Star time five evening up seven point is good

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Photos:

…..while most of you are surfing the 'Net, here in the Middle Kingdom we are wading up to our necks in an unpleasant sludge of proxies, disconnections, no connections & restarts, while THEY, (whoever THEY are.....), still valiantly try to maintain total control of this, not hundred, but many million-headed monster. The proxy program sometimes works, sometimes takes forever. Now & again, it's possible to get straight onto some sites without the proxy but everything is blocked with it on. Suck it & see. It sucks!.....

…..I have learned two words for paranoia in Chinese. I prefer the second, Wang Xiang Kuang, or “absurd thinking insanity”, but the first one, Pian Zhi Kuang, “slanting or predjudiced, persisting in, insanity” is not bad either. (more accurate interpretation by my Chinese readers are welcome).....

…..last week the temperature & humidity increased to an uncomfortable level, up to about 38C on Thursday or Friday. It appeared to have set in for the summer so, going to Nantong to deliver some translation work from my friend Greg in Sydney for Shen Yue to work on. I thought shorts & tee shirt would be adequate. Ha ha!. When the cool change came, brought in by a strong northerly wind, the temperature dropped 20C or more & along with the rain made me wish I'd been more judicious in selecting clothes. Not cold enough to be life threatening but I wish I had at least brought a raincoat & a thin jumper.....

…..I find out later that Evi, off to teach in Nanjing for the weekend, got caught in the same way but ended up being sick. My cough, a memento of the Half Marathon, is much improved but the tiny thread of cotton that feels as though it's lightly touching the back of my throat is still there on occasions.....

…..Shen Yue & Wenyi, the latter just returned to Nantong from a visit to her home in Qiqihar in the far north, did find time to take me to a restaurant where they serve desserts, a rare find in China. It also gives them time to sort out the difference between “desert” & “dessert”, a problem not just for non-native speakers of English.....

…..Peter is preparing to move to Suzhou next year, partly to be closer to Ting Ting, partly to look at studying Chinese at the university there. Now who will do the Gloria Jean's coffee house gigs with me, & after that great publicity photo too? The first one is due to happen this Friday, 27th of May. We'll just do it acoustically for an hour or so to gauge the reaction, (if any!). He has also kindly presented me with a swag of CDs & a portable sound recorder as he unloads unnecessary baggage before heading to Suzhou.....

…..we all dropped the ball on the HSK Chinese proficiency exam, (level 1). Patrick, Erin, Peter & I were just not learning enough characters though Landon, one of our American teachers who has studied Chinese extensively prior to coming here, has just taken the Level 2 exam & apparently it's not necessary to know as many as the 800 or 1000 Chinese characters we thought we needed. On the positive side I am slowly beginning to, on occasion, if people speak slowly & keep it simple, to understand more & am putting sentences together a little more fluently. Every time a taxi driver understands the destination the first, or even second, time, is an achievement. I also don't get so many replies to text messages saying, “What did you mean by that”. With help from the electronic dictionary to fill in the vocabulary & basic grammar it's slowly making sense.....

…..why is it so difficult anyway? Here's one sentence from my reply to Zhang Jinghua, the manager of Gloria Jean's:

If you get a translator &, without any other context to go by, go through it character by character, (see the picture, in case your computer doesn't recognise Chinese), it could easily come back as:
“Star time five evening up seven point is good”, rather than the actual meaning,
“Friday evening seven o'clock is OK”.
Because the characters can stand alone or form words with other characters & there is no spacing to determine where one “word” ends & no capitals it is a minefield of alternative interpretations for the beginner. If we did the same in English then these could be alternative situations at a hospital using exactly the same letters in the same order:

afterwards canteen staff trusted
after wards can teen staff trust Ed

Sometimes the only positive outcome appears to be that French or German should be a breeze after this.....

…..after all that explanation Friday this week is not OK. My voice, still recovering from the after effects of the Half Marathon, is just not up to it. Inaugural gig next week maybe.....

…..it also gives me more sympathy for my unfortunate students, struggling with the mass of inconsistencies that is English, especially as our material & previous teachers are a mixture of American, English, Australian & a few other nationalities. We're onto clothing this week. Running shoes, yes, I have to give you points for that answer as we sometimes us that equivalent of the ever logical Chinese, even though most people call them sneakers, or maybe trainers. I usually point out that Americans call trousers, “pants”. Why go to the trouble of teaching the distinction between “shirt” & “blouse” when the American mother on the audio CD accompanying the poster hands her daughter a blouse & says, “Do you want to wear this shirt?. We have so far avoided mentioning Australia versus the Rest-of-the-World on the subject of thongs.....

…..I offer to take my colleagues from the teacher's office to dinner on a night & at a place of their choosing. They decide to go on Monday at around 8pm to a fish restaurant not all that far from the school but I think I'd be hard pressed to find it again among the back streets & hidden behind an anonymous wall & courtyard. You can't really trust the Chinese. Having gone along on the pretence of being treated to dinner they wait until the end of a pretty substantial meal with more fish dishes than I've ever seen at one sitting before ensuring that, as I leave the table on some pretence to ensure I get the bill before anyone else they send someone out to overtake me & insist on paying for it. The most duplicitous people on earth when it comes to AVOIDING being treated.....

…..Xiao Li's command of Chinese won over my halting attempts to persuade the laoban, (boss), to accept MY payment for a good bunch of colleagues, especially considering the language barrier & the fact that we foreign teachers get it easy compared to particularly the class teachers who are on the job from 8am to 8pm in addition to Sunday evening staff meetings & other impositions on their time, all for a lower salary.....

…..I buy a large cake from the Da Run Fa collect it on Thursday lunchtime. It's a typically Chinese confection, helium-light sponge & a mountain of soft cream, all topped by a fruit salad. They all dutifully take a slice, (or two), despite some of the ladies needlessly claiming they fear, “Chang pang”, (“grow fat”.....).....

…..the electric mosquito racquet has been recharged & every night several sets are played with me apparently winning after frying dozens of the little ******* but somehow always leaving enough hidden somewhere to return in the small hours to take revenge. The advantages of the racquet are that it doesn't squash them on the walls leaving the red smudges that I found when I first moved in. It can also be used in a semi-comatose state, waved around languidly while still lying in bed to at least catch the ones within arm's length. It's better with the light off; not only the satisfying “zzzzzzp” sound but it's also possible to see the little spark of light caught in the mesh as another one goes to meet its Maker. One of our resident breakfast philosophers points out that hell for humans could actually be heaven for things like mosquitoes. A lofty thought as we scratch our previous night's collection of bites.....

…..despite still believing that China is one of the safest places you could be, there is obviously crime here. Every bike has a lock, windows often have iron or stainless steel security screens. Still, the confronting, in your face, violent street crime is not a feature of life here. It's only possible to tell from what you see yourself or what people talk about. I only heard about one violent street crime in this city of four & a half million in the almost two years I've been here, a woman stabbed at an ATM one night. The details may be erased from the Internet & not reported in the papers but people will certainly find out & talk about it.....

…..it's worrying if those who are supposed to serve the people are responsible for the serious crimes . This story is from a very reputable source. The municipal government has an area in the east of the city under development. One “nail house” remained, a house still standing because the owner has refused to move because the compensation or alternative accommodation offered is inadequate. Thugs were employed to harass the offending occupant, services cut, the police not showing up when the threats were reported. Whatever the reason for holding out the owner finally emerged, went to the government offices a few days ago, poured petrol over himself in the middle of the main road outside & set fire to himself. With over 90% burns he is almost certainly dead by now. My informer tells me that the story, which quickly appeared on Chinese web sites, very quickly disappeared. No mention of it can be found now. I can't vouch for English language sites as THEY (whoever THEY might be!), are still blocking connection a lot of the time.....

…..an idea for solving street crime in the Western world. Employ all the thugs & hooligans on “government business”. It could all be covered by the umbrella of “Community Service“. Perhaps the original quotation was too difficult to achieve in practice & has been changed to; “From each according to our ability to extract, to each according to how much it takes to get what we want”.....

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Photos

Chefs, Zhenjiang
Making lunch for Peter and me on a trip to Zhenjiang

TV Tower, Nantong
Sunset

Australian Shop, Nantong
Yes, you can buy a kangaroo scrotum money pouch in China

Shen Yue, Nantong
Thinking about some translation work for a mate in Sydney

Canal by night, Nantong
Prettier after dark

Peter and Dave
Suggestions for a band name, anyone?

Fish Restaurant, Yangzhou
Dinner with my Grade 3 colleagues

Fish Restaurant, Yangzhou
After dinner with my Grade 3 colleagues

New Deveopment, East Yangzhou
More apartments, and more, and more

School, Zhenjiang
School for Disney character impersonators???