A few days back we returned from a trip to Taidong and environs. It was a nice 3 day "holiday" - well, it was a holiday for Wanlin, but just a little icing on the cake for the perpetual vacationer I.



.

I was just talking with my reporter friend from Chengdu and we started talking about the Olympics, specifically the huge PR campaign.  I didn't know these little "jing-jings" were officially dedicated to each character or that they were called the "5 Friendlies."  The cutesiness of these mascots actually feeds my constant conviction that most Chinese people are very friendly and accommodating long as your interest in China is limited to childish wide-eyed "How can you possibly eat with 2 sticks and not a fork! That must mean your understanding of the world is deep and profound!  I wish I had 5000 years of history!! You're so unscrutable and awesome!!" type of wonder and you never try and scratch below the surface with more penetrating questions - questions like what do the new "8 Friendlies" below mean and what social trends galvanized their creation.   Another nice little indigenous development with those who haven't been harmonized by the government...

The Official 5 Friendlies (Click for larger pic):  北京欢迎你 = Beijing Hunaying Ni! = Beijing Welcomes You!

So we all see how each Friendly is named after each of the characters in the sentence for Beijing Welcomes You, right?: Bei-Bei, Jing-Jing, Huan-huan, Ying-Ying, Ni-Ni.

The 8 Modified Friendlies (Click for larger pic): 北京欢迎你丫挺的 =  Beijing Huanying Ni Ya Ting De = Beijing Welcomes You...more or less.... (Click for larger pic)  I find it very funny that it now says this and added 3 extra Friendlies to represent the new words, with a further double homophone representation "Yatingde / 丫挺的" with the Duck (Ya = Yazi), the Dragonfly (Ting = Qingting) and the cab driver (Di = Dige). 


Anyone knows what it now says?  Anyone want to hazard a guess?  I'm now looking around for a shirt that has this on it.  I wonder if anyone would say anything if I were to wear it.  Probably garner a lot of stink-eyes  and earnest low-voiced "It isn't good to wear that" 's.    Still,  I love these little developments of popular culture....  Then again you can pass it off as nationalistic and not anti-olympics because you are addressing the foreigners who are coming to China for the Olympics, and those are the dirty imperialists who burned down our Summer Palace, after all...

Decided to write this (currently working on translations into Chinese) after getting wapped about the head for daring to criticize China's visa procedures.  Encountered tons of non-sequiturs and a host of flag waving.  Since some of these people are my friends I decided to whip this little guide up to help them the next time they want to both a) argue about why China is great and b) not lose all self-respect in the procesess.  Oh, and be careful of the generalizations - given both my Chinese skill and space requirements they are a necessary evil until an actual conversation gets going...

Warning - Work in progress - much of this is still in outline form waiting to be written up properly.  Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.

 .

.

Well, today I turned in my letter of resignation.

.

I received this email from a friend of mine the other day.  He is an ex-marine, Harvard grad who is currently teaching in China.  Met him my first year over - intelligent, acute, loves China and a great person - what I picture P.J. Ivanhoe to be like.  He wanted to talk about Confucianism:

.

Glad they have that little counter there on my Chinese blog.  Not bad turn out for a random introduction of myself.  Then again, in a country with more internet users than the entire population of the US, percentage wise 32 ain't that high, but then again I always was terrible at math.  It almost feels like I have a little following - and we're talking about 32 hits between 6am - 7am China time, not really high traffic time.  Still, what great fun this is!

Well, I've started a real Chinese blog (the one I'm always referring to is actually just a language learning site).  You can go see it here!  Actually, I'm going to have bar liukaiqin and robot_mel from going there (don't how I'll go about doing that yet) since I have no doubt their Chinese supersedes my own and it would be rather embarrassing to show how bad my written Chinese really is.  The reason why this comes as such a shock to me is that I've tried to sign up at various places like this before, but I've always been unable to get in.  It led me to believe that the government wasn't letting IP address from outside of China sign up since we might be political bandits out to destroy society.  Guess I was always just trying to sign up when web traffic was high...  Anyway, happy day for me and all my friends in China who can finally read (some) of what I always scribble about! Yeah!      

The last few nights have been...processing.  (verbs can be adjectives, right?)

.

3 or 4 thoughts as I cruise the web...

I was very appreciative of the China blogs today and would like to share some them with all y'all.  They were mostly about new sayings among the youth, some of which I find wonderful and will certainly adopt in my Chinese, and may even, as the title suggests, start using them in English as well. 




.

So I was riding the bus to work today and a woman sat down next to me. 

My sister just got back from a wedding and it has been making me think about marriage, mostly on wedding ceremonies rather than the institution as a whole.


.

Yep, the polls are closed and the tallies are in.  I'm a bread stick.  A deep-fried, venerable one at that.

.