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July 05 If they're the sort of recruits you wantThen I've been teaching them all year. The Chinese says "懒人"俱乐部会员招募中… ("lǎnrén" jùlèbù huìyuán zhāomù zhōng…) which means, er, "'lazy person' club members are recruiting…"[1] It reminds me of the Naughty Pet Hospital in Beijing. There was me thinking that it must be Chinglish, but that was exactly what the Chinese said. I assume the sign is meant to be comical. Must be humour with Chinese characteristics. Notes. 1. Perhaps "Members are being recruited to the 'Lazy Person' Club" might be a little more accurate; or at least idiomatic in English. The varying viscosity of the InternetLike solid concrete out of a toothpaste tube. The quality of my connection to the Internet has been variable this week. I learnt yesterday that Language Log really was blocked the other day, although at the time I gave Nanny the benefit of the doubt and allowed for the possibility that the server was dead. MSN was out to lunch or barely in the office a few days ago. I couldn't get near GB from any angle via IE 7.0, but I could with FF3; not that that necessarily means anything. The connection to some sites has been abruptly dropped or, if it's maintained, then pages have been taking far longer to load than they normally would. Yet the next day, things have been back to normal. (Well, what passes for normal here.) Blogspot really is unblocked at the moment as I find by surfing it with IE 7.0. Actually, I should have realised this because the New Humanist Editor's blog, which is hosted by blogger, is inaccessible. When the whole of blogspot is blocked, everything is accessible via the proxy I've been using; but when that block is removed, other filters then seem to kick in. I'm not even certain why the NH Editor's blog should be being blocked because China has only featured on it once as far as I'm aware. It may be because of some connection, not undeserved, between humanism and human rights regardless of the specific content of the blog, though the imperium sericum holds no special place in the editor's attention. July 02 The pain; the painThe Oxford Murders. One day Frodo Baggins decided to go to Oxford to work with Caligula (and if you get that reference, you're at least as old as I am). When he arrived in Oxford, his landlady got murdered, which made him run around the town looking very alarmed or as if he'd got a spike stuck up his bottom. But though he looked like a startled hobbit, all the girls instantly wanted him, including the mad one who'd killed the landlady in the first place. Caligula, who thought he was so clever, couldn't tell Frodo what the third symbol in the series was, but he pretended that he knew. Then the man with the weird face crashed the bus full of involuntary organ donors. Inspector Morse might've been able to do something with this, but Frodo Baggins and Caligula should've stayed in Hobbiton and Rome. Just Add Water. No, just add acid, destroy the DVD and get awarded an OBE for services to the entertainment industry. Chaos Theory. An efficiency expert's day goes completely awry. His wife thinks he's been cheating on her, but as a consequence, he learns that she cheated on him. But it all ends happily – unless you paid to watch this at the cinema.
July 01 宫bao鸡丁Bāo, báo, bǎo, or bào? I was having 宫bao鸡丁 (which will be more familiar to many of you as kung pao chicken) for tea last night, but couldn't think which bao. I thought it was 保 (bǎo), having forgotten that the receipt had the character on it, but Linda said that it was 煲 (bāo). I did a Baidu search for the name and found that it's usually 宫保鸡丁 (gōng bǎo jī dīng), but can also be 宫爆鸡丁 (bào). I was having lunch today when it struck me that 宫保鸡丁 can't be an especially old dish because peanuts come from the Americas. It turns out that it dates from the 19th century. A man called 丁宝桢 (Dīng Bǎozhēn; 1820-86), who came from Shandong Province, and who was appointed to Sichuan as a provincial administrator was the creator of this dish. What I got last night was overlarded with hua jiao (花椒) and underlarded with chicken, which included bits of bone and skin. The best 宫保鸡丁 I've had was from XXKX in Fuzhou even although, properly speaking, they weren't really dishing up the real thing. June 29 The last temple in the shop大慈寺. 大慈寺 (Dàcí Sì) is a large Buddhist temple east of Tianfu Square, and the only major temple in Chengdu which, until lunchtime today, I hadn't previously visited. It's not hidden away, but it's a little off my radar. In fact, the LP China guide doesn't even mention it. To get there, take 总府路 (Zǒngfǔ Lù; north side of Tianfu Square) east; keeping going past the Foreign Languages Bookshop (other side of the road, so you probably won't see it) and the intersection with 红星路 (Hóng Xīng Lù), and soon after you'll stumble across this wall and gate. This is actually the back gate, and some woman directed me to park back round the corner to the left (as you head back towards Tianfu Square). I parked my bike in a small bike park next to a teashop on 北纱帽街 (Běi Shāmào Jiē; 纱帽 can mean "gauze hat worn by an official in dynastic times" or "public office"), but I was probably meant to go round to the main gate which is on the south side of the temple. That's east off 北纱帽街; there are signs, but it's much more straightforward to go in the back gate. The only problem with going in the back gate is that you'll miss out on the site map and the info about the temple that are just inside the main gate. Xuanzang is, of course, the whining, petulant monk from Journey to the West. Just inside the gate is a picture of how the monastery would have looked during the Tang Dynasty. The place is still a working Buddhist monastery with monks and worshippers. As was the case with the Lantern Festival parade in Fuzhou last year, the faithful are either the elderly or the young and almost no one in between. These are pictures of the Tripitaka Pavilion. As you can see, the Veda Bodhisattva had one devoted disciple. Obviously, the plan was to develop the area in the same way it's been developed around Wenshu Temple, but it appears that the money has run out and the olde Cathay chic was looking rather dilapidated. There's a lot of waste ground around that area where there would once have been a thriving community. From what I could tell, it's probably the haunt of local homeless people. It's clear that no one's bothered with the land around the temple for quite some time and if there were plans to develop the whole area, they've been abandoned for some time. I've uploaded a selection of full-sized pictures of Daci to my Pictures of Chengdu folder on SkyDrive. Today in historyOne year ago. It's a year ago today since I arrived in Chengdu, and for the first time in three years, I'm staying right where I am, a prospect which I don't find disagreeable. Admittedly, I'm not looking forward to another year of dealing with academically below average school children, but I like Chengdu, which is definitely one of the better places to be in China in my experience. I have no desire to return to some small, provincial town like Changzhou. Didn't we do well? I'm sure the headmaster's head has been just that little bit more swollen this weekend. In unrelated news, there were quite a few more kids signing up for the A-level programme at school this weekend. From what my source (all right, Linda) tells me, the kids in this programme are not going to be a lot different from ours – rich and a bit thick. But considering how much the teachers on the A-level programme are being paid (a great deal more than I was originally led to believe and much more than I earn), I shan't have much sympathy should they complain about the (lack of) quality of their pupils. When I got back from tea this evening, I found that the banner on the left had been hung up on the outside of the International Building, which is at the intersection where it can be seen by everyone passing by. If I understand this correctly, then our school had the top two science students, and the top and third arts students in the NMET in the province. Obviously, the headmaster's head is much more swollen than I thought. 30.06.08. When I went over to school this morning, I found that there was another copy of the banner hanging on the side of the school lecture theatre. I really did underestimate just how swollen their Lordships' heads have become. More High Fly. As I was sitting at High Fly Pizza last night, I noticed a poster up beside the door which said that there's now a second branch in Chengdu round the back of the Shang-ri La. It's on 水井坊, but I saw no sign of it the other day. Then again, that páilou was at the end of a street north of the Shang-ri La. I note, coincidentally, that the High Fly Cafe mentioned in the Lonely Planet China guide is no longer operating. I assume that it was the predecessor to High Fly Pizza, which is not far away on the north side of the river. June 27 古蓉城无 the chic. The weather this week has been amazingly good, not just being fine and sunny but also clear. When it's sunny in Chengdu, the air can often been quite hazy. I decided to take a trip to the north-east where I found that 古蓉城 hasn't quite completely disappeared, even although it's hidden away in corners. This particular alley, 大同巷 (Dà Tóng Xiàng), is beneath the shadow of the Shang-ri La Hotel. This street, with its dilapidated shops, is just nearby. In the right-hand picture, going off to the left, is 青龙正街 (Qīng Lóng Zhèngjiē; Green Dragon Street). At the end of the street is this páilou, which has 水井坊 (Shuǐjǐng Fāng; Shuijing Lane) on it. Beside it, to my surprise, was this old cinema, the 星桥 (Xīng Qiáo; Star Bridge), although it's being demolished. As I was going down 三友路 (Sān Yóu Lù) some time later, I spotted these two shops. Call me the Lord Mayor of Cynicton, but why do I doubt that a shop on some obscure street in Chengdu is going to be an authorised supplier of England football kit? Perhaps it really is, and my scepticism comes from having lived in China for too long. The final picture is slightly ironic. I took a picture of a red dragonfly the other day, and now I find there's a chain of shops called Red Dragonfly. Never heard of them myself, but there were two in roughly the same area in the north of the city. Their main sales line appears to be handbags. Don't let's be beastly to our alphabetDon't let's be beastly to Eszett. (With apologies to Noel Coward.) The letter ß (= ss), which is found in the German alphabet, has been given official recognition by the ISO. ('More than just a pumped up B': Germany celebrates recognition of the letter ß.) I didn't know that German spelling reformers had been trying to get rid of it, and I don't blame them. ß isn't historically a letter, but rather a ligature from the days when 's' was written in its modern form finally, but as long-s (ſ) initially and medially. ſ + s > ß. I realised this not so long ago from an 18th century English text which employed this particular ligature, although the font made the ligature look like two s's joined together. In other words, Eszett isn't some mutant B. I must admit when I write ß (which I'm sure I did when I did German in my second year at university), I'm really writing β. I know that the Unicode character set includes the ligatures fi and fl. I'm pretty certain that I've seen them in my lifetime in modern texts, but wonder whether they're used at all today. June 26 Chengdu ChinglishIt's probably a word. Here are a couple of instances of Chinglish which I spotted a couple of days ago. The first one says, "Take care. Pool water is electrified. Playing in the water is strictly prohibited." Strange. According to my dictionary, 嬉 (xī) "play; have fun" is literary. The Chinglish in the second one is a mystery. "Without a conscious viewing waterfront" means, er, what? Not quite sure of the exact translation, but the Chinese appears to say, "Beside the water, watch your footing." An odd notice because there wasn't any water in the pool. June 25 Right up your alleyThat ol' Cathay chic. I took a trip over to 宽巷子 (Kuān Xiàngzi) and 井巷子 (Jǐng Xiàngzi) to take some pictures of the current state of the place. There's still quite a bit of work to be done before it's really complete, but it's in a much more advanced state than it was nearly two months ago. The first shot is the square at the eastern entrance to the area, and the second shot 宽巷子 itself. Last night, there was a group of people dancing in the square. At the near end, there's a sequence of columns with outline maps of old Chengdu from different dynasties on them. These are pictures of 德门仁里 (Démén Rénlǐ), which is a reconstructed 四合院 (sìhéyuán). There's a museum-style display in the left-hand wing as you go in, which includes the statistic that back in the days when the city had a population of 600,000, it had 120,000 teashops. Some instances of original architecture survive. The place on the left is called 恺庐 (Kǎi Lú; Happy House); the sign above the gate on the right says 养云 (Yǎng Yún), though I'm not sure what it's meant to mean. On the left, representing European architecture, is this former French church dating from 1938, which was established to do charity work in the district. And not far away is, yes, Starbucks, a common sight in 古蓉城. There was the Governor often to be seen ordering a mocha latte and waiting for financial encouragement from well-known local businessmen. The area is more extensive than Jinli, and probably about the same size as Wenshu. The old Cathay chic of the area is, like the latter, artificial, dotted with modern embellishments such as back-lit silvery signs and fonts which would make the ancient calligraphers mistime their strokes. June 24 Recent picturesThe scarlet dragonfly. Coincidentally, when I was living just outside Beijing, it was at this time of the year when hordes of dragonflies would suddenly appear followed shortly after by squadrons of swallows. I don't recall any of them being as colourful as the dragonfly in the picture. As Chris says of himself in this brief post, so I'm just about done myself. I finished off most of the reports last night and heard from Linda that a few more report books from Class 6 had turned up. I'm going to go over to school and sort out my part of the results sheet. My job isn't quite done, but to all intents and purposes, school's out for the summer. June 23 DisparityBatteries and boxes. Because my original mobile battery has been showing signs of age, I bought a new one today. It came in a metal box with a circular plastic window in the lid. Volume of the battery: 8.25cm³; volume of box (external dimensions): 194.656cm³, which makes the latter nearly 24 times the volume of the former. The only thing in the box apart from the actual thing you want is a plastic insert to hold the battery in place so that it doesn't rattle around. I hate to sound like some Green Crusader, but it seems rather wasteful. Perhaps with the price of oil being so high we're going to revert to the days when things came in metal or cardboard. I can't remember when I last saw a toothpaste tube made of metal, but I wouldn't be surprised if no one under thirty can remember such things. Perhaps supermarkets will start dishing out paper bags again. I haven't seen one of those in a long time as well. June 22 Firefox 3I'm sure it's different underneath. I finally got round to downloading Firefox 3 yesterday, and a very fast download it was. I wasn't expecting any obvious changes, but things are a little slower when FF3 starts. It seems the delay comes from the drop-down list in the address bar being populated, which means that if you don't wait for this to happen, you end up wondering if FF is jammed when you try to start surfing. The drop-down list of recently visited sites seems a little overengineered. I tried opening a pdf document from the ROA, but FF3 seems no happier opening such files than any other version. FF really needs to add some sort of progress bar for pdf documents so that you can see how much progress is being made. After five minutes of waiting for a 470Kb doc, I downloaded it the old-fashioned way. Admittedly, the download speed was slow, but I was sure I was getting something.[1] The Open and Remove options have either disappeared from the download dialogue box or they've been moved and I overlooked them. Admittedly, the Remove option was pretty useless. The new version of the Bookmarks Organiser (now called the Library) is a definite improvement. When you click on a bookmark in the main window of the dialogue box, all the info appears underneath. No need to right click and select Properties if you want to copy the URL to another application. That info is already available. FF3 is still a big, fat memory hog (although IE isn't exactly virtuous in this respect). Overall, there doesn't seem to be any reason to expect that FF3 will be significantly different from previous incarnations, at least on the surface. As for the sub-surface parts, I remain blissfully ignorant of them.[2] Notes (24.06.08) 1. I seem to have spoken too soon on this matter. A different pdf document from a different source not only appeared much more quickly, but Acrobat's progress bar was also visible. Nonetheless, I remain sceptical about the functionality of pdf documents in FF. 2. This article on The Register addresses some observations I made to myself now that FF is really no longer an also-ran on the Internet. I switched to FF (or, as it was called, Firebird – or something like that) partly because IE 6.0 was a piece of crap that attracted the attention of malevolent forces online and partly because Netscape had fallen flat on its face with a successor to Navigator 4.7. Back then, FF was unlikely to attract much attention, but as the number of users has grown, the more likely it is to be a target for one exploit or another. Time to move on to some other browser? If so, what? Meanwhile, on the Internet… In slightly unrelated news, I note that Barking at the Sun remains blocked, although I'm still getting visitors from there; and even although the New Humanist editor's blog is hosted by blogger, it also remains inaccessible in spite of the proxy. There's quite an interesting article about Darwin on The Guardian. (How Darwin won the evolution race.) It's 150 years since the idea of evolution was first publicly presented, and next year Darwin's on a double anniversary: 150 years since The Origin of the Species was published and 200 years since he was born. June 21 That's a word?Last used in 1784. A recently acquired T-shirt came with care instructions in English and Chinese. The English had a slight garnish of Chinglish about it, but nothing really worth mentioning for the most part apart from the fourth instruction – "Insolate is prohibited". My first thought was that this was a typo for "insulation", but that made no sense at all. "Immolation" was my next stop (sounds a little sacrificial), but when I thought about "insolate", I thought of solus "only" and sol "sun", with the latter edging out the former. I had a look at the Chinese, which mentions 阳光 (yángguāng) "sunlight" and found my hunch was probably correct. The English should say something like "Don't dry in direct sunlight"; but this is Chengdu, where there's little risk of that. The Chinese itself says 请勿在阳光下暴晒 (qǐngwù zài yángguāng xià bàoshài) "Please don't expose to sunlight". I looked up "insolate" on answers.com and found that the word means "expose to direct sunlight". You know that no one's used it since Dr Johnson included it in his dictionary when a Google search yields a mere 23,000 instances and most of those are links to online dictionaries. June 20 Those below-average averagesIn full. Finished the marking this afternoon. Most of the writing was strictly pedestrian. Crippled pedestrian, that is. That also sums up the average for my three halves of the classes – (drum roll) IELTS 4.5. Although a proficiency exam is a neutral assessment of someone's level in a language, this is a fairly dire result. As I wrote the results in the report books for Class 5, I occasionally glanced at their results from the end of the 1st term. As they say in local body elections, "No overall change". A couple of years ago, I had thought the improvement in my little darlings at the time was really due to their Chinese English classes rather than ours. But on the basis of the indolence of my little dears this term, I'm now inclined to think that James and I really did make a difference. The pitiful average this term can't be attributed to the quake or any other interruptions, but rather to the utter laziness of the Senior 2s. If last year was a waste of time one way; this was a waste of time in another. Last year's students were congenital morons; that was their excuse. Only some of this year's students could hide behind the skirts of Cretinism, but the skirts of Sloth were much more inviting, voluminous, and accommodating. Hopefully on Monday I'll be in the mood to write a few scathing comments in the report books, but like sarcastic remarks I make in class, it'll be a waste of quality material. And the name of the movie in Chinese is… I see I had a visitor looking for the name of Kung Fu Hustle in Chinese. I whipped out my authentic pirated copy to find the name of the film is 功夫 (gōngfu). No hustling required. The word means "skill; workmanship; art". A 功夫片 (~piàn) is a kung fu film. June 19 Those partial resultsIn full. The Senior 2s had the IELTS writing exam this morning during which time I finished marking the listening exams from yesterday. The marks are a little topsy turvey for my halves of the classes. Class 5 have the highest average; Class 6 have the worst; Class 16 lie roughly in between. Because I've always regarded Class 6 as the best of 'em (which isn't saying much), it's a little surprising that they'll probably end up with the worst results (unless their writing is really good). I suspect that the reason for such a discrepancy is their inflated sense of their proficiency in English. For example, one of the kids in Class 6 calls himself Einstein and has spent much of the year doing homework in other subjects in class time. His English isn't bad, but he's probably going to end up with a 5.0 or 5.5, which is upper intermediate. While I was supervising the FCE reading exam this afternoon, I nearly got through Class 5's writing exams. Average, average and average. Had more than one kid spot the word "computer" in Writing Task 2 and waffle on about computers instead of addressing the actual task. In the past I've been fairly generous when it comes to marking IELTS writing, but with approximately 70 scripts to mark instead of the usual handful I've had in the past, most of which will be slight variations on a theme, I'm being more rigorous. Besides, most of the writing is utterly average. The writing tasks are usually completed to a minimum level; vocabulary and sentence structure are fairly repetitive; the overall structuring of the tasks is often wanting a decent intro and internally they show clear signs of a lack of planning. I admit it's a stupid question, but what's the Chinese for china? I know it's a silly question, but it suddenly popped into my head some time in the past eighteen hours or so. I know that "plate" is 盘 (pán) or 盘子 (pánzi) and that "bowl" is 碗 (wǎn), but I'd never considered what the word for "china" or "porcelain" might be. The answer is 瓷 (cí) or 瓷器 (cíqì). "Bone china" is 骨灰瓷 (gǔhuīcí), which is literally "bone ash china". Speaking of plates, I see teatime is nigh. June 18 Words in characterCulture temples are not what they seem. As I and others have noted before, it's possible to know all the characters in a sentence yet not have the faintest clue what it might mean because characters typically pair together to make words. Such combinations range from the transparent to the semi-transparent to the opaque. For example, I've mentioned 文庙前街 a few times. I know what all these characters mean, but it was only by chance last night that I discovered a 文庙 is a Confucian temple. So too, I find on further investigation, is a 孔庙 (kǒngmiào). This is a good example of how useful spaces between words in Chinese would be. If 文庙 had been followed by a space, I would've known it was a word. Actually, spaces would've helped yesterday during my painfully slow and prolonged translation of those slogans. This is another occasion when a reverse dictionary would be useful so that I could look up -庙 to find out what sorts of 庙 there are. The only other one I know is 寺庙 (sìmiào) "temple", which is one of those compounds where a pair of synonyms is used together without any real change in meaning. Packard (2000:89) has a short list of these, although omits the only other one I know off the top of my head, 古老 (gǔlǎo) "ancient; old". Actually, I do know 森林 (sēnlín) "forest", but it didn't immediately spring to mind. June 17 ExhortationsShouting at the people. One of the things you soon notice in China is the number of exhortations on banners, posters and signs. I concluded long ago that no one actually pays much attention to them. This evening when I went out to Zoe's for tea I saw that the exhortation manufacturers of China were getting their Christmas bonus early this year. The hoardings where they're working on the Metro just north of the gates to 川大 have been shifted sideways again and this time come with some chunky red posters. There were more posters up outside the computer centre and on the buildings across the other side of the road. These included 保民生 (bǎo mínshēng) "Protect people's livelihood"; 保和谐 (bǎo héxié) "Maintain harmony"; 恢复生产促进发展 (huīfù shēngchǎn cùjìn fāzhǎn) "Resume production; accelerate expansion"; 抓好受灾群众安置 (zhuā hǎo shòu zāi qúnzhòng ānzhì) "Emphasise goodness[1]; endure disaster; resettle the people"; 争分夺秒抢损失 (zhēngfēn-duómiǎo qiāng sǔnshī) "Make every minute and second count; oppose loss; 加快发展建家园 (jiākuài fāzhǎn jiàn jiāyuán) "Accelerate development; build the homeland". I've always regarded these sorts of slogans as unsophisticated and unsubtle. Just don't see the point. But then again I'm foreign and regard it as peculiar that any government would want to shout at me in this way. Notes 1. I admit I'm not sure exactly how to translate 抓好. Website's off. There is one other reason why I need access to anonymouse. When a website appears to have gone off the menu, a crosscheck via anonymouse is always useful. Right now, it appears that Barking at the Sun has fallen victim to the latest round of websites Nanny's decided to block. Of course, the sight might be down for maintenance, but… On the other hand, I've just found connie's space via the China Blog List. She's another expat here somewhere in Chengdu. |
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