This is the street I just trudged down for 45 minutes in the freezing cold. The vanishing point is about a third of the way to the small expat party I was walking home from. A taxi, a taxi, my kingdom for a taxi.
The party was nice. At midnight, we all went up to the roof and saw fireworks in the distance. Fireworks. In China. Now I’ve seen everything.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Quick question. How is the Lexus “A December to Remember” ™ sales event going?
Some may remember the story of my epic quest to Pudong last year. To this day, the tale of the tubby gringo who braved a 45 minute subway ride and 45 minute death march in 99 degree heat & 99% humidity — just for some Mexican food like home — is whispered over baskets of Mission tortilla chips and pitchers of Señor Discounto margaritas.
Well, a couple of months ago, that restaurant opened a second location a scant four Metro stops away from my new place! Everything’s coming up Milhouse!
My favorite of the X-Men, Nightcrawler, once said, “When you’re born with a tail, you learn to go through doors fast.” Something similar applies to being tall in an Asian country and learning to duck.
That’s eye-level on the Shanghai Metro.
In case there was a doubt about whether or not I moved into a cosmopolitan part of Shanghai, I just tried out the gym at my new apartment. It’s directly above an Apple Store and looks out at a Tiffany’s.
There’s an old joke among linguists that a “language” is just a dialect with a navy. Dutch and German, for example, are distinct mostly because of political identity rather than because of any sharp linguistic differences.
Chinese has two major dialects: Mandarin and Cantonese. However, they share a common written language. (A Mandarin speaker can still order at a Cantonese restaurant if they write their order down.)
In the 1950s, in an attempt to eradicate illiteracy among its citizenry, the People’s Republic of China mandated a simplification of the written language which had evolved (and grown rococo) over thousands of years. But some communities continue using the traditional characters.
It’s complicated. I made a chart:
| Written Language | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional | Simplified | ||
| Spoken Language | Mandarin | Taiwan | Northern and Southwestern China |
| Cantonese | Hong Kong and many overseas Chinese communities | Guangzhou area in southern China | |
For my stay here in Shanghai, I’ve been studying Mandarin and simplified Chinese chracters. None of which helped me in Hong Kong. But — armed with my meager knowledge — I still had fun figuring out the following just from subway maps and signs on the Peak.
| Mandarin | Cantonese | |
|---|---|---|
| 上 | shang | sheung |
| 后 | hou | hau |
| 天 | tian | tin |
| 花 | hua | fa |
| 火 | huo | fo |
| 门 | men | mun |
| 安 | an | on |
| 地 | di | tie |
| 王 | wang | wong |
Yes, so, that’s the kind of thing I do in my free time. In case you were wondering.
Our offices here at work are spread across three contiguous floors: the 12th, 15th, and 16th. In China, buildings usually skip naming the 13th floor (out of general triskaidekaphobia) and any floors with “4” in them because the sound of the word for “four” (sì) sounds similar to the word for “death” (sǐ).
I haven’t worked up the courage to admit to my coworkers that the “IV” at the end of my name is actually a Roman numeral. In addition to chiding me for shaming my ancestors by re-using the exact same name as my father, I don’t want them to start referring to me as “David Death.”
Actually, scratch that. That’s pretty awesome. Everybody start calling me David Death from now on.
Waiting at the gate for my Christmas Eve flight back to Shanghai. Since being here in China, the ubiquity of decorations and Christmas music has been one of the biggest surprises. But it’s Christmas divorced from its religious roots or even Victorian sentiment, leaving only the crass commercialism.
Yes, that’s a towering Swarovski crystal Christmas “tree”. Linus and Charlie Brown would not approve.
We’re about to board. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
So, I saw The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies with Traditional Chinese subtitles. The translation of some of the dwarves’ names would have horrified Tolkien.
Balin became Ba Lin (巴林) and
Thorin became Suo Lin (索林). “Lin” means forest. No self-respecting, cave-loving, forest-hating dwarf would approve of that.
Which American movie will the good people of Hong Kong connect with better?
They both have exclamation points on their posters, so I guess it’s a toss-up.
Because the calligraphy and antiquities wings of the Hong Kong Museum of Art were both closed, I ended up at the Hong Kong Space Museum after not too long. Nice to see the history of astronomy start with the Chinese for once.
Despite the fact that their interpretation of Ursa Major was painfully lame.
Just ate at an awesome dim sum place called Dim Dim Sum Dim Sum. You know, for clarity.
It came highly recommended by both my coworker (whom I trust) and by Newsweek‘s “101 Best Places to Eat in the World” (which I don’t trust as, I assume, the article shares the magazine’s radical leftwing ideology.)
A Tlingit “Blackfish” pole gifted from Canada to Hong Kong in 1991.
As we all learned from the documentary Blackfish, this was the First People’s term for killer whale.
