Chinglish of the Day

There are plenty of interesting English translations in China. I won't criticize anyone's translations, especially as I spend hours each day trying to do my own, but I do think you'll find some of them humorous. I'm not sure that today's is really that bad of a translation, but it is interesting. I saw it on a restaurant sign as we were riding the bus back to Beijing after visiting the great wall (and it is great). 

COD: Donkey meat Dongquan Reservoir Fish

Mmmmm. Too bad we couldn't stop, don't you think?

The Dungeon

Like I mentioned before, I am trying to improve my writing skills and I want to be able to create pictures with words. The room where I stayed the first night in Beijing is a good opportunity for me to do this. I’ll include pictures at the end so that you can compare the image in your head with what I describe. (I'm having trouble so I'm going to put the pictures in later.)

The hostel where I stayed had rooms both above and below ground. Mine was underground. As I descended down the three flights of stairs, I remembered all of the sketchy places I had stayed in the past. This one was surely going to be memorable, whether or not it made my top ten list of weird cheap lodging.

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Airport to Hotel

The arrival at Beijing International Airport was uneventful. There were some slow moving lines at the immigration checkpoint, but the Chinese officials soon changed some of the foreigner lines over to general entry lines, and I quickly made it through. It continues to be a mystery to me why some lines would move so much faster than others.

I would have liked to have been Zachary Auerbach today. There was a hostess at the airport who kept walking around baggage claim with a white piece of paper with his name typed on it. The third time she walked by, I looked a little closer at it. Apparently, she worked for the Ritz-Carlton and was going to take him there. That would have been nice. My Chinese language skills were not good enough to convince her that I was Zachary, so after picking up my bag, I walked over to where the express train from the airport to downtown leaves from. As I walked out of the airport and into the train station, I realized I was not in Portland any more. The blanket of heat nearly knocked me over.

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Buildings of Grandeur

The airport terminal at San Francisco is gargantuan. Walking into the terminal check-in area, you are immediately struck by how much space is all around you. It feels like you are up in the sky. You feel insignificant. It is simply nearly impossible to see from one end to the other. It is like walking into an old, majestic field house that hosted the basketball team at your alma mater (or the indoor track team, if you went to WSU). Your eyes are drawn upward toward the ceiling, where light gray massive steel girders, hoisted on massive round white cement pillars float lazily overhead. On one side, the windows reach all the way up to the ceiling giving the terminal an open airy feel that contrasts with the massive structure surrounding you.

If PDX claims to be an international airport, SFO actually feels like one. Apart from its sheer size, the diversity of the people traveling is much greater. From Sikhs to sheiks, every type of language, country and culture is on display. If you sit at a café for 15 minutes and watch people pass by, you will have no shortage of entertainment trying to guess where each person comes from. SFO is like a smaller version of the UN, except that the people get along better in SFO, if only because they have to in order to reach their destinations.

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The Seatmate Lottery

One of the more interesting aspects of travel is what I like to call the “seatmate lottery”. If you are traveling alone and are forced to travel economy class (which so far, has been every time I’ve traveled), it is likely that you will have at least two strangers sitting in your row with you. Whether or not you end up liking them, you’re pretty much stuck with them for the “duration of the flight”.

Much like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, there are a number of different ‘lottery’ outcomes. If you’re lucky, you hit the seatmate jackpot. There are two types of jackpot. The “open spaces” jackpot is the first type. Every once in a while, you will arrive at your row and there will be no one else sitting there. When this happens you stop and quickly look around to see if the rest of the plane is full. If it’s not, you think you’ve got a chance to have the seats to yourself.

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SFO Chowder

Why can it be so hard to tell the truth? Why do we go out of our way to not offend people? I ask this because when someone asked me a question today, I did not respond with the whole unvarnished truth. Here’s the story.

After rolling out of bed at 3:54am so that I could hurry to catch the Max to the airport, and then waiting around for almost two hours before a flight that arrived early in San Francisco, I found myself at the San Francisco (SFO) airport at 9am, waiting for a flight that would not leave until nearly 3pm. Since I had some free time (and I had to wait a couple hours to even check in for the China flight) I decided to wander for a while. There were a lot of places to wander.

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Beijing

I forgot to mention that I am in Beijing now and will be until the end of August. I received a scholarship to study Chinese for one month at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Some of the following posts are about my journey here.