pronunciation), and some had examples of usage. The first word we looked up was "hello" and it gave no translation, simply this example:
"Hello Mr. Cock, I have got a nice surprise for you."
I figured I'd be a little daring and looked up "fart" - only an example in this entry too:
"Stop ~ing around an behave yourself." [sic]
Sadly I ended up buying a different phone.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
addendum
I've already posted today and don't want people not to read this because I write too much, but I have to mention a couple of things I saw at the gym today:
- A guy smoking on the bench press.
- Two women in heels: one on a stationary bike and one playing racquetball.
Acclimatizing
So Alison thought that if I was going to work here I'd probably have to put on my own music to drown out all the noise from outside... Trouble is, I find even my own music to be a distraction, mostly when I have to think hard about something in particular that I'm working on. And at first the noises outside were indeed annoying. There's the incessant car honking, the restaurant or whatever nearby that plays about four songs1 on an interminate loop, talking and shouting, random sounds of construction and such, and then the guys who walk around with pushcarts shouting something unintelligible every ten seconds or so - all either selling or collecting something. (Actually, more irritating than the unintelligible monosyllabic cries is the loudspeaker set to repeat the same line over and over.) But now it's all truly just background noise... unless I'm in a particularly irritable mood, of course.
On the guys- pushing- carts- collecting- crap- and- shouting- something- probably- meaningless note, I'm intrigued by the garbage collection system here. The place for people in our building to take our garbage appears to be an arbitrary spot next to some stairs outside. So that's where we take it. And amazingly enough, at times we see a guy coming up the stairs to collect it, taking it down to his little cart to carry it away somewhere. I see lots of these garbage cart dudes around. (Actually our guy seems to be better-off than most - his cart is a bicycle one, not a mere walky one.) It wasn't until a week or two ago that I went for a fairly-early-morning walk that I saw the next step in the system - I came across an actual garbage truck, at its rear a large number of garbage carts with their pushers unloading them into the truck. I'm told, actually, that sometimes there's an intermediary - a larger cart pulled by a donkey or mule. I guess all this is a way to make use of the huge excess of cheap labour this country has.
This excess is apparent in other areas, too. For instance, virtually every store or restaurant has too many employees. A lot of shops along the street Alison's school is on seem to have the view that this overemployment can be put to use to bring in more customers. I'm sure there are many ways to bring this philosophy to life, but I'm not so sure of how successful their current strategy is. It consists of this:
And now a brief break to gripe about toilets again. I've mentioned the toilet paper thing before, yes? Now, a lot of toilet paper rolls here have no core, which is because many bathrooms (such as our apartment's) don't have a toilet roll holder, and I guess because it's somewhat less wasteful (which I'm all in favour of). But the lack of roll holder means that you have to pick up the roll at each use, and, hypothetically, one could slip and drop the whole roll of paper into the toilet. That would sure be careless though, and boy am I glad that I've never done that. Not even just now.
Back to garbage stories! The other day this woman came to the door and knocked really loudly, repeatedly, not even pausing, for, say, five seconds or so between bouts of knocking to give anyone a chance to get to the door. When Alison opened it:
1One of them seems to have English lyrics, even.
On the guys- pushing- carts- collecting- crap- and- shouting- something- probably- meaningless note, I'm intrigued by the garbage collection system here. The place for people in our building to take our garbage appears to be an arbitrary spot next to some stairs outside. So that's where we take it. And amazingly enough, at times we see a guy coming up the stairs to collect it, taking it down to his little cart to carry it away somewhere. I see lots of these garbage cart dudes around. (Actually our guy seems to be better-off than most - his cart is a bicycle one, not a mere walky one.) It wasn't until a week or two ago that I went for a fairly-early-morning walk that I saw the next step in the system - I came across an actual garbage truck, at its rear a large number of garbage carts with their pushers unloading them into the truck. I'm told, actually, that sometimes there's an intermediary - a larger cart pulled by a donkey or mule. I guess all this is a way to make use of the huge excess of cheap labour this country has.
This excess is apparent in other areas, too. For instance, virtually every store or restaurant has too many employees. A lot of shops along the street Alison's school is on seem to have the view that this overemployment can be put to use to bring in more customers. I'm sure there are many ways to bring this philosophy to life, but I'm not so sure of how successful their current strategy is. It consists of this:
- Put a large display out in the street, usually comprising something big and inflatable.
- Play really loud bad music outside the door.
- Place many employees amidst the display. They can be divided between these two tasks:
- Handing out flyers.
- Clapping.
And now a brief break to gripe about toilets again. I've mentioned the toilet paper thing before, yes? Now, a lot of toilet paper rolls here have no core, which is because many bathrooms (such as our apartment's) don't have a toilet roll holder, and I guess because it's somewhat less wasteful (which I'm all in favour of). But the lack of roll holder means that you have to pick up the roll at each use, and, hypothetically, one could slip and drop the whole roll of paper into the toilet. That would sure be careless though, and boy am I glad that I've never done that. Not even just now.
Back to garbage stories! The other day this woman came to the door and knocked really loudly, repeatedly, not even pausing, for, say, five seconds or so between bouts of knocking to give anyone a chance to get to the door. When Alison opened it:
- woman: "JABBERJABBERJABBERJABBERJABBER!"
- Alison: "对不起，我不会说中文。" [Sorry, I can't speak Chinese.]
- woman: "JABBERJABBERJABBERJABBERJABBER!"
- Alison: "Um..." (reaching for phone)
- woman: "JABBERJABBERJABBERJABBERJABBER!"
- woman: "JABBERJABBERJABBERJABBERJABBER!"
- Talking loudly.
- Saying the same thing repeatedly without slowing down.
1One of them seems to have English lyrics, even.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Stuff to sweep under the rug
There are some general things about the Chinese language that I find interesting. If you take away the ridiculous writing system1 and the absurd idea of using only one syllable per word,2 then it’s remarkably simple. There’s no conjugation, no plurals, and basically no need to put extra words in the sentence that don’t really add to the meaning. For instance, there’s a word for “please,” but in most contexts it sounds weird, so you can just leave it out and get to the point. To my Western ear, it makes everything sound rude, or at least abrupt, but I’m getting used to it. One place I find the absence of “please” strange is with some beggars: some will just say “thank you” over and over. And there’s no beating around the bush with things like “Could you spare some change?” In the case of one woman who followed us around for a while the other day, it was simply, “Give me one kuai.”
And this brings me to a more depressing topic. Alison tells me there’s more street poverty here than there was in Chengdu. It goes with the generally higher degree of rundownness that seems to exist here. I was walking home from the gym today, and my route took me through an underground market to avoid an intersection.3 On each of the two sets of stairs I had to take, there is often some variety of street vendor, but even more frequently at least one panhandler. Further down that street, I noticed the guy who has no hands and no feet, who usually crawls along in the middle of the sidewalk pushing a can; this time he was resting against the wall. I wonder about this man; I don’t know much about the politics of begging in China, because I haven’t asked (and Alison tells me that people won’t say much even if you do ask), but I don’t think it’s so elaborate as in, say, India, where there’s a whole hierarchy and people choose to be mutilated as part of the “job,” but still - how does one lose one’s hands and feet? Very bizarre, very sad. Anyway, further down the street from this guy was the oddest begging set-up I’ve seen yet. There was a man lying flat, face-down, repeatedly nodding his head. This in itself wasn’t that out of the ordinary: Alison has talked about seeing arrangements with one person like this (sometimes not just nodding, but banging his head into the ground), and a second person next to the first, doing the actual begging. This man in particular was alone, but he had a boom box next to him, playing something, and occasionally he’d look up from his nodding to adjust something on the stereo. I just don’t understand.
Now to be insensitive and shake thoughts of other people's misfortune from my mind, I will leave you with a couple of recent photo albums:
1 A phonetic writing system makes so much sense! If I see a word that I don’t know, at least I can probably figure out how to say it, and then I can ask some one, “What does ‘ludicrous’ mean?” If I can’t pronounce it, I can just say, “Do you know this word: O, U, T, R, A, G, E, O, U, S?”
2 The sound “shi” (sounds like the “shou” in “should”), with a sharp falling tone (as opposed to the four other tones that exist), could mean to be, city, thing, pattern, life, room, scholar, inspect, experiment, or at least thirty other things. (At least 37 characters exist with this pronunciation, and each character can have more than one meaning.)
3 Alison always stays at street level as she doesn’t like the market and because Joe got his wallet stolen in there once; Joe, however, still takes the underground route because it’s faster and includes some stairs for better exercise.
And this brings me to a more depressing topic. Alison tells me there’s more street poverty here than there was in Chengdu. It goes with the generally higher degree of rundownness that seems to exist here. I was walking home from the gym today, and my route took me through an underground market to avoid an intersection.3 On each of the two sets of stairs I had to take, there is often some variety of street vendor, but even more frequently at least one panhandler. Further down that street, I noticed the guy who has no hands and no feet, who usually crawls along in the middle of the sidewalk pushing a can; this time he was resting against the wall. I wonder about this man; I don’t know much about the politics of begging in China, because I haven’t asked (and Alison tells me that people won’t say much even if you do ask), but I don’t think it’s so elaborate as in, say, India, where there’s a whole hierarchy and people choose to be mutilated as part of the “job,” but still - how does one lose one’s hands and feet? Very bizarre, very sad. Anyway, further down the street from this guy was the oddest begging set-up I’ve seen yet. There was a man lying flat, face-down, repeatedly nodding his head. This in itself wasn’t that out of the ordinary: Alison has talked about seeing arrangements with one person like this (sometimes not just nodding, but banging his head into the ground), and a second person next to the first, doing the actual begging. This man in particular was alone, but he had a boom box next to him, playing something, and occasionally he’d look up from his nodding to adjust something on the stereo. I just don’t understand.
Now to be insensitive and shake thoughts of other people's misfortune from my mind, I will leave you with a couple of recent photo albums:
- Some amusing things I've come across so far (I'll be adding more to this one as I go along, so check back if you're an Engrish - or in this case Chinglish - fan)
- Pictures of skewers of food that my boss wanted to see after I mentioned eating sticks of meat to him
1 A phonetic writing system makes so much sense! If I see a word that I don’t know, at least I can probably figure out how to say it, and then I can ask some one, “What does ‘ludicrous’ mean?” If I can’t pronounce it, I can just say, “Do you know this word: O, U, T, R, A, G, E, O, U, S?”
2 The sound “shi” (sounds like the “shou” in “should”), with a sharp falling tone (as opposed to the four other tones that exist), could mean to be, city, thing, pattern, life, room, scholar, inspect, experiment, or at least thirty other things. (At least 37 characters exist with this pronunciation, and each character can have more than one meaning.)
3 Alison always stays at street level as she doesn’t like the market and because Joe got his wallet stolen in there once; Joe, however, still takes the underground route because it’s faster and includes some stairs for better exercise.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
A Belated Topic
I'm going to start this post on a higher note than my other ones, and talk a bit about the wedding we went to about a month ago for one of Alison's fellow teachers, Ben. He's from the States and his now-wife Amanda is Chinese. However one couple we met a the wedding was the opposite - Chinese guy and foreign (in this case Irish) girl, which isn't so common at all. Anyway, the wedding was held in Songyuan, which is one or two hours away by train.
(Oh yeah, and the resolution to the cliffhanging state I left you in, albeit at the beginning of the previous post: The water came back on after six days.)
Further ado aside, here are some guidelines for anyone who plans to attend a Chinese wedding:
- Be ready to get up early. Everything will be over before noon.
- Unless you're one of the people getting married, don't waste time getting dressed up. Wifebeater and/or baseball cap is pretty much expected attire.
- If you don't think you can hold out until 8:30am to start drinking, you can bring your own beer to the table, as demonstrated by another of Alison's colleagues who was sitting with us.
Me, I was a bit hung over from the night before when we all went out and ate barbeque on a street corner near our hotel, so I partook in neither the beer nor the baijiu ("white liquor" - pretty much the hard alcohol in China, though it's less than 40% - and you can get it in various flavours from stuff having soaked in the bottle - one bottle I saw at a restaurant last night had a large root and a snake in it).
On the topic of the hotel (from which we were but a block away), it was a rather curious, place. We didn't get room keys; there was simply an attendant on each floor who had to open the doors for us whenever we wanted. The rooms were a little dirty and not too well maintained - one of the two bed lamps in ours was dangling from the wall where it should have been mounted. Our shower produced not so much of a shower as a dribble (though I'm told ours was better than most). Finally, each room had a water cooler in it, but it wasn't until I'd had drunk least two or three litres - I went for a run on the first afternoon - that I learned they were actually filled with tap water. I had to put my faith in whatever remnant of a filter was left. (Nothing came of it, so maybe I could save the two dollars we spend almost weekly to have water delivered, and brave the tap... On second thought, tap water often has a stench to it, so I think the two dollars is worth it just to avoid that.)
Back to the joining of two souls forever in happiness, etc.:
As friends of the groom we got to go through some morning pre-wedding rituals with him. First we went to Amanda's parents' home and Ben had to bang on the door and convince them to let him in, which they eventually did. Inside were some friends of the parents, and some snacks and stuff laid out for us - this included a platter of cigarettes. On with the ritual, Amanda was in her bedroom with her mother, and Ben had to go through the same routine to get through that door. Once inside, he had to find her shoes, which he did in record time because one of the Chinese English teachers from Aston (Alison and Ben's school) had advised him on the most typical hiding spots. Finally, after much picture-taking, the last step was for Ben to carry Amanda outside, which he did only after she descended the stairs from her parents' sixth-floor apartment on her own.
On the topic of the shoes Ben had to find: they were red, and Amanda's socks were yellow. Aside from that, for the first half of the morning they were both in rather Western wedding dress: he in a tux and she in a white gown. Later on they changed into something more Chinese: red suits, both his and hers. Ben said later that the shoes to be more traditional were actually meant to have been green, but he drew the line there on the thought that she would have looked too much like a traffic light.
The only downside of the whole process, ignoring the getting-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn element, was the MC for the ceremony. They had Lucy, another of the Chinese English teachers from Aston, acting as a translator for us outlanders, but the main dude's strategy seemed to be to talk overly loudly into a mic that was already being ampilified too much, to make jokes about foreigners, and to drown Lucy out before she could get more than two words in edgewise.
Ack! I just read over my second entry and came across the line, "Is it too much to as for a waiter to leave give you time..." I can't believe I got away with that.
(Oh yeah, and the resolution to the cliffhanging state I left you in, albeit at the beginning of the previous post: The water came back on after six days.)
Further ado aside, here are some guidelines for anyone who plans to attend a Chinese wedding:
- Be ready to get up early. Everything will be over before noon.
- Unless you're one of the people getting married, don't waste time getting dressed up. Wifebeater and/or baseball cap is pretty much expected attire.
- If you don't think you can hold out until 8:30am to start drinking, you can bring your own beer to the table, as demonstrated by another of Alison's colleagues who was sitting with us.
Me, I was a bit hung over from the night before when we all went out and ate barbeque on a street corner near our hotel, so I partook in neither the beer nor the baijiu ("white liquor" - pretty much the hard alcohol in China, though it's less than 40% - and you can get it in various flavours from stuff having soaked in the bottle - one bottle I saw at a restaurant last night had a large root and a snake in it).
On the topic of the hotel (from which we were but a block away), it was a rather curious, place. We didn't get room keys; there was simply an attendant on each floor who had to open the doors for us whenever we wanted. The rooms were a little dirty and not too well maintained - one of the two bed lamps in ours was dangling from the wall where it should have been mounted. Our shower produced not so much of a shower as a dribble (though I'm told ours was better than most). Finally, each room had a water cooler in it, but it wasn't until I'd had drunk least two or three litres - I went for a run on the first afternoon - that I learned they were actually filled with tap water. I had to put my faith in whatever remnant of a filter was left. (Nothing came of it, so maybe I could save the two dollars we spend almost weekly to have water delivered, and brave the tap... On second thought, tap water often has a stench to it, so I think the two dollars is worth it just to avoid that.)
Back to the joining of two souls forever in happiness, etc.:
As friends of the groom we got to go through some morning pre-wedding rituals with him. First we went to Amanda's parents' home and Ben had to bang on the door and convince them to let him in, which they eventually did. Inside were some friends of the parents, and some snacks and stuff laid out for us - this included a platter of cigarettes. On with the ritual, Amanda was in her bedroom with her mother, and Ben had to go through the same routine to get through that door. Once inside, he had to find her shoes, which he did in record time because one of the Chinese English teachers from Aston (Alison and Ben's school) had advised him on the most typical hiding spots. Finally, after much picture-taking, the last step was for Ben to carry Amanda outside, which he did only after she descended the stairs from her parents' sixth-floor apartment on her own.
On the topic of the shoes Ben had to find: they were red, and Amanda's socks were yellow. Aside from that, for the first half of the morning they were both in rather Western wedding dress: he in a tux and she in a white gown. Later on they changed into something more Chinese: red suits, both his and hers. Ben said later that the shoes to be more traditional were actually meant to have been green, but he drew the line there on the thought that she would have looked too much like a traffic light.
The only downside of the whole process, ignoring the getting-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn element, was the MC for the ceremony. They had Lucy, another of the Chinese English teachers from Aston, acting as a translator for us outlanders, but the main dude's strategy seemed to be to talk overly loudly into a mic that was already being ampilified too much, to make jokes about foreigners, and to drown Lucy out before she could get more than two words in edgewise.
Ack! I just read over my second entry and came across the line, "Is it too much to as for a waiter to leave give you time..." I can't believe I got away with that.
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