Shanghai Bob

I took the train to Munich on Friday and met Ann, Christian, Joel, Elke, Manny, and Ava.

They start drinking young in Munich.

We spent most of Saturday in the English Garden, followed by dinner at one of the bräuhauses…

…followed in turn by more drinking and some dancing until early in the morning. Many of the guys were wearing lederhosen, and many of the girls were wearing dirndls, which created the effect of dancing with lots of beer hall waitresses.

If you have some free time (which you clearly do if you are reading this blog), check out http://www.hanzismatter.com for examples of misused Chinese and Japanese characters in tattoos and advertisement.

Today I saw a car with its own tattoo:

Part of the reason I took a picture, though, is because the car brand is Megane, produce by Renault. Every time I see one, I have to laugh — Megane is the Japanese word for “glasses”, a silly name for a car.

These are a little puerile, but I’ve collected some other “brands” that don’t travel well: A German travel group, a small town in Germany near Nürnberg (all the inhabitants are blind), and the Freiburg Traffic Association.

One of my friends in grad school gave her students instructions to observe and record a conversational misunderstanding. One of her apparently hapless students gave several examples from his own interactions during the week. In one, he met a girl in a bar and found out they both ran track for the university. After chatting for some time, she said, “We should go out some time”, meaning go out on a date. He thought she meant go out for a run, so answered, “How far do you go?”

In Japanese, the word hai means “yes”, and is also used to indicate that you have heard or are listening to someone. It sounds pretty much like the hi that English speakers use for hello, which made the following exchange common:

Foreign guest: Takemura-san?

Takemura: Hai!

Foreign guest, startled: Oh, hi! [sometimes accompanied by a wave]. I just wanted to ask you…

When I was waiting in the Frankfurt airport for the bomb to be cleared off the train back to Freiburg, several extremely pretty girls and one dude were wandering around with clipboards approaching people. Guess which one came to talk to me? He asked me in German, Do you live in Germany? I answered in English, No. He appeared to interpret that as, No, I don’t understand you/don’t understand German, and mirrored that back to me in pidgin English: You no German? I said, That’s right. Basically he didn’t understand any of the immediate intention behind my responses, but was still able to draw out the full pragmatic value of the exchange, namely that I didn’t want to talk to him.

The autumnal equinox is in five days, on September 22 this year, and the temperature has dropped a few degrees in anticipation. It’s sunny again in Freiburg, but everybody is wrapped up against the cold and the leaves are starting to turn. The first few weeks of September were beautiful here, but because I spent June, July, and August in London this year, I was robbed of a summer. I’m hoping Thailand in November will make up for it.

Something else typical of Freiburg: mosaics. Every shop has a stone mosaic on the sidewalk in front of their store, and the public buildings do as well. This is Freiburg’s Wappen, or coat of arms, with St. George’s cross, just like the English flag.

The sunshine and shadow of a bicycle are also typical of Freiburg.

I found out that you can live in a large, quiet, clean apartment near the center of the city for just €250/month, or for €150/month a little outside the city (in St. George, for example!). These numbers haven’t changed much since I was a student (though of course they were designated in Marks then). In practical terms, you can pay your rent for an entire year in Freiburg on what it costs for one month’s rent in London or Tokyo, or for less than two months’ rent in San Francisco.

Back in Freiburg it is rainy and cold, and I have a cold. I spent a few minutes online today googling “Shanghai Bob” to see what comes up. Apparently the most competition for this name comes from the Shanghai Bob Valve Company. It’s not obvious what scope Bob has in that name — is it modified by Shanghai (the valve company that belongs to Shanghai Bob) or does it modify valve (the Shanghai company that produces bob valves, whatever they might be).

The fact that the email contact is bob@bobvalve.com, and that the inventory lists ball valves, gate valves, globe valves, check valves, butterfly valves, plug valves, and slab gate valves, but no bob valves, suggests that the first explanation is correct.

At any rate, I found my site at the top of page three, which is pretty good considering that it was nowhere to be found just a month ago. I’ll check again over the next year and see how it improves. The real test will be once I make it to Shanghai to see where this blog comes in a search for just the word Shanghai.

We took a roundabout route home from Switzerland and stopped in the middle of the Black Forest to visit the improbably large St. Blaise Cathedral. It’s billed as the third largest cupola in Europe. Wikipedia lists it as the third “widest” and adds the caveat “at the time it was built.” We got there just as the choir was starting, and left just as it finished.

One of the people traveling with us asked, What’s the difference between a Cathedral and a Minster? — the third time this has come up.

One of the first poems I memorized in German was Die Lorelei, which contains the line Und ruhig fließt der Rhein (“and peacefully flows the Rhein”). It’s useful as a reminder that the Rhein, like the Neckar and unlike most other rivers in Germany, is masculine. But the poem is self-descriptive, in that once you get it stuck in your head, the sing-songy rhythm stays there (das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn). It started up when I went for a walk along the banks of the Rhein in Düsseldorf, and got stuck for a good three days.

There is at least one place where the Rhein doesn’t flow peacefully, however, and we got to see it on Sunday. On the way back through Switzerland, we drove to Neuhausen to see the Rheinfall. They’ve built decks right on top of the flow of water, so you can lean over the edge and get a feeling of what it would be like to jump in. The falls are not very high (in spite of being the largest waterfall in Europe), but a huge volume of water passes through, 463 cubic meters/second on the day we were there, which is only one-third of peak flow. We were lucky that the sun came out long enough to give us a rainbow.

[pictures coming!]

There’s a castle above the viewing decks that you can’t really see except from the other side of the river.

On Saturday we hired a minivan and drove to Switzerland, through Zurich to Einsiedeln. People who live in Einsiedeln are called Einsiedler, which also means “hermit” or “recluse”. So Einsiedeln is an oxymoron, a community of hermits. They take suspiciously good care of their cattle:

What was intended as a hiking weekend was transformed by rain and fog into a card-playing weekend. Here’s the view out my window on Sunday morning:

Wednesday through Friday I visited Manpreet and Volker at their new digs in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf started out as a dorf (“village”) on the River Düssel, but by now it has grown into a full-blown city on the River Rhein.

I gathered another data point for my upcoming “Gelato Index”, a measure of purchasing power parity based on the cost of two scoops of gelato. It’s 2 Euros in the Königsalle.

Strangely, one of the big attractions in Düsseldorf is Japanese food. The city has just over 600,000 inhabitants, and around 1% of them are Japanese. We had ramen.

We had to wait in line outside the place (just like at a real ramen-ya in Tokyo), and had an interesting exchange in which the Japanese hostess took our order in German while we conversed in English. When we had finished ordering, we offered the menu to our Japanese neighbor in Japanese, and he, having heard our conversation, accepted in English.

My train home was delayed over an hour by a bomb scare.

In at least one Amazonian language, pitch conveys much of the meaning of an expression, which makes it possible to whistle anything you want to say. As a result, Pirahã speakers can with little effort hold whistled conversations with people whom they can’t see.

I found this idea fascinating and bizzare, but a little reflection turned up a few examples in English where most of the meaning is encoded in pitch. For example, if you say, “I don’t know’ without opening your mouth or moving your tongue (try it), the low-high-low pitch pattern alone conveys the meaning to other English speakers.

But not to speakers of other languages. When I first moved to France to study, I would occasionally, unconsciously substitute “uh-huh” and “huh-uh” for Yes and No. Because the “h” phoneme is not significant in French, French speakers who had not learned English had trouble differentiating the two grunts, and I had to unlearn them.

Yes = uh-huh, mm-hmm
No = huh-uh, nuh-uh, hm-mm (first “m” is actually a glottal stop)

If you add pitch to the mix, you can say “no way”: “say” huh-uh, but extend the final uh and give it a falling tone.

All this is a long prelude to explain a linguistic discovery a friend and I made some time ago. German and French both have a word that is a combination of contradiction + assertion. In English, you need to use a circumlocution. An example should make it clear:

• You didn’t pay the telephone bill, did you?
• I did too.

In English you say, I did too, I did so, or Yes, I did, but in German you can say simply Doch (In French it is Si.) Why doesn’t English have a one word equivalent for contradicting people? It turns out that it does, but most people stop using it once they are out of their teens (if they ever use it at all). To the list of meaningful grunts in English, you can add yeah-huh (or yuh-huh), which means Yes, so. Pitch is expressive here as well: the more pitch variation you apply to the “huh” syllable, the more obviously wrong you imply your interlocutor is.