Cultural detritus

I've been back for about 10 days and am only now catching up on all the cultural detritus and news that I missed in September, thanks in part to my friends. For example:

• the South African world-champion hurdler who opponents alleged wasn't really a woman might actually be intersex
• Serena Williams loses her shit at a linesman, threatening to "shove this [expletive] ball down your [expletive] throat" at the U.S. Open and loses her semi-final match when penalized for it
• the A.V. Club taste tested the KFC Double Down burger!
  

It itches! It itches!

a.k.a., fun with language

In China we were lucky enough to go to a hot springs resort (off season=good deals) that featured a series of hot spring pools that you could immerse yourself in. There was a ginseng pool, a mint pool, an ice pool, etc. One of the pools contained little carvnivorous turkey fish that would nibble on you while you sat there. When I first put my feet in, the fish rushed for my toes and started biting. The bites weren't painful (my cousin Jim referred to them as little fishy kisses) so much as ticklish and I started giggling. Jim kept asking me, in Cantonese, whether it itched. I kept saying no, since I was laughing, not scratching.

Turns out that in Mandarin, the way to ask if something tickles is to ask if it's itchy because there is no word for ticklish in Mandarin. In Cantonese, the dialect that my family and I speak (some of us better than others), there is a word for the verb "to tickle" and a term for "ticklish", which roughly translates to "flesh/meat sour". The Canadian cousins in turn taught Jim the adjective "ticklish", which he duly wrote down.

I did eventually lower my entire body, up to my neck, into the fish pool. The full immersion experience was not ticklish, just neat. The fish seemed to like me; one kept nibbling at my belly button.

China in Numbers

Cities (Towns) visited: 14

Tour buses: 7

Tour guides: 6

Hotels: 11

Flights: 6 (They serve congee for breakfast on Chinese airlines!)

Boats: 3

Hot Pot Dinners: 3

Times I squatted: 6 (I tried to avoid them so yes, I'm able to count the number of times.)

Trough style potty: 0! (Thank goodness! I never encountered one first-hand, but my mom, aunt and cousin did. When you have to go...)

Update - Finally compiled all my photos. Between my two cameras;
Photos taken: 3500

Random things about China

[I sent this to blogger on Sept. 21, but it never got posted, so here it is again]

1. KFC is the most popular fast food restaurant. There are apparently many factors for this, including good training of staff, consistency at all the franchises, and a different recipe suited to the Chinese palate. I have not yet gotten up the nerve to eat KFC in China, though I have eaten pig intestine.

2. I have been obsessed with an ad that I saw on a bus stop in Beijing that was promoting some kind of shrimp sandwich. The ad featured a picture of the sandwich, but also a picture of a row of people dressed in shrimp costumes (complete with the shrimp heads), lined up in a row (see below). We've always had a tour bus, which means that I've only been able to take photos of the ad on the fly, if I happen to have my camera ready. I finally got a semi-decent shot in Shanghai, and wouldn't you know it, it was for a sandwich at KFC.



3. The babies in the cities that we've visited wear pants with slits in the front and at the back. They do not wear diapers. The slits are to facilitate going to the bathroom. And rather than finding a bathroom, their parents let them do their business on the street. I have seen two toddlers squat and pee on the streets of Shanghai, leaving little puddles behind. And we're not talking narrow side streets; it was on the major Nanjing shopping street.

4. No sales tax. The price you see is the price you'd expect to pay. However, at many places you're expected to haggle. I don't know enough Mandarin to do it verbally, but every shop has a calculator to use for negotiations.

5. Related to #4. I bought a pair of shoes for 40 Chinese yuan that were originally 120 yuan. That works out to about $7 Cdn.

6. What I thought were expiry dates on the bottles of water and juice are actually production dates. Which is good, because it didn't make sense that every bottle of flavoured iced tea that I looked at was past its expiry date.

7. There are a lot of different regional cuisines in China. This does not really surprise me. What did surprise me was how little I liked them. I've found a lot of the food too greasy, fatty, or salty. This could be due to being a tour group and therefore getting set meals designed for tourists, which is a bit dissapointing.

8. The Sofitel hotel in the financial district of Shanghai charges 10 yuan to print one page at its business centre.

9. The number nine is considered lucky in Chinese culture because it sounds like the word for longevity. So this past September 9, 2009 (i.e., 9/9/9) was a popular day for weddings.

10. I will not miss the public horking. Or the expelling of phelgm through the nose onto the sidewalk, which we saw a man do our first night in Beijing.

11. When taking photos, the Chinese don't say "cheese", but rather, "eggplant", which in Mandarin makes a similar long e sound to elicit a smile.

Hong Kong: Thoughts

1. HK is shopping. Everywhere you look there's a shopping mall. There are shopping malls at the bottom of office buildings. There's shopping in Metro stations. There are little shops in every street. There's a huge shopping mall at Victoria Peak. You could easily spend days shopping in Hong Kong at grimy little stores to high end designer shops like Louis Vuitton and Coach. The consumerism got to me quite early. Having already shopped myself out in Guangzhou, I found it difficult to reconcile wanting to see Hong Kong with the fact that sightseeing entailed seeing a lot of malls.

2. No more squat toilets. Save for one, at the vegetarian restaurant at the Big Buddha.

3. Hong Kong feels a lot like the UK, which is not a surprise, considering its colonial history. The streets have names like Edinburgh Place and Coombe Street, people drive on the left side of the road, a friendly woman's voice in the Metro reminds you to "mind the gap", and the Metro has an Octopus card, which works the same as London's Oyster card.

4. In Guangzhou, I found that many people still spoke to me in Mandarin even though Guangzhou is the largest city in Guangdong (formerly Canton) province, where Cantonese is dominant. Chalk it up to Mandarin being the state-sanctioned national language. In Hong Kong, however, everyone speaks Cantonese, and I find that I can get by much better. I usually speak a mixture of English and Cantonese to my sister and cousins, and most people assume that we're from Malaysia or Singapore because of that mix.

5. Crossing the border from China to Hong Kong entails more bureaucracy than I assumed it would. We had to fill out health report forms, submit our China exit cards, and fill out Hong Kong immigration cards. It really was like entering another country, even though the handover was over 10 years ago. One country, my ass.

6. I've been wanting to go to Hong Kong for a long time, but lately I've been wanting to see it specifically because of the movie Chungking Express, which I consider in a new light now that I've been to Hong Kong. The escalators, the rampant consumerism (of products and food), and the camera's point of view of the city—all these things as they are represented in the movie are very Hong Kong. It's difficult to get a full geographic view of the city, as it's spread out across several (?) islands and is very hilly. Even the view from Victoria's Peak was incomplete.

7. Starbucks is expensive in China and HK, but the quality control is excellent and I don't know what I would have done without it, especially in HK where we decided to forgo paying for the breakfast buffet in the hotel and forage for ourselves instead.

7a. I had just ordered a coffee at a Starbucks in the Central Metro Station in HK. The white man after me asked, with a heavy German accent, for beer. He ended up buying a bottle of water instead.

Accents, language

Very few people in China ever guessed that my cousins, sister and I were Canadian based on our accents in Chinese and in English. Some of our tour guides, knowing that an English-language guide had been requested, assumed we were American. The concierge at our hotel in Beijing was surprised that my cousins Lisa could not speak Mandarin even though she's Chinese. A change room attendant in Huizhou complimented my sister on her Mandarin. My cousin asked us what the difference was between Canadian and American accents. In Hong Kong, where English is more prevalent, people often guessed or assumed that we were from Singapore or Malaysia because we would mix our Cantonese and English when talking to each other. The only people who knew that we were Canadian based on our accent was an Austrailian couple who shared a cable car with us at the Big Buddha in Hong Kong. When I asked why they didn't guess American, the guy said that he knew right away, that he could tell. I'll admit that while Austrailian was my first guess for their accent, I stopped to wonder whether they were from New Zealand.

There were also times when Chinese accents got the best of my parents, especially in more rural regions where the accents are thicker. We also struggled with Chinese-accented English, which can be difficult to work around. When one of our tour guides talked to us about our itinerary one day, my cousin Lisa kept wondering what was so special about this "iron pot" that we were going to see before leaving. It turns out the guide was trying to say "airport".