Will the Chinese fun never end?!

I finally bought my tickets to China the other day - this year I am going to fulfill a ten-year dream of going to Tibet. I arrive in Beijing on 10th August and leave on 7th September. Will be in Tibet roughly between 14th Aug - 2nd September.

So I look into cheap flights on the internet, and find one for 70,000 yen (£350) which is an annoying amount to pay to go the country next door, but not bad given this is the most expensive season (unfortunately the only convenient time for me to go this year) and other travel agencies were talking about 100,000 to 120,000 yen.

I phone up and ask about flights to Beijing, get transferred. I'm talking to the guy in Japanese and at some point I think I must have hesitated to think about something, at which point he says:

"hwarlepwhahla, fuwalamyupunghwalahwalaxiong ma?"

WTF? I'm thinking I must have seriously misheard something.

"Eh?"

"hwalamyowfwangshumwhalapyo, huarlexiaobow ma?"

And I'm thinking "you're not seriously speaking to me in Chinese, are you?"

"Errr... I'm not Chinese...", I say.

"Oh. What nationality are you?"

"English."

"Oh. I can't speak English."

"Well, shall we carry on speaking in Japanese, then?"

Later, I go to the shop to actually buy the tickets and meet the same guy. He says I was transferred to a line specially for Chinese people, so that's why he thought I was Chinese. Indeed there were a number of boisterous Chinese employees, answering phones with a verbal abandon that you would never hear from a Japanese customer services person.

He looks in the database for the cheapest seats, and since Pakistan Air is all booked up, the next cheapest option is Iran Air. Great! Fly to a communist country on a terrorist airline! That's why it's so cheap...

I give him the go-ahead and he looks at my passport (which as a foreigner you need to show when you buy tickets for anywhere outside of Japan). He got a bit confused between the surname, forename, middle name and nationality lines: he thought my first names were "British Citizen."

Having clarified my name, I pay and ask whether Iran Air is a reliable airline (it only flies once a week, so if they cancel, it's pretty inconvenient for me). He reckons it's unlikely to happen, and while the planes are a bit old they have a decent enough safety record. (Yeah, right)

More importantly he says the reason why many Japanese don't like to travel on Iran Air is because they serve smelly food on board. That again is something a Japanese employee would never say.


----

I'm actually being a very bad employee, googling details of Iran Air's safety record and posting on this blog from the office (hey, I have nothing to do, okay?)

I just got a weird cross-lingustic shock, as my Japanese boss said something to me about going to eat food from Fiji, and I heard "feiji" which means plane in Chinese, and froze as I thought he was commenting on my illicit internet activities. Even though he doesn't speak Chinese. Tuh! My guilty conscience will get paranoid in several languages, it seems.

We're gonna Bei your Jing

The textbook we're using in Chinese class is ultra basic and extremely old fashioned, illustrations and all. Occasionally it makes slight mistakes in the English vocab lists, and since the texts are only written in Chinese with pinyin, the only way of figuring out the meaning of words you don't know is to consult the vocab list.

In this case the vocab list has 努力 down only as "hard" when it's more like "hard-working/put effort in". So see how that mistake alters the meaning of the following bit of text (plus picture).

这是我们的教室。我们的教室很大，很干净。
This is our classroom. Our classroom is big and clean.

那是他们的教室。他们的教室不大。
That is their classroom. Their classroom is not big.

这是我们班的同学。我们班男同学多，女同学少。
These are my classmates. There are a lot of male classmates and few female classmates in our class.



我们学习汉语，我们都很努力。
We study Chinese, we are all hard.


Oh dear. At least the Chinese characters tell you that despite their evil faces, there's no ill intent.

And to those of you who studied Japanese under Haruko, can you imagine studying Japanese under her guidance for two months and still only being at this level??!!

Let's Slang!

So here's a fun bit of wordplay for you kanji scholars...

One of the intriguing things about starting to learn Chinese after five years of learning Japanese is discovering the subtle differences in the use of kanji between Chinese and Japanese. This list isn't going to be that interesting to people who don't know Japanese (and will confuse people who don't have Asian language support on their computers), but here goes:

念　 ＝　読む
作　 ＝　する
工作 ＝　仕事
写　 ＝　書く
听　 ＝　聞く / 聞こえる
手表 ＝　時計

But my favourite came the other day...

太 in Chinese means does not mean 太ってる ("fat" in Japanese), it means "too" as in "too much" or "too heavy".

So, "it's too difficult" is written 太难。The character on the right is the slightly simplified version of 難しい。

To me it looks like "fat difficult", which sounds like some form of London ghetto slang. "Man, that's fat difficult, I ain't doin' that."

I really want this to become a used expression...

The Pyongyang Protocol

Aren't the North Koreans doing a good job for energy-conservation, switching off all their lights after dark...



Oh I'm sorry, I forgot, THE NORTH KOREANS DON'T HAVE ANY LIGHTS!!!

But the Japanese do, hehehe, oh yes we do.

Wow!

Rare flaming rainbow seen over Idaho. Must be Kim Jong-Il's birthday already!

Don't you Pyong your Yang at me sir!

Oh dammit, I'm so ronery. Why nobody pay attention to me? What canna do to get moh attention? I know, I fire missile. I fire missile over Japan, maybe hit bear in Araska and they send me more angly retters.

Dammit, I'm so sick of rooking like Yoko Ono.

They move, they watch.

Apparently the website for the Association of International Glaucoma Societies has been voted one of the worst ever. I've seen worse in terms of design, but this one has something truly special lurking in the top-left corner... be warned.

Time to die, whitey.

You can imagine how weird it felt for me last week to be walking past the post-office and find a hangman's gallows erected outside. Who are they going to lynch? An unproductive employee? Foreigners?



Though it turns out a week later it's all just to be a bit of harmless festival fun. Although what festival I don't know...

Ooh, War, that's where I'm a Viking!

Go GW!!

You have got to be kidding!

Militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still alive when Iraqi police got to the scene of the air strikes that targeted him, the US military says. But the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq died of his wounds shortly afterwards, Major General William Caldwell said.

US planes dropped two 500lb (230kg) bombs on Zarqawi's safe house near the city of Baquba on Wednesday.

Zarqawi had tried to move off the stretcher where he had been placed by Iraqi police, Maj Gen Caldwell said.
"Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he had received from this air strike," he said.
Zarqawi had "mumbled something indistinguishable and... very short" before he died, the US spokesman said.
When US troops got there, they had made an identification of Zarqawi by distinguishing marks on his body and "some kind of visual, facial recognition", he said.

"We do not know" why he had survived the initial strike, he said.


Well, at least he's being honest and not trying to come up with some far-fetched excuse about terrorists being made of teflon or something. But seriously, I'm so glad that they used the "some kind of visual, facial recognition" technique to identify him and not the "some kind of aural, listening recognition." To think that they could have been pressing their ears up against Zarqawi's dead body for hours and still not known who he was...

Hmmmm...

Zarqawi died in a strike against an "isolated safe house" about 8km (five miles) north of Baquba at 1815 (1415 GMT) on Wednesday, officials said.
"We have eliminated Zarqawi," Prime Minister Nouri Maliki told a news conference in Baghdad, sparking sustained applause.
The strike was the "painstaking, deliberate result" of intelligence over "many weeks", US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said.
He showed a picture of the militant leader's body and a videotape of the attack, in which he said American F-16 fighter jets dropped two 500lb bombs on the site.

Now, I'm not that interested in conspiracy theories, but given that a hail of bullets and RPGs practically blew Saddam Hussein's sons beyond recognition, you can't seriously be telling me that you dropped two 500lb bombs on one house and recovered Zarqawi's body intact and fit for display to the media?

Long time...

...no bloggy, I know. I've had an insanely busy couple of months, lots of freelance review writing on top of my study and part-time work. My photo exhibition has finally started, which I'm very happy with. You can see more about that on my other site. It's also a massive organisational burden off my shoulders so maybe I can blog more from now on. I have plenty of pictures I want to upload, and will try to do so sooner rather than later.

I'm annoyingly restricted from posting on this blog in retrospect because no matter what browser I use, the menus for choosing the date of the post on have gone. In some cases it appears for a second as the page loads but then mysteriously disappears once the loading is complete.

For the time being, here is a photo of me having my brain washed.



It's actually an eye-massager...

You know times have changed when...

You find a free DVD inside your cornflake packet. Maybe in 20 years there will be free Apple laptops in bumper-size crisp packets.

Plumbing New Depths of Depravity

I was looking for my personal name cards, which I haven't seen in ages, so I decided to look in my winter coat in case they were still in one of the pockets. I reach in and feel something soft, sticky and squidgy in there, like bluetack. I pull it out, wondering what it could possibly be and find that it's a dried plum, a thoroughly mouldy dried plum. Where did it come from? Well, I have some recollection of being given a dried plum by someone and not wanting to eat it straight away so I put it in my pocket... but when? I haven't worn that coat for over a month, so that little dried plum must have been moulding in there for all that time. Yeesh.

Shenanigans!

"No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation. And no-one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbour, or interfere with democratic movements."

Who else could say this but Dick Cheney, in Vilnius, criticizing Russia on its own doorstep.

Argh, the hypocrisy! It burns!

Question

What does this sign mean?



There's a hilarious discussion devoted to what it could mean on Fark.com, which is where I found it in the first place...

My two favourite possibilities are:

-"Do Not Attempt to Stand Up Straight While Standing on Your Dog's Nine-Foot Peener or You WILL Bend it"
-"Dogs With Nine-Foot Dicks Deserve to be Carried"

J'ai pas envie de faire mes putain de devoirs. Alors quoi faire? Le Fuck it.

Eventually something had to give. Deep down I knew that my insane schedule couldn't keep going on as it was, and this came to me as a kind of epiphany this (Sunday) morning on the way to work. I was walking to my office in a business area of Tokyo that was completely deserted because even the die-hard salarymen were at home asleep and I spent the whole day in front of a computer screen in an empty office. I refuse to spend the rest of my twenties like that.

So I decided to scrap my Japanese lessons because they were inconveniently placed in the middle of the afternoon, four times a week for an hour and a half each, plus homework; they were screwing up my entire schedule. Plus, as I said, my classmates are no great joy to be with and being a research student this pain is worth nothing as I can't even get credits to contribute to my master's course next year. Worst of all I effectively had no time to do any of the research I'm actually being paid for - I've only read one article in a whole month, which is really not right! Getting rid of these lessons makes everything else fall comfortably into place and gives me a freedom of choice over how I organise my time. I feel so much better knowing I don't have to do any FUCKING HOMEWORK any more!!

Through the Looking Glass.

The last three to four weeks have been nuts: juggling study and two part time jobs has been pretty exhausting... but rewarding, and I think I have it under control now.

So the last three to four weeks, in no particular order.

University is pretty good. I'm taking advanced Japanese classes and beginners Chinese classes. Not sure about how many friends can be made out of current classmates as they all come across as too young and into different things. There was a strange coincidence in my Japanese class as there is a guy who was at the same school as me when I was sixteen. Took me a while to realize because he's grown and his attitude has apparently changed a bit for the worse since. He doesn't seem to recognize me at all - in fact he's too f***ing cool to even say hello, which suits me fine. I live content with the knowledge that I know who he is and he doesn't know who I am. I get a kick out of the international atmosphere of the place: Japanese is the only language that a Russian classmate and I can use to talk to each other. Meanwhile, the library is heaven, everything the UL at Cambridge should be: seven floors of modern facilities, total quiet and privacy. Many students go there to sleep.

Tokyo Art Beat has been pretty time-consuming work but has been the fuel to the new fire of my social life, which is a great bonus. I've met a lot of interesting people in the last two weeks and it led to me writing a short 200 word preview of an upcoming exhibition for the Japan Times, which was published a couple of days ago. Hopefully will lead to more, longer freelance work.

My photography exhibition is coming up at the beginning of June. Slightly concerned about number of things that have to be done by then, but know it will be fine.

Just came back from three well-earned days of holiday in Osaka, where I stayed with Emily. Despite it being Golden Week and millions of Japanese people thronging into the countryside we managed to go to two places that were free of all this hullabaloo. One was this mini-hike to an abandoned temple in the forest. It was literally this Alice-in-Wonderland experience: we walked to the edge of the suburbs of Osaka, down a backstreet and there the concrete ends and the woods begin. Within ten seconds the massive city had completely disappeared behind us and we were deep into this dense natural landscape - woods, mountains, rivers - psychologically a million miles away from urban Japan. I can't describe how rare and unusual it is to have this experience in Japan.

Wheeeee!

I'm more of a Safari user, but this ad for the Firefox browser is really funny!

Ribbit. Friggit.

In some ways the picture speaks for itself... but let me rant.

Why? Why would anyone put something like this in front of their kitchen sink? Assuming it hasn't been given as a present, it clearly reflects a decision to purchase. "Oh honey, I know just what we need for the kitchen. Look, won't it make washing up so much more fun?"
I can't help but envisage Kogo's otherwise shy and silent girlfriend giggling hysterically like an overexcited five year old girl, rubbing the soles of her bare feet against the rug as she does the washing up, soap bubbles floating up, glistening in the summer sun. "Oh thank you, frog, thank you for being there for me."

Every time I look at this frog I see red.