What Color is China?

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Some observations about color in China
If you were a child in China, you might grow up thinking that all trucks are blue. Seriously, almost every single truck that I have seen here has been blue. Sure, I’ve seen a handful of green ones, but they’re few and far between. Trucks here also move pretty slowly here, and they have these smaller, ‘tractor’-like trucks here the move _really slowly. I think these things have like 2-cylinder engines, you can hear the pistons just firing.
Ok, can you guess what color that flowers are here? That’s right, red and gold, like on the flag. Of course, this could be for the national-day holiday, but we’ve seen displays all over, and yup, they’re all red and gold blossoms and blooms. If you’re a pink, purple, or blue flower, you’re pretty lonely around here..
Translating Chinese
I raised this topic in an earlier posting, and now I have some time to return to the subject of translating Chinese into English. We’ve seen some pretty funny misspellings/typos here, and also some interesting results when Chinese characters are translated, one-by-one into English. I can’t remember the 3rd class of error in my previously authored typology, but I don’t never-mind, because the examples that I have don’t fall into this category.
We came across this one sign at the bus station here in Lijiang that exhibited both poor spelling and also literal character translation. I don’t have the exact text but I do have a photo and it had something to do with not bringing flammable or dangerous items onto the bus. The amazing part was that neither Sherry nor I could decipher exactly what it meant.
Anyway, here’s some text from some other funny translations that we came across during our Yangtze river cruise:

• “You will get an electric shock” (on a cabinet door on the ferry boat)
  
• “Meet and discuss with care” (sign in the boat lobby. What does this mean?!)
  
• “It is releasing and free when getting rid of the living of rules. What we see is happy facial expression and leaving laughing from the bottom of the heart. Feel kind of estrangement and makes from us. Just this moment raise your wine with warm in your heart”
  (slogan on a beer can. It sure has the Bud and Coors slogan beat!)
  

Many apologies, but I can’t post any photos right now. It is really putting the fear into me because the cd ROM drive on this computer can read another cd (audio cd), but cannot read the cd with our burned photos! Our memory card has already been cleared, hopefully this batch of photos isn’t gone forever! Sherry has another copy, but that was made at the same place… Hmm, maybe it’s just this silly computer. Let’s hope.
Sherry and I are also currently in the middle of the seriously painful experience of buying a cheap flight from Stockholm to Paris. Darn SAS web site keeps throwing this error on the, and we can’t get thru to them on the phone either. The whole thing just makes me want to scream! Nobody here would take much notice if I did really… ; )

Ta ta for now,
-Cory

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Comments

[fav aunt]

what
thought we were going to hear about the deepest gorge on earth.what?? instead we get blabla about colored trucks, you losing it?... love ya anyway