Back to China

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Hi,

After 3 exhusting days of travelling from Laos, I finally arrived to Dali in Yunan province.
While waiting for the passport stamping at the Chinese border, I was pushing with all the other people (in China acts as a Chinese) in order to save my rights. To my surprise, the policeman ordered us to stand in the line, otherwise he won't continue. Am I crossing back to China?
The other evidence to the fact that I was back to China (except the stamp in my passport), was that on the night bus from Mengla to Kunming, the vomitting woman was travelling with me again (might it be the same woman that following me in all the buses and vomits???).
In the first part of the ride (for about 6 hours), the road was very curving and very bumpy and so she was vomitting very frequently with all her heart and voices.
Back to China, i.e back to the loud, spitting, vomitting, smoking and unpolite people.
While travelling in Laos, I was afraid that I might forget my good Chinese that I have gained after 1 month of travelling in China.
However, it appeared that I do still remember the following essential words / sentences: "hello", "thanks", "rice", "good night", "How much it cost?" (the only problem is that I don't understand the answer, still need to practice with numbers), "I don't understand", "I don't want". The 2 last ones are very important to banish people that hassle me too much. I found out that it helps more to say it in Chinese then to say "no" and to use hand gestures though I am sure they understand it as well. Those phrases are quite easy. However, I do have some difficulties in pronouncing the words "pork" and "toilet". For some reason they don't understand me. There is probably something with the tone that I still did not catch. But, normally they understand WC and send me to the right (normally stinking) place. However, I keep trying to say those words in Chinese and don't give up even when they lough at me and at my pathetic trials after they understand what I meant. Chinese are known as not very polite people. Sinit safa kasha (this is in Hebrew).
The Chinese writing is very strange. Each character represents a word.
An average person knows about 500 characters while an educated person will know about 5,000 which is enough to read newspapers and books. However, there are many more, maybe 30,000, many of them are not in use. That means that every name has a meaning becuase it is combined of characters or sometimes it is meaningless.
For example, Bejing means the 'north capital' while Nanjing means the 'south capital'.
This method maybe made sense in ancient times when there were no connections between kingdoms. But nowadays, when there is the media and the world becomes more and more global, this method seems to be more and more stupid.
For example, there is one guy called George Bush, how he will be called in China? They need to write his name as well, not just to say it. So, they need to combine existing characters that will sound the closest to his real name. Bush name in Chinese is something like Busher which means something like "no die". So, does Bush Chinese name have a meaning? maybe...
The Chinese give new names for foriegn football players, foriegn movie stars, foriegn singers, etc.
This makes a problem for Chinese people while talking with foriegn people when reffering to Western figures. They normally will not understand each other.
When a foriegn student comes to China, he needs to pick his 'Chinese' name. I wonder what they would do in the olympic games, so many new names to invent...
This method is tolorable for countries names, cities names, etc but when it comes to people names it less tolorable becuase people names are unique and cannot be changed.
But, on the other hand, also for Western people, it is very difficult to pronounce Chinese names and normally they mis-pronounce them so this makes it even. And indeed, in a English class of a native English speaking teacher, the students pick for themselfs an English name.

Bye, Sharon

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