The Brain Dump

Peanut Butter Doodle Time!

+08:00

Alright, I'm gonna make it quick. I'm tired. Christina and I had to get up at 5:15 today so we could make it to a hospital in Zhengzhou (pronounced "jung-joe"), the provincial capital, so we could get examined for our residence permits before the crowd hit the hospital. So here are the doodles I learned for week two:

Monday

[mian2] - (roof), doesn't appear by itself
匕 - bi3 (ladle)
它 - ta1 (it), the top part of this is the above [mian2]
了 - le (marks verbs or sentences as "completed action" or "changed status")
子 - zi3 (child)
好 - hao3 (be good, well/consider good, like, love)
厶 - si1 (be selfish, private)

Tuesday

幺 - yao1 (coil/be immature, be tender, be little)
[si1] - (silk), the bottom half of the character below this one is si1 for silk
累 - lei4 (be tired)
彳 - chi4 (to step)
艮 - gen4 (be tough/be stubborn/be leathery/be blunt)
很 - hen3 (very)
口 - kou3 (mouth/a measure for humans)

Wednesday

灬 - huo3 (fire)
马 - ma3 (horse/a family name)
吗 - ma (marks sentences as questions and marks off subjects in sentences)
言 - yan2 (word, words/a family name)
讠 - yan2 (word, words)
隹 - zhui1 (dove)
谁 - shei2 or shui2 (Who?/Whom?)

Thursday

大 - da4 (be big)
夫 - fu1 (husband/"big man")
天 - tian1 (heaven/God/day/natural)
气 - qi4 (breath/vapors/exhalation/animus/energy/soul)
笑 - xiao4 (to laugh, smile/to ridicule)
儿 - er4 (child, son)
尢 - wang1 (be lame), or you2 (still) . . . Here's how I remember this one: I knew a kid growing up named Bobby Wang, so this is what I tell myself: "Bobby Wang is pretty lame, but you are still OK." Chinese mnemonics, sigh . . .

Friday

辛 - xin1 (be bitter/be toilsome/a family name)
幸 - xing4 (lucky)
[zhu3] - (dot), the top dot of the next character is zhu3
主 - zhu3 (lord, host/principal/to indicate)
住 - zhu4 (to live/to stay/to stop)
[shui3] - (water), the left part of the next character is [shui3]
注 - zhu4 (to comment on, annotate/to concentrate on/note, commentary/to pour into/bet, stake/a measure for business transactions or for sums of money) <---this one's loads of fun to remember.

That's it--two weeks worth of doodles. And I still can't read any signs . . .

Photo Albums

+08:00

I added two photo albums to the blog--one for Pics o' the Week and another as my first batch of pictures from China. Unfortunately, there seem to be some technical errors with them. With the China one, for instance, when you go inside it, you can see the thumbnails for all the pictures but when you click on one to magnify it you only get a blank box. You can see most of them in the slideshow, but for whatever reason you can't see the last seven. It's all very frustrating. I'll try to get it fixed but until then . . . here are some nice thumbnails for you to look at!

The Pic o' the Week will continue now that I'm relatively settled and blogging on a regular basis.

OK, time for bed. G'night!

Doodle Me This, Batman!

+08:00

You never quite realize how much you take something for granted until it's taken away. Let's say, for instance . . . literacy. Signs, books, directions--no problem! Yeah, well . . . move to China. Suddenly you're confronted with not letters, but doodles! Doodles everywhere! And you have no idea what anything means.

Enter: Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition

This tasty little book gives the definition, pronunciation, and stroke order diagram for each of the 3,000+ "frequently used" characters in China. That's right--3,000+. It recommends learning seven a day, as that's the rate of the average college student, I think is what it said. I dunno, works for me. So I've started doing that.

The Chinese writing system is based not on letters, but special characters called radicals. Sometimes these radicals are words in and of themselves, like 已 (yi3, "to twist"). Others are only used in combination with other radicals. "How many radicals are there?" you ask. Well lucky for you the Chinese simplified their characters in 1959, making it easier to learn. That means there are only 226 distinct radicals (and then a few "leftovers") to memorize. Yippee!

What's more, the logic behind the writing system is based on six different kinds of "meaning determinates." Depending on the character, you may be looking at a:

1) Picture - These characters are a pictorial representation of what they mean--though, due to the simplification process from 1959, many of the characters no longer look anything like what they are supposed to. It's like Pictionary but without the reference card!

2) Symbols - These happy characters are stand-ins for concepts.

3) Sound Loans - Sometimes characters look and sound exactly the same but have completely and totally different meanings. I guess the Chinese were running low on noises and pictures to make.

4) Sound-meaning Compounds - These two-part characters use one part for meaning and the other for sound. Similar to sound loans but more complicated!

5) Meaning-meaning Compounds - These characters combine two previously separate characters into one really complicated character and derive its meaning from what this doodle book insists is a kind of "logic." For instance, when you take 女 (nü3), which means "woman," and 子 (zi3), which means "child," and cram them together for 好, you logically get the character for (hao3) "to be well, good; to consider good, to like, to love." It's just so damned logical!

6) Reclarified Compounds - Sometimes Chinese gets a little carried away with loaning characters sounds or meanings or this or that from other characters and people start to get confused. That's when a nice and totally random scribe would step in and add things to characters to help distinguish them and control their meanings. In this way, you can get sound-meaning-meaning compounds--like cloning a clone. What could go wrong!

You'll be relieved to know that any character you see could derive its logical meaning from any of the six methods above--we wouldn't want things too get to easy now, would we? But enough praising the Chinese for their logical and easy-to-learn writing system. Let's get to the characters! I thought I'd share the ones I'm learning with you, so you could come along for the journey if you wanted to. I've already been at this for a while, so I'll only include the first weeks characters. Tomorrow I'll post the rest. Here we go:

一 - yi1 ("one")
丿 - pie3 ("left")
女 - nü3 ("woman/female")
人 - ren2 ("person/human being")
二 - er4 ("two")
三 - san3 ("three")
十 - shi2 ("ten")

jiong1 - ("borders") I couldn't type the character for this one because it never appears as an independent character, it's only a radical that modifies other characters. Doesn't mean you don't have to learn it though!
囗 - wei3 ("to surround")
力 - li4 ("strength")
男 - nan2 ("man/male")
丨 - shu4 ("downstroke")
ren2 - ("person") I couldn't make the character here either, because this is a side-radical--only used with others
已 - yi3 ("to twist")

[grass radical] - This one doesn't even have a pronunciation.
艺 - yi4 ("skill/art")
亿 - yi4 ("one hundred million")
xin1 - (side-heart radical)
忆 - yi4 ("to remember")
[back-turned stroke] - See [grass radical]
也 - ye3 ("also")

她 - ta1 ("she/her")
他 - ta1 ("he/him")
门 - men2 ("gate")
们 - men2 ([pluralizing suffix]) You tack this onto nouns to make them plural
手 - shou3 ("hand")
shou3 - (side-hand radical)
弋 - yi4 ("dart")

戈 - ge1 ("lance")
我 - wo3 ("I/me")
找 - zhao3 ("to visit/to look for/to make change")
亠 - tou2 ("lid")
mi4 - (crown radical, doesn't appear by itself)
小 - xiao3 ("small")
你 - ni3 ("you")

That's all thirty-five for the first week. And remember: That's more characters than English has letters--and you still won't be able to read any signs or any books after you learn them all.

Isn't Chinese fun?

Christina Is a Genius!

+08:00

I'm dating a crazy-super-hacker-nerd . . .

. . . or maybe that was a dream.

Regardless, Christina has found a way to get around the troublesome Chinese firewall: Hotspot Shield. The purpose of Hotspot Shield is to protect your computer while unsecured (or even secured) wireless networks via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Basically, it sets up a private little connection between me and the Hotspot hub, which, in turn, is connected to the intertubes. This protects my intertubing from any eavesdroppers that might want to know what I'm doing, as well as protecting passwords, bank accounts, etc.

It is, in a sense, my own private tunnel under the Great Firewall. See, the firewall doesn't monitor private networks, so as long as I'm hooked up to my VPN, the Chinese won't be monitoring what I'm doing. And as long as they aren't monitoring what I'm doing, they won't be blocking my searches because the firewall only blocks what it knows is in violation of its definition of "decent." If it doesn't know what something is, it doesn't bother with it.

Booyah.

So now I am able to see my blog. And Christina's. And anything else on the internet. Wee!

It just makes the Chinese firewall all the sillier. It took Christina an afternoon to figure out how to thwart it. Two minute download, seconds to install: open access to the internet. It begs the question of why they should even bother censoring the internet at all. Whatevs. I don't care anymore. The only price I have to pay is a slightly annoying bar across the top of pages I open that asks me if I want to invite any friends to the Anchor Free Hotspot Shield Network. Free and open access to the internet? That's a price I'll gladly pay.

Consumer Communism

+08:00

Well, Christina and I have spent almost two full weeks in Anyang and we're beginning to settle in nicely. We've certainly bought a whole bunch of stuff. Cleaning supplies, a shower curtain, pots, pans, and, well, a few DVDs. I already own The Dark Knight (thank you, Chinese DVD market) and the entire Planet Earth series (which, being legitimate, was a little more pricey. I wanna say it was . . . $10?). Robert, a foreign teacher from New Zealand showed us a nice little DVD shop where I could find just about anything I could want, so long as I have the patience to sift through the boxes. Alas, no Arrested Development or Battlestar Galactica. Yet.

Most of our shopping, however, has been done at a local hypermarket--that's right; it's not just super, it's hyper--named Dennis. Oh, Dennis, why do you treat us so well? There are a few advantages to going to Dennis for our needs. 1) It has a shit-load of stuff. Everything from books to clothes to food to dinnerware to bedding supplies. Puts Wal-Mart to shame. 2) The prices are fixed. See, here in China, they still employ the lost art of haggling. Christina and I suck at it. What's more, we can barely make out what anyone is saying to know what the price even is. I know we've been over-charged for things, but I've just been so relieved to understand anything that I pay whatever they first ask. But not at Dennis. True, its goods are a little expensive, but at least we know we're only getting a little ripped off. Not that getting ripped off is anything major here. Christina and I have fully stocked our apartment with all manner of consumer goods--just about everything besides the big furniture and a few appliances--and we did it for probably $230.

There are some drawbacks to shopping at Dennis, though. One is the people. If you happen to go there during a peak shopping period, there will be people everywhere. Packed in so close that bumping into people becomes a casual fact of life. Imagine a two-story Wal-Mart Supercenter absolutely crammed with people. Second, Christina and I remain a spectacle, and with all those people around, it guarantees that we will be approached by complete strangers who want to be our friends, get our telephone numbers, speak English with us, offer us gifts. It becomes quite surreal. During one trip in particular, I made the mistake of asking a Dennis employee where I might find undershirts. I tried to ask at least, as I don't know the word for "undershirt." By the time I had mimed what an undershirt was to the poor employee, twenty people had gathered in a semi-circle to watch the show. Then they all tried to help me at once--everyone doing or showing me a different thing. Christina fled.

We're learning the rhythms of the Chinese, though, and avoiding these types of places at their busiest times. We're also exploring our neighborhood more and more, especially now that we have bikes. There are shops everywhere. I love that aspect of it. I can take a quick walk up and down the block and come back with fresh vegetables, fried bread, and anything from one of four smaller supermarkets. I much prefer it to an American suburb, where your only option is to jump in your car and drive to the nearest shopping district.

It also brings to light the realities of the Chinese economic system. Ideologically, I suppose communism still has some meaning, but economically speaking it's all but dead. Anyang, at least, is a thriving den of capitalism. Oh well. So goes the revolution. Now if they could just chill out a little on this censorship thing . . .

The Great (Fire)Wall

+08:00

It's been some time since my last post and for that I apologize. I also have a pretty good excuse:

I blame China.

Firstly, our internet service seems to be a tad shaky. We lost the precious intertubes for about four days. At first we thought it might be a virus of some sort. Anyang Normal University gave us two computers and it seems that, along with the operating system and every bloated, add-on software they could find, they installed at least one virus to one of them. The other seems to work OK . . . except that everything is in the doodley characters and neither Christina nor I can read what they hell is going on on the screen. But we have our laptops.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for the Chinese intertubes. For whatever reason, we weren't getting a connection until, finally, the university sent for a repairman. He showed up, turned our computers on, and--lo, there was a connection! Before he even did anything. So, apparently, sometimes we just lose the internet. Awesome. Makes posting regularly real convenient.

Secondly--that wasn't enough for China, oh no. Secondly, I am unable to see my blog through the oh-so-wonderful firewall China has set up between me and information. I think the whole blogspirit service is blocked, or something. I don't know. All I know is that I can see the website's homepage, I can even log in and post (as illustrated now), but I can't actually see my blog or what I just posted.

I'm told there are ways to get around The Great Firewall, but I don't know them. I'll try googling how, but I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to see the sites that come up. I have a friend here, Adam (another foreign English teacher from Poland), who is very good with computers. He also has a blog and no trouble seeing it, so maybe he can help me out too. All else fails, I may need to create another blog on a different service. Because I can't very well change the look or content of a website I can't see.

Christina is also pissed. She can't even log in to her blog to post. It's all very annoying. Thankfully, mercifully, both the websites for The Daily Show and NPR come through the firewall, so I'm not wholly cut-off from the sites I love. Also, most wikipedia entries come through, they just take a whole long time to load.

Anywho, that's all for this post. Hopefully, I'll find a way around the firewall and upload some pictures soon.

Veni Vidi Visa

+08:00

Hello, again, from China.

Obviously, Christina and I made it here safely, but that is not to say the road was not bumpy. Oh no. <--a lot of negatives in those two sentences . . .

No, first we had to navigate the treacherous waters of bureaucracy. And not just any bureaucracy. Chinese bureaucracy. Paiyow. This was, naturally, back when we were still in the US. We had to go to Houston, because that is the only consulate in Texas (and Arkansas--but I'm getting ahead of myself).

We cut it a little close. Not our faults, though--it was the Olympics. The Chinese didn't want too many foreigners amongst them, so our departure date was delayed a month. Alright, fine. We only had to navigate Orbitz's bureaucracy to make them change our flights. Not so bad, what else you got? A hurricane? Oh . . . you . . . you have a hurricane . . . I did not know that.

Yes, the week Christina flew into Dallas, the week we decided to go to Houston, just happened to be the week that God (or maybe his Chinese Overlords) decided to send Ike our way. Awesome. Of all the fucking . . .

You know, when my mom told me that there was talk of evacuating Houston (on that Monday), somehow it didn't phase me. Of course there was a hurricane. I mean, it would have just been too easy any other way.

So I kept a close eye on the news. Luckily, the evacuation talk was set for Thursday or Friday. Christina was flying in Tuesday. We could leave Wednesday, turn in our visas, wait however many hours, and pick them up in the morning. We could still do it. This was made infinitely easier by my wonderful friends, Will and Kay, who were gracious enough to let us spend the night at their house. Kay was out of town, but I got to see Will, so that was fun.

So yes! We raced down to Houston and turned in our visa applications. While at the consulate Christina and I saw no less than three people leave in a fit of rage. The first was an American. We don't know what the problem was, but we did hear him when he began yelling at the Chinese bureaucrat behind the bulletproof glass, "I drove twelve hours to here from Arkansas! I drove twelve hours to here from Arkansas!" Alas, the Chinese man did not care. The other two were Chinese people. One looked to be in his early twenties. He was with what I assumed to be his girlfriend. Evidently, he did not appreciate the service he was receiving because he threw his pen down and started yelling. Until the security guard came over. Then he was escorted out. The other was a Chinese lady who didn't understand that when she got out of line to fill out an application, she couldn't just jump back to the head of the line. Add to this the fact that she was paranoid about losing her passports (she was applying for more than one person) and Christina and I got another bit of a show.

Things went smoothly for us. We filled out our applications, turned them in, and were stoked to get our visas the following day. We had to leave our passports with them overnight. That was something that was hard to surrender to the Chinese bureaucracy. But we did, and we spent a lovely evening with Will. The next day we found out that parts of the city were being evacuated at noon. Crappity crap-crap. The consulate closed for lunch at 11:30, didn't open again until 1:30. That would have been messy, so we set out to get everything done in the morning. We managed to get there--through traffic and with a bit of Starbucks to keep us awake--around 10:30. We found a parking spot. We got in line. We stood in line. We stood in line. We finally made it to the front at about . . . 11:05, I think. We gave the woman our receipt, she got out our passports, together with visa, and started to hand them to us when she said, "Three hundred dollars, please."

I'm sorry, what? Three hundred dollars? Good lord. But whatever, sure, here, do you take Visa?

"Cash only, please."

Yes, with what I will call a pun in very bad taste, the Chinese consulate did not take Visa. I actually got my wallet out and looked at it (knowing I only had sixty dollars) and was surprised when I did not find three hundred. I looked back at the consulate lady, smiling patiently. The phrase "We drove five hours from Mansfield!" bounced around my skull. Off to an ATM! Any ATM! Anything! We raced across Montrose. We found a Chase ATM--thank god! That's Christina's bank. We still have time! Except that it wouldn't process her card. Dammit. Will it--no, not mine either. Crap!

We raced again. What time was it? 11:15. Oh god . . . but then! Bank of America! We will pay the fee, just, please, give us money! Success! Back to the consulate! 11:20 and we were back in line. Waiting. Waiting only a few minutes. Finally we made it to the front at 11:25. Yes we do have three hundred dollars (in cash). The nice lady took that money and then she handed us our visas.

Relief . . . washes over us . . .

We got out of there with three minutes to spare. Thank you, Chinese bureaucracy. It took us another five or six hours to drive back to Mansfield (thank you, Ike) but we made it. And we were able to keep our already-changed plane tickets. Phew.

That, I feel, is the best word to describe working with any government: Phew.

An Alaskan Joke

+08:00

What's the difference between a vice presidential candidate and a pit bull?

The pit bull has a longer leash.