3/30/10 7:20 AM
You can always tell when the tea is made from tap water. Which is to say, it's always made from tap water. Thoroughly disappointing, especially in the fancy restaurants. It tastes like my shower (water) smells.
It was really cool being in a group of kids who routinely spoke 3 different languages, and being privy to 2 of 'em.
I dropped by to the guitar store again yesterday, and had another great conversation with the guy. There was this wonderful moment where we were like… "is that… dude! It's you!" in our respective heads.
He's making me realize how universal everything is. (Alert! Recurring theme!) We were talking bout spending a lot of our time, invested in something, like playing guitar. He used the word "pledge," as in "to pledge your life," and I thought that was awesome. And he said "I just don't know what's worth fighting for," and I totally got that. And I had my normal logical argument about "well, the only thing that seems provable around here is that we can enjoy ourselves from time to time, so we might as well flex that muscle," but he got to the same point by proving it in the negative. "We're all going to waste so much time and energy because of the way society and the world certainly seems to be structured, so we need to work as best we can in the opposite direction."
3/31/10 8:31 AM
I bought some really cheap packs of pokemon and yugioh cards the other day, just for kicks, and it turns out they're both incredibly, elaborately faked. All of the numbers on the pokemon cards seem to be randomly generated, and all 20 cards I got, without exception, were "rare," and it looked like one card had cake frosting spilled on the back of it. The Yugioh cards were a little more legitimate, but in two of the packs, 12 (of the 15) cards were identical, and came the exact same order. One of the packs of pokemon cards that Malia got was exactly the same as another pack she got. Sort of funny, I think. Maybe no one cares but me?
We found a really good DVD shop (remember when I talked about finding band DVDs? That one, last week, around the Nanjing trip-ish), which closed down about 4 days after we found it. First time we dropped in, we got unexpectedly good prices, the next day we dropped in, half their stock was packed away, and the next day we dropped by, the store was empty but for a lady eating noodles who told us to go away. We find fewer occasions to drop by that way nowadays, but as far as I know, it's being gutted, and will be redone into something else.
Kae-por said there is sort of a crack-down on the bootleg DVD business, in preparation for the Shanghai Expo. Same thing happened before the Beijing Olympics, apparently. He says the DVD places on side streets that aren't so visible will be left alone, but the more prominent ones are on their way out. I think Hannah or Malia said something about a really visible DVD store by their house closing down, too. The store right by our school, though, that is tucked away and hides all signs of being a DVD store (nowadays; before they had a sign up advertising DVDs [this is how we found out about it], but two weeks or so they brought it inside and sort of boarded up all of the windows, so the racks can't be seen), so as to protect their business. Crazy stuff.
I'm reminded of something I read that Banksy (wicked awesome London graffiti/guerilla artist[/apparently filmmaker now?]) wrote about the graffiti scene in Australia, specifically Melbourne, which apparently has a truly wonderful street art vibe, which got basically destroyed by the preparations for the Sydney Olympics. Don't know exactly where to go from here, except to say that governments seem to tend to have the power to destroy culture?
3/31/10 7:00 PM
Naiyi and I watch America's Funniest Home Video's basically nightly. The channel, ICS (International Channel Shanghai), realized a problem with the broadcast, though. Calling something "America's" isn't so international, now is it? So over here it's called "Funniest Home Videos." But that also means they can't use a lot of the live footage of that annoying guy who introduces all the videos and stuff, because he says its "America's" videos, not anyone else's. So they have this other random guy, who's young and sort of awkward and I suppose inoffensive, reading this other, even crappier than normal script. But they still like showing some of the segments and games that they do on the normal show, but the studio of the regular show has "AFV" everywhere in big yellow letters, and for anyone who's seen the original show, it's really strange.
They pretend to have two hosts. The new, clearly not legitimate host talks sometimes about hanging out with the original host, and it's generally weird. The new catchphrase is "the show that speaks the international language of laughter," which is mild bollocks, because some of the shows, I think are, edited to keep the American-ness to a relative low.
This is the best documented series of things I have ever done.
There are advertisements in Naiyi's apartment's elevator, which are refreshed often and cover all three available walls, but no advertisements or previews before movies. Odd stuff.
When Jason hangs out with us too much, he starts talking to Chinese dudes in English. And they sort of stare at him. Afterwards he catches himself, and feels really silly, and the whole thing is definitely a spectator sport.
4/2/10 7:31 AM
Some hilarity has been ensuing with regards to toilets over here, but I don't think they're "General admission" sort of stories, so I won't recount them here. But when I'm back in good ole 'merica, I'll be happy to give you the whole story upon request, with mid-air, wavy-arm diagrams and all ("Okay, so this is the hole in the ground, and right here would be the plumbing implement, and there's the plunger…"), to bring it all to life.
We have like, a week and a half left in Shanghai. How am I supposed to work with that?
Oh yeah, people spit food on the table when they eat. Like, bones and things. Our family has a bone-bowl, as I suppose it should be called, and we pop the fish and chicken and things in our mouths, and spit out the extra craps. But apparently at Hannah's house they don't use bowls, and just spit the stuff on the table, and at the end of the meal clean up the table. Some restaurants do this, too, with the occasional place mat for easy clean up.
Apparently Jason's dad works on post-production on really snazzy Chinese movies. The one you've probably heard of is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Yes. Oh yes. And then I started sort of freaking out and naming some awesome fight choreographers and kung-fu actors and people, and Jason said his dad probably knew all these dudes. So I'm a little star struck, now, even though I didn't actually meet anyone.
I showed Hannah and Malia Legend of Drunken Master, which I still firmly believe is one of the best martial arts movies ever made, and is that movie that I'll talk about with you whenever we start talking about martial arts movies. They loved it. Because it's awesome.
On "Cool Edition," (has anyone noticed that I don't know whether to underline movie titles/TV shows/books or put them in quotes? I've noticed. Forgive me, MLA.), an odd but not so bad show that covers "all things cool," there was a segment on the Kids' Choice Awards. And it was really weird and lame and Disney-channel-sponsored, and I was like, "I remember when that started! I'm old school!" I feel like in 20-30 years time, I'll be yelling at the TV as my kids watch some 9 year old make millions by coughing into an auto-tune machine for 2 and a half minutes. I saw Katy Perry get green slime shot at her.
But anyway. China stuff. I'm sort of amazed that anyone can speak any language at all. I mean, really. How can a single person contain all this information? It seems like the gross mental load needed to learn and repeatedly work within a language seems more cumbersome than any other thing we can do as humans.
Also, I was so guilty tossing a huge chunk of Wikipedia in my last post that I forgot to say that Jason lived in Tennessee for a year while he was like, 11 or 12, so his brain deals with English as if he were a native speaker, I think.
It's a little too easy to mistake high-end Chrysanthemum tea for Kool-aid, at first glance. And then you taste it, and it's all good. But there's those first few moments of dread.
I walked on a broken escalator for the first time yesterday. I wanted to say "sorry for the convenience," but I knew no one would get it.
I have a lot more to write about, but I'm tired and I think this might do.
No comments:
Post a Comment