The Ride is Almost Over

What began over a year ago is down to seven weekends. I've planned mini-trips for two of them. One is my birthday weekend (yay!), and one more I'll have a going-away dinner at my place. (On the advice from a friend, it'll be a Chinglish party ...)

Seven weekends. Really?

Yup. Unlike the last time I faced expulsion from China, I'm ready to leave now. (I've really  got to stop wanting to add "... and continuing my life" on the end there, as if this trip in Shanghai was somehow an interruption, a blip, in my life.) I'm pretty excited about going back to Austin. Just now I happened upon the flickr group for said city, and I had to stop myself from looking at it, because I would just get overcome with homesickness at a time when that's already increasing.

Don't think I dislike Shanghai or China -- far far FAR from it. If I knew I was staying another year or two, I would be thrilled. But since I've known for six months now that I'd be coming back in January, the excitement and anxiousness over returning has grown. It's just that, you know -- the US and Austin feels like HOME. (At least it does from over here.) And you can't replace that feeling, no matter how hard you try.

At the same time, I'm really sad about leaving. To say this experience has been amazing would be a understatement of the grossest proportions. To say I've learned new things about myself and others would not even be a fraction of the story. To say ... well, honestly, there's just no way to put it into words. There just isn't. Even if you have read all my blog posts and looked at all my pictures and talked to me on the phone billions of times ... and even if you've visited me ... there's just no way to transmit that experience. I could try, but I could never get it perfectly, and that would be frustrating, so I won't even try. Actually I'm worried about this feeling affecting me when I return. 

I hope I don't sound too elitist here. Each person's life is like this, I suppose -- unable to be perfectly conveyed to others. Chalk that up among the lessons I've learned here ;-)

Ah, I get very meta and grandiose at times like these, so I'm sure that before I leave I'll post one long super rambling post of that nature. But now's not the time :-)

Onto more mundane matters: I got home Saturday night (ok, really, Sunday morning) and realized I'd lost my ATM card!! This was a little disturbing, as it's not like I can go to the bank and withdraw money without it. (I am dependent on CCB ATMs.) But I was pretty sure that I'd left it in the ATM earlier that night when I went to withdraw funds for the night's activities. The bank was closed Sunday, but I called their help line and spoke to a nice woman who said she would alert the bank branch about it. She suggested I alert my own bank for safety reasons -- but I didn't, because I'm lazy and because I was pretty sure that my card was tucked safely inside the ATM. (Unless some unscrupulous ATM tech happened upon it, I suppose.) Probably not the smartest decision (or lack-of-decision) I've ever made, and to be fair, I did check my online balance numerous times to make sure no one had withdrawn my life savings out from under me. But, as I mentioned before, I'm lazy and didn't want to cancel a card that has funds automatically withdrawn from it (for bill-paying purposes) and have to deal with the hassle of asking my bank to, like, overnight me a new card because otherwise I'd have to eat at KFC 3 times a day because they take my Sodexho card that has buttloads of money on it and borrow money from the other Americans here and feel like a doofus. 

Yeah.

So this morning I waltzed in the bank at 9 AM and walked over to the nearest person I saw. She was busy with someone else and told me to wait for a moment while she went in the back room to talk to someone about something else. When she came out, I told her my problem and -- glory of all glories -- she already had my ATM card in her hand!! Lucky me. After a quick inspection of my passport, she handed it over, and I was on my merry way. 

Lesson learned? I dunno :-)

Fun With Words

Jin tian zai zhong wen ke ...

I learned how to say "immediately": ma shang

ma (third tone) meaning "horse"

and

shang (fourth tone) meaning, in this usage "on" (it's the same shang as in Shanghai, which means "on the sea")

Zhe ge shi hen hao wan!

Just another example of how Chinglish gets around. Speaking of which, remember kids:



Also, I have some Xujiahui pics and Century Park (Shiji Gongyuan) pics for your perusal. Flickr is being stupid though and is refusing to let me upload some pics. Boo.

The weather has been in the 20s (C) and sunny the past couple of days. Tomorrow it's supposed to rain a bit. I hope it tapers off by Saturday and Sunday because I wanna go sightseeing some more in my sweet comfortable shoes :-)

Wo bu zhidao zenme shuo ...

The language lessons continue. Daily. Hourly. I love it.

At my last tutoring session on Saturday, my tutor spent most of the time speaking, while I translated into English. It's tough! A lot of it was contextual. Moreso than I would have like. What I mean is, I was able to recognize a couple words and then figure out what she was saying/asking. A couple times I got mixed up, like hearing xi when she said qiu and so on. I learned a bunch of new words, too. Like "baseball" and "Tokyo" and "convenient" and "buy" and "there" and "here". From the subway, I also know how to say "We have arrived" which helps with the taxis, although now I can also say "Stop here" or "Stop there" while pointing to a place. Very helpful. And this morning at work I was able to put together a sentence - Xin qi liu wo zai Jialefu mai chi de. (I think that's right, anyway.)

Notice (if you can) the placement of the prepositional phrase there -- zai Jialefu. It is stuck in the middle of the sentence, where in English the prep. phrase usually is at the end of the sentence. But I guess in Chinese it's different - which is just one of the many things I'm having trouble with. I also have heard different opinions about adjective/noun placement. For example in English I would say "the black cat" - but in Spanish I would say el gato negro. I think Chinese might be a mixture of the two, which -- well, damn, more confusion to be had :-)

Oh, and there are no articles - "the" or "a" or "an" do not exist in Chinese. It's actually quite refreshing to not have to worry about those words. It's like, I'm saving my breath, haha. Even though it takes an extra second to realize "Hey, I'm not going to sound like a moron if I leave out the article." Hahaha.

Another thing is this seemingly random placement of de. I've figured out le - it indicates that something has changed. So, Mei you means "I don't have [it]", while Mei you le means "I do not have [it] anymore," or put more simply, "[it's] gone." Your state of having-ness has changed. (If you're speaking this at home, phonetically this would be pronounced "may yo luh" although not quite.) The subject [it] is omitted if you can figure what "it" is out from the context.

Another example: dao means "arrive", but dao le means " to have arrived." (The subject is implied by the context) See how that works? I think dao is 4th tone and you'd pronounce it similar to "dow".

But I still haven't figured out de (pronounced "duh"). In one sense it indicates possession, so, for example, wo de means "my" or "mine", ni de means "your" or "yours", and so on. But in other sentences and other contexts it seems to just appear randomly. I'll have to inquire further about usage. It's also one of the few words that are toneless.

Other fun stuff. Today my coworkers and I were walking to lunch, and Mark said something that translates word-for-word as "Your back has a car." Um ... wtf? What that means, though, is "A car is coming from behind you." Hahaha. I am starting to see how Chinglish comes about so easily :-)

I learned "most" is split into two words - duo for countable objects (for example, the number of pieces of candy I ate at work today) and cui for un-countable objects, like, the degree to which someone is a jerk, haha. I would also say wo ren cui gao le, or "I am the tallest person"! Haha. See, now that's an example of something that's confusing me - I can't figure out how le indicates change in that sentence. Maybe it's just another random placement, like wo e le ("I am hungry"). If you say just wo e, that's apparently not a complete sentence. And wo shi e is not proper, either. So yes -- confusing you see this is.

Today at the cafeteria I needed an extra chair for my table, so I found an empty one, pointed to it, and said to the guys at its table, Ni men yao zhe ge? They kind of stared at me funny, and so I repeated myself. Then one of them acknowledged me with a wave of his hand, that said I could take it.

You astute Chinese speakers will realize my mistake here, and it's one I still make from time to time -- I left out the ma in the above sentence. So what I said to them was not a question, but a statement: "You [collectively] want this." No wonder I got a stare :-)

Speaking of zhe ge - zhe means "this" and ge is a generic measurement word. Chinese has tons of measurement words, for example, yi zhang piao means "one ticket". Yi is "one" and piao means "paper" (but refers to tickets usually). Zhang in this case is a measurement word associated with piao. As you can imagine (or read on that link), measurement words are different for all sorts of things. But ge can apply to just about anything - the only problem is that it's generic, so you have to be sure you're being specific by using other means (usually by pointing at what you're talking about, haha).

Sheesh.

And tonight at the gym, I was getting some water when one of the staff asked me for help with a word. He's got a little book that he's using to teach himself English at home. One word turned into twenty, though, as I walked him through words like "captain," "harbor," "sail", "confident," "large", "treasure", and so on. (He was apparently on the nautical chapter.) I was having a lot of fun. On words like "large", I could hear him adding an extra "uh" on the end. So the word became "lar-juh". Again, this is typical if you hear a native Chinese speaker say words in English for the first time. But, you know, I've never heard someone actually go through and learn it, so that was really neat.

He also had a problem with "throw". I exaggerated the degree to which I stuck my tongue between my teeth to make the "th" sound, but he still couldn't get it. It kept coming out like "srow", which, again, is a stereotypical thing to hear I suppose. When I am learning, I have found it helps to watch the person's mouth and, if they speak English, inquire about proper tongue placement. (I'm really resisting the temptation to make a foul joke or two here, haha.) These tactics helped me with sh, ch, and zh, which still give me trouble but which I think I'm still getting better at. And doing this requires you both to share a common language, which wasn't really the case here.

But also, doing this really helped me see how much I want to learn proper Chinese pronunciations, not just the words themselves. I want to sound, like, good. Hahaha. I suppose anyone would. But I feel a strong desire to speak (and understand) proper Chinese. Appropriately enough, I bet that "language" is the most common tag on this here bloggity-blog.

I think I'm doing well. At least I'm able to enumerate some of the problems I'm having and some of the areas where I could use more work. I try out my Chinese all the time. Primarily on my co-workers, but I also want second opinions, because my co-workers are highly educated and trained in English, so they are used to hearing it spoken to them. I want to talk to, for example, the taxi driver, or the woman selling oranges in People's Square, and see if they understand me.

So I do and, usually, I think I get my point across :-)

Chop the Pepper Big Fish Head

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Shanghai has some fucking AMAZING food. Last night I had some kind of honey-BBQ pork with a side of (get this) dates stuffed with rice and glazed in sugar. With sprinkles on top, no less! Permit me to drool for a second ...

Tonight however, I walked into Tasty Hall, opened up the menu, and promptly saw this staring me in the face:



My favorite is "The Beijing onion explodes the fat cow." I just picture a harmless cow, perhaps a little on the "beefy" side, wandering around in a field in Beijing. Suddenly, an onion jumps out of nowhere!

KABOOOM!!! Cow giblets everywhere. The onion waits for a split second, calmly rotates around, and rolls off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

But I also like to imagine a platoon of west toast snow fish, spears at the ready, strapped into helmets and rattling their chain mail, gazing at a distant castle with a steely glint of determination in their round eyes.

Tonight, they invade.

(Ai ai ai, muchos peces peligrosos!)

Other delicacies on this Chinglish-ridden menu include:

• Pumpkin healthy fungus
• Burns the shrimp
• The XO sauce explodes the spiral piece
• Spiced salt little yellow croaker
• The Guangdong snake ground fries the cured foods
• Pineapple and the meat
• The gold garlic steams the Guangdong towel ground
• Pair of taste burns the dried meat boiler young
• The fragrant and hot string burns the big shrimp
  
• Fat cattle winter mushroom boiler young
• Tasty Hall water cooks big shrimp
• Chop the pepper big fish head
  

... and so on.

If you look at it long enough you can recognize patterns, like "burns", "cooks", "explodes", and so on. I'm guessing that "cooks" means "boiled", since it's paired with "water". "Burns" could mean "fried", except that "fries" appears a couple times on the menu. As to the other ones, well, I leave that up to you to decide :-)

So what did I have? Well, the "Tea tree mushroom and meat", of course. I had no idea what kind of meat would show up -- and now that I've eaten it, I still have no idea!

I wanna find these menu writers and hire them to write documentation for us :-)

In more word-friendly news, Shanghaiist posted an entry about an anagram map of the Shanghai metro. My stop is, appropriately enough, Huge Shoe Healing Communist Ascendancy (Shanghai Science and Technology Museum). And it's only a 4 kuai fare to I'm a Hot, Dashing Dinosaur. (Shanghai Indoor Stadium). Good times :-)