Xianzai, wo you san ge mingzi ...

First, an announcement:

The fiendish overlords at work have decreed that I am to toil underground in the Shanghai mines, bereft of sunlight and oxygen and Mexican food, for another SEVEN months instead of two. Thanks to this extension, I will be returning to Austin around January 2009, not in July 2008 as originally planned. I screamed for mercy, but they flayed the skin from my bones, ignored my howling, and continued their awful cackling at my plight.

Please, please, save me from this hellish nightmare.

Please.

;-)

Okay, now that I'm about to get fired -- I'm still not sure whether I'm coming home in late June. I'll let you all know when there's a decision on that. But if anything, this should give you all a chance to save up more vacation time / $$ and visit.

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I forgot to mention earlier that I now have a Chinese name, courtesy of my teammates:

高瑞安

If I got the characters right, that should read Gāo Ruìān. Because Chinese people put the last name first, my name in American Pinyin then would be Ruìān Gāo .

Gāo meaning tall (an obvious choice for my 'family name' - sorry Dad, I know you have like, generations of family invested in my last name, but this somehow fits me better ... hahaha)
Ruì meaning auspicious, lucky
ān meaning peaceful

I like it :-) The best part is that if you put 瑞安 into Google, you get "Ryan". It's like I was born for this name.

The next step is to learn how to write it :-)

This makes three names: 1 American, 1 Hebrew (שִׁמְשׁוֹן), and now 1 Chinese.

Word.

The best part about today was that I had an awesome conversation with an older couple on the train home. It was sooooooooooooo great because I understood like 40% of what they said, and we were able to have a semi-meaningful conversation. To prove it, here are some things we talked about:

• Whether I understand or speak Shanghainese
  
• How they don't speak English
  
• Where I'm from
• Whether I'm in town for work, where I work, and what I do (for this last bit I just made the typing-on-a-computer pantomime ... haha)
  
• If I like Chinese food
• If I like spicy Chinese food (don't worry Mom, I won't make you eat any ...)
• (I then proceeded to tell them about Di Shui Dong, including where it's located)
  
• If I like Shanghai
• When I'm going to Beijing (the conversation started when I noticed the woman reading my Beijing travel guide over my shoulder, so I was like yeah, I'm going on Wednesday)
  
• If I'm taking the train or flying
• Where I live in America
• How long I've lived in Shanghai
• How the Line 2 metro is really fast -- I think they said this because they're Shanghainese and have seen the city grow up around them
• Something about America and 20 years... I 'm guessing, something about how Shanghai will be better (or something along those lines) than America in 20 years ... or how Shanghai has changed so much in 20 years and it's now like America ... you see what I'm dealing with here, I only have so many pieces to this puzzle :-)
  

There were long stretches where the man was talking and I had NO idea what he was saying ... but I just nodded ... and caught a word here and there. The best part was that because we were on the subway, there were like 7 people were sitting on the bench opposite us, no doubt laughing or something ... but shit man, it's like, I got something out of it, I'm sure the couple enjoyed talking to a lao wai, and if people who watch it get some entertainment value, then everybody wins. I am more than willing to sacrifice what little shame I have to give people a good impression of Americans AND practice my Chinese. After all, I have Chinese class in a friggin' KFC, so I can't claim to be too shy about it.

Also, I ate dinner at a Chinese fast food place, and understood the guy behind the counter a bit ... "Do you want to eat here?" "Do you want anything else?" And I asked whether my dish had pork (It was a Chinese menu, I could only see pictures), and he said yes.

I could be having the worst day ever, I think, and conversations in Chinese like this could turn it all around. It's so incredibly encouraging to have these little moments. But, thankfully I haven't had to test that hypothesis yet :-)

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Also, I wrote a mini-article about Saturday's CBL game for one of the (US) baseball sites I frequent. Check it out!

Tidbits

• Looks like I'll have a chance to see baseball in three countries. The China Baseball League just announced their 2008 schedule. I plan to attend a game in Shanghai on April 19th :-)
  
• Until yesterday, my feet were killing me after every long walk I took. I could really feel the pavement on the balls of my feet after each step. So this past weekend, I went shoe-hunting, only to get laughed out of two stores at the Thumb for having gigantic lao wai feet. However, I was tuned into this place called Decathlon, a sports/outdoors store, and so yesterday I visited and picked up a rather decent pair of light hiking shoes for just 250 RMB. They are Quechua brand, which I assume is Chinese for "of outstanding quality." (And not, as some might believe, an ancient South American language.) So far they are really nice and my feet feel tons better after a long walking trip.
• The Decathlon also had rollerblades in size 47, which is one size below what I need. That makes me think that somewhere in this city I might be able to buy a pair of rollerblades and go skating around Century Park or the Shanghai S&T Mueseum metro plaza. The hunt is on!!
  
• I discovered the Chinese word for "Jewish" is youtai. Not sure what, if anything, that translates to. (My guess: "Super Awesome".) So now I can say Wo shi Youtairen! There's even a book about us -- unfortunately it's in Chinese. I still should try and find a copy, though.
• Speaking of Judaism, one of the Chabads over here recently moved to within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. That should make it more likely that I'll go and visit them :-)
  
• Last Friday, I attended a technical presentation given by a group manager at work. He gave most of it in English, although there were points where he had to continue in Chinese because he didn't know how to describe the relevant terms in English. And actually, it was the basic stuff that he had trouble with in English. Like correlating a sine wave to the rotation of a coil when wrapped around a wire caught between two opposing magnets. He couldn't find the words in English for that. I thought that was pretty interesting. I can't really explain why I think that. Just -- I dunno. An example of how important language is, I suppose. And how extremely difficult it can be to learn one as your second language. As if I didn't know this already :-)
  
• Along these same lines, I was talking to another co-worker today about his English name. It is nothing like his Chinese name, which is Xiangjie. He picked his English name in college. We talked a little bit about whether it felt weird to be called by his English name all the time, at work and such. He said not really, because he was used to it. There are even some people at work that don't have English names - we theorized this might be because some people don't like picking one, but in some cases it might be because their Chinese name is really easy for us foreigners to pronounce. I said it was weird being introduced to a Chinese person and having them say "Hi, I'm Scott" or "Hi, I'm Wendy." Because I immediately want to be like, "Liar!" Hahaha. But I guess not really - because they decide what they call themselves, so it's not like they're lying. I guess I just want them to trust in my ability to remember and pronounce their Chinese name. But of course that will not be the case for all Westerners.
• I'm sort of in the middle of getting my own Chinese name. The first name is set, and I think it's Rui an. Amazingly enough when you plug the Chinese characters into Google Translate, it spits out "Ryan". Haha. So I think this was pre determined by someone other than myself :-) I don't have a last name yet, but since most Chinese prefer names that have a total of 2 or 3 characters, I'll have to pick a one-character last name. I was thinking gao for tall, so that might be it :-)
  
• I was totally going to go to the gym tonight but I unwisely sat down in front of the computer to update my blog first. Now all my motivation's gone -- boo -- and I just feel like making some jiaozi for dinner :-)
• I got another power bill today ... (dun dun dun ....)
  

Words & Food

Today was the first time I've been able to say it's actually warm. I even took off my big heavy jacket on the walk from the Thumb Plaza to the metro station. Of course, it's all relative, as today's temperature was something like 7 - 8 degrees C - hardly "warm". But given the past month of crappy weather, I'll take it. Oh yeah, and the sun came out. It was pretty nice :-)

I went to the Shanghai Art Museum today. Half the stuff my guidebook said to visit wasn't there, haha. Either that or I was just not good at finding it. There's not much English or Pinyin to be had, so I just walked around and looked at all the pretty pictures for awhile. There were a couple of which I wanted to buy prints, but the gift shop didn't seem to have them. I need to learn the word for "buy". Um, I'm sure it's in my phrasebook. I also need to learn "live", "need", "with", "there", "here", "after", and "like". Probably all also in my phrasebook.

The great thing about having a language tutor is that I can come to her and say "Help me learn these words." In fact I might text message her with these words and ask her to come up with sentences designed to help me learn and remember them. Word. (hah! no pun intended!)

I'm getting better at recognizing words I know when people say them to me. That's pretty cool and empowering. So I am having more mini-conversations with taxi drivers and waiters. In the morning when taxi drivers have talk radio on, I'm starting to recognize words like "today", "want", "have", "you", "me", and so on, from the vocabulary that I actually know and can speak. Baby steps man -- baby steps. Today I saw a billboard for Heilongjiang - and immediately knew that means "Black Dragon River". That's a pretty badass name for a province, if I say so myself.

In fact I was watching a bit of TV this morning, and there was some commercial for skin moisturizing cream on - Garnier, I think. (Amusingly, the announcer pronounced it "Gar-nyer", where in America it's pronounced "Gar-nyay", which I guess is the correct way to say it in French.) I heard the phrase gao keji, and immediately went - ahh, I know what that is! Because two metro stops I say the most are Shanghai Keji Guan and Zhangjiang Gao Ke. Ke is technology (first tone, anyway), ji (fourth tone) is science, and gao (first tone) is tall. (We all know why I know this word.)

So gao keji, in the commercial, literally means "tall science and technology". In this context though, gao probably means something like "advanced". Combined with my knowledge of how these commercials are all the same, e.g., they all try to convince you they've uncovered the secret formula for eternal youth, I could infer that the voice-over was using this same technique of persuasion in China. Not that there's anything especially interesting about that - I'm just happy I was able to recognize the words in a normal, everyday context.

Another funny phrase involving gao is Ni he gao le. This literally means, "You drink tall" which makes no sense. But colloquially, this phrase means "you're drunk", and if you think about it, it kind of makes sense (at least to me, anyway). This one is easy to confuse (when either speaking or listening) with Ni hen gao le, which simply means, "You're very tall". A way to make it easier is that he is first tone and hen is third tone, so if you get your tones right, I guess there's less of a chance of insulting someone accidentally.

In other, smaller triumphs, I went shopping yesterday at Carrefour and bought vittles. It took me a couple trips to load everything into the taxi, so I knew I wouldn't be able to carry everything up to my apartment by myself, not in one trip anyway.

Solution, you ask?

As we stopped at my door, I said to the taxi driver, Wo gei ni er shi kuai bang wo. This translates to "I give you 20 kuai help me." I could have added zhe ge ("this") while pointing at the bags, I suppose, but I got my point across. He understood and helped me carry all my bags upstairs. Victory :-)

Speaking of er ("two"), it's pronounced like "ar" (as in "yard"), and it's first tone. So every time I say it I'm reminded of the sound a dog makes ("arf arf!") and I feel a little silly because I feel like I'm barking at someone in the way a small dog would, haha.

Also speaking of er, you only say that when you're saying the numeral two. When you want to say "two of <something>", you say liang. So if you want two bottles of water and you say Wo yao er ping shui, you'll confuse people. What you need to say is Wo yao liang ping shui. But if you're giving a street address, you'd use er. Don't ask me why this little rule is in there. But it's confusing :-)

Back to Carrefour, or Jialefu as it's called here, I bought a pot and a pan. So now I can boil (and fry!) the frozen jiaozi that I bought, which is way better than microwaving them. They also make for a much better dinner than a pack of Bugles and some rice crackers. (I'm such a bachelor.) I'm really starting to enjoy all the different kinds of dumplings - jiaozi, xiaolongbao, and wonton. They're cheap and delicious. Good times. I guess it's in my blood, and all, given that I grew up being served kreplach every so often :-)

I'm not sure if now's the time to explain how I've been living here almost two months and my refrigerator was not plugged in -- but, I guess I just did. The funny part is, I didn't even notice, because it's so cold here. All the bottles of water I had in there were cold, so I had no reason to be suspicious. Yesterday I dropped something behind the fridge and had to look back there, so I noticed, hey, this thing's not plugged in! Now the fridge light turns on when I open the door, and I'm like -- oh, right, that's supposed to happen -- I forgot.

Back to Jialefu. You know you've made it in China when your company or product is blessed with a Chinese name. For example, KFC is known as kendeji which, when said out loud, vaguely sounds like "Kentucky". Same thing for places like Washington DC, Houston, Italy, Canada, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, McDonald's, et al.

Aaaaand I am looking into booking a trip to Beijing at the end of April. Randomly enough, a friend of mine who I used to carpool with to Hebrew School in 3rd grade is in a play that is touring through China this spring. The tour is not coming to Shanghai, so I'm going to plan to meet up with them in Beijing.