Shanghai Bob

These sculptures just appeared in the courtyard of the mall I walk through to get to the subway.  Children playing checkers, a woman on a cell phone, a boy playing with a paper airplane (I thought it was too corny, but I saw a Chinese girl lean up against this one and give it a kiss), a guy kissing a girl on a bike (you’d think that would be too risque for China), and this one of a guy pretending to play the saxophone:

How do I know he’s just pretending?  The hands are switched and the sax is on the wrong side of his body.  It’s like the sculptor was working from a mirror image.

This blog now shows up as the first result if you do a Google search for “Shanghai Bob” (with or without a space).  Last summer it was somewhere on page three, when I was in Germany it was in the top ten, and now finally number one.  See the “web” category of posts for the history of its progress.  I’m thinking I should contact the Shanghai Bob Valve Company (which I displaced from the top spot), and offer them my services as a marketing consultant.

I drew this diagram to help with studying Chinese directions.  By the time I was done with it, I didn’t need to study them anymore, so I may spend more time in front of the computer.  Outside is 外 = wài, the same character as in Japanese.  It’s used in both languages for foreigner:  外国人 = wàiguórén/gai(koku)jin.

We went to a Sichuan restaurant last night.  The first menu page showed a picture of moist, shiny chicken in a clear sauce.  English name: Saliva Chicken.  The characters read mouth water chicken, which I find less objectionable, but it turns out that Saliva Chicken is the standard name for this dish. They also offered Acid Kidney Beans and Quick Stir-fried Grandma.

Over the weekend I did several small things on my own in Chinese:  mainly asking for directions and directing taxis.  The exchanges were painless, and a big improvement over my attempts to navigate the city in my first two weeks.  The early attempts usually involved getting the hotel concierge to write my destination on a card in Chinese.

I have several pages of notes on directions in Chinese, both cardinal directions (north, south, etc.) and taxi directions (left, right, stop here, you are going the wrong way).  The minimum fare in a Shanghai taxi costs only $2.00 and will take you all the way across town, so it’s pretty cheap to practice.

I learned yesterday that Chinese say “Cold hands, warm heart” just like we do.  Considering the telegraphic syntax, it could be originally Chinese.  This is just a way of saying that it’s still cold here, in spite of today’s sunny weather (the first sunny day in three weeks).

I was chatting with a conversation partner who used “88″ to sign off.  This turned out to be a numerical representation of a Chinese approximation of an English farewell:

88 = 八八 ＝ bā bā = “bye-bye”

Because “I”, “you”, “be/am/are/is” and “love” all have close approximations in Chinese digits, you can actually say a lot.  Some super-methodical person put up this list of Chinese codes and their translations.  My favorite is the self-refuting

8006 = 不理你了 = “Not paying attention to you anymore”

I learned today that in the local Shanghainese dialect a left turn is called a “big turn” (because you cross half the road) and a right turn is called a “little turn”.

In class we learned buy (mǎi; 买) and sell (mài; 卖).  The characters differ only by one component and the pronunciation differs only in the tone.  I asked how traders confirm buys and sells on the phone, but our teacher didn’t know.  I was at a CFA happy hour over the weekend with Andrew and we found a member who could tell us:  they add an extra character to each: “buy in” (买 进) and “sell out” (卖 出).