"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."