"How are you" "Oh, I'm horse-tiger"

The language barrier here is probably the most shocking part of my time in China thus far. The only non-Westerners that appear to speak english are business people who need it for work. Otherwise, fluent english is quite rare. Most of my communication is comprised of pointing, wild gestures, and gentle sobbing.

Shanghai has it's own language, known as Shanghainese. Evidently Shanghainese and Mandarin are completely different and mutually unintelligible. While my Mandarin level is still extremely low, I have begun to notice when people are speaking Mandarin and when they are speaking Shanghainese. The differences I notice now are on very basic levels - speed, inflection, etc. Most everyone from Shanghai speaks Mandarin, but the majority of conversations going on around me are in Shanghainese. So much for complete immersion in Mandarin.

The title of this post comes from my first Mandarin lesson. My tutor was going over basic responses to the question "Ni hao ma?" - how are you? Among the typical respones is this little gem - "Mama haha." I have no idea how I put the correct tonal punctuation on those words, but there is some. Anyways, "mama haha" means so-so, or ok. However, if you were to translate each word directly it means "horse tiger." At the time I found this hilarious.

And now for the link - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7530720.stm
That's right, alcoholic tree shrews! In addition to being a whimsical/interesting piece, I would like to direct your attention to the caption for the picture. I admire the BBC's attempts at alcohol humor, but let's leave it to the professionals. Even a layman like I could see that the appropriate caption would have been "This bud's for shrew."

Still figuring this thing out

My friend Jarret makes a good point in one of the comments to the previous post. He pretty much asks why I'm not going to write about controversial things such as the Olympics. The first reason is that I want this to be more of a "man-on-the-street" type blog. It will pretty much just compromise things I run into on a daily basis. Secondly, I really don't feel like pissing anyone off. I will be looking to tackle really basic, everyday scenarios including......food poisoning!

A slight warning: although I don't end up getting particularly sick, some of you might get kind of grossed out by the rest of this post.

I met up with a couple friends from France on Friday night for dinner before heading out to a bar. I was pretty excited because this particular bar is on the 26th floor of a building on the Bund (the area near the major river running through Shanghai) and is supposed to have breathtaking views. We decided on a small, european cafe near my apartment. After a dinner consisting of a decent pizza and soda, we walked down the block to meet up with a couple more people. We had been standing on one of the street corners for no longer than a few minutes before I began to feel extremely ill.

By the time our friend Jerome showed up, I was surveying my options of where I could vomit, which included the street and a small green area that was currently being watered by some guy. Jerome attempted to have a conversation with me as I sat there nodding and holding my stomach. Finally the last of our party arrived and I announced that I was ditching them due to impending stomach fireworks.

We were only a block from my place so I stumbled home, attempting not to chuck on any innocent bystanders. By the time I made it to my apartment building, I was feeling a reasonable amount better but still pretty off. I laid in my room for a while and eventually felt pretty OK. The rest of the weekend I ended up feeling fine.

Yes, indeed this has been a boring story, but it speaks to something that a reasonable number of people fear about life in China/Shanghai. From what I understand, food poisoning is not too much more common here than anywhere else. Just like in US cities, if you eat at shady places, you're going to run risks. On the other hand, I would be lying if I said there did not appear to be more of those shady places in Shanghai. Seemingly every block has 4 tiny little restaurants that are comprised of a kitchen and eight seats. I can't even really blame the place I ate, considering I really only felt bad for a few hours and of that time I only felt legitimately sick for about 10 minutes.

As of right now, I'd say the food has been pretty good. Lunch usually consist of eight dumplings (which costs a total of 5 rmb, or about 80 cents USD). Those go down pretty well everyday. I figure food poisoning may or may not be a running story throughout this little excursion, thus I decided to write it up. Perhaps I'll look back on this as a one-off outlier. Or perhaps this will be the first of many.

Anyways, this entire post has been more or less and excuse of why I don't have anything interesting from the weekend. Sorry kiddos. Enjoy the link.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502255.html

Pretty great column on how perceptions may not be reality when it comes to thinking about China.

Also, vote in the damn poll.

Sloppy 100-millionths

One of the reasons I'm doing this blog is that you really don't seen many blogs in China. I feel like I'm really breaking new ground here. It's nice to know that what I'm doing will be among the first blogs to really discuss China.

http://www.cwrblog.net/1089/cnnic-over-100-million-bloggers-in-china.html

Well then.

Sequels are never as good as the originals.

For a few reasons, being among them boredom and vanity, I decided to do another blog. It will probably end up with me posting entries consistently for about three weeks and then abandoning it, a la the jasoninaustralia blog. Therefore, I make no promises about consistency and/or quality.

First things first - I'm not going to blog about or link to anything controversial. There's plenty to write about Shanghai alone, and I really don't care that much about the political issues in China right now. Expect entries to be comprised of things like "Wow, there's a lot of people here!!1!1!" and not "China must stop XXXX right now, blah blah blah."

Secondly, for anyone who ends up reading this, please ask questions or come up with stuff for me to write about. I am incredibly lazy when it comes to doing this and input will provide at least some motivation.

Lastly, I'm really going to try to avoid any posts about the Olympics, mainly because there's literally dozens of quality blogs in China doing a pretty solid job of covering it. The only thing you might see is links. I'm going to try to include links, usually to other blogs, that might be of interest. This is pretty much going to be a blog about what might randomly stand out if anyone from the West came here.

Otherwise, I'd check back maybe weekly for posts. I don't see myself putting up anything interesting more than once every week or two.

As for the link I promised -

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2008/07/chinese_like_us_they_really_re.html

From a blog I read here pretty often. The writer puts it in a pretty funny way.