I've been doing a lot of transcription on the computer lately, and my left elbow is starting to bother me again. I think I have to switch to paper transcription. If only there was handwriting recognition that recognized IPA! Computer technology just isn't "there" yet; we have to adapt ourselves to computers, when it really should be the other way around.
In the town I'm in (Mianning), there's been a particularly disturbing and/or hilarious sound change in their variety of Southwestern Mandarin, namely /ʂw/ > /f/, the result of which is that, e.g., 'drink water' is /xo⁵⁵ fei⁵⁵/ (喝水), and 'fun' is /xao⁵⁵ fa⁵⁵/ (好耍).
This sound change, as I hope all my Ling 130 students will recall, is a kind of fusion, since /f/ retains the manner of articulation from the fricative /ʂ/, and the labial place of articulation from /w/.
I confess... my guilty pleasure here is the National Geographic channel. (Actually, English-language TV in general, but the other two channels are movie channels and the movies are usually a family affair. Hot Fuzz is a great movie, by the way.) Last night I watched "Whitewater Kayak China". It was definitely superficial on the cultural commentary (one of the guys was even going to stay in China for a whole six months to learn "the language"), but it was definitely well-shot and the kayaking was pretty damn cool.
There is exactly one travel agency here, and I went there today to buy a plane ticket from Chengdu to Guangzhou. I was originally going to take an overnight train from Kunming, but my plans now require going back to Chengdu first, and a train from there to Guangzhou will take something like two days---too long to be trapped in a train in China, for me. So here I am at the single travel agency here, they tell me they have a ticket for 50% off, I say I want it, they ask for my ID, and I pull out my passport. Dear goodness, they say, what country is he from? (In such circumstances people always seem to prefer to ask the person I'm with where I'm from, even though I'm obviously capable of telling them myself.) I tell them. The boss says, normally we don't do business with Americans, but since you're Chinese (华裔), it's OK. (And one that can speak Putonghua, too, the woman working there adds.) He tells me that Bush is to blame for the high oil prices, along with all the war around the world. They don't do business with Americans or Japanese, he tells me. (They're anti-Japanese for WWII reasons... I've been kind of shocked at how many TV shows and movies here are about the Japanese invasion of China, which naturally vilify the Japanese. I'm also kind of surprised that the actors portraying the Japanese are actually speaking Japanese, though I can't tell if their accents are horrible or not.) I try to explain how the foreigners they meet here are just ordinary people, and remind him that pretty much half the people in the U.S. didn't even vote for Bush, and the woman helps out by saying yes, it's not like everyone's a political scientist. He says, but maybe it will send a message if people know that Americans are disliked even in a small, remote town like here. He goes on to bring up the March incidents in Tibet. Isn't it good that it's being developed, he asks rhetorically. He goes on to tell me, pretty much every foreigner here ends up reporting to our travel agency, since they have to buy train or plane tickets. I smile and nod.
We walk out of the travel agency, and the important thing is, I have my half-price plane ticket in hand.
Dude, when did Obama get the nomination? Dammit, I get no news here.
On the other hand, it's very beautiful here... (this is a 360-degree pan... if anyone knows how to clean up the boundaries i'd appreciate help!)
So now that I have a large-ish external hard drive (long story short: I bought one, the enclosure died on me, and then I had an adventure buying a new one in Beijing), I finally decided to try out the new Time Machine feature in 10.5. I have to admit, it's pretty slick. It always used to be such a chore to back up, and now all I have to do is plug in the hard drive and off it goes. I think it might have actually decreased my productivity, it's kind of amusing going in and seeing old versions of my hard disk.
Web cafes are kind of terrible here, if only because of all the smoke. Also, there are notices posted saying "no minors allowed", but I swear last time I witnessed a twelve year old kid committing both offenses: puffing away at a cigarette and surfing the web at the same time.
The TV is on pretty much all the time here. Today I had some TV time to myself, during which time I discovered the National Geographic Asia channel. To celebrate ten years of "Nat Geo in Asia", they were counting down the top 30 documentaries. The one I saw was about how bees are disappearing. CCD is what it's called--Colony Collapse Disorder. Basically a third of the food we eat and something like 70% of the plant life out there depends on bees for pollination (and thus reproduction), and for a variety of reasons bee populations in various countries including the U.S., France, and possibly England experienced massive decreases last winter (I assume they meant 2006-07?). Here in Sichuan, China, the town of Hanyuan has no bees at all because a couple decades ago they killed them all using pesticides. Hanyuan provides something like 80% of the pears in the region, and they way they do this, now that there are no bees, is by hand-pollination by humans. It's extremely labor-intensive, and unsustainable--with people increasingly moving to the cities nowadays hand-pollination probably won't be a viable option in ten or fifteen years.
In high school my online friends would joke about experiencing withdrawal after not logging on for a day or two... It's been almost a week for me, and I suppose I am experiencing somewhat severe withdrawal symptoms. At night I'll have dreams of easy internet access, like an ethernet jack in the hotel room ("Why didn't I notice that earlier?"). Or I'll dream that I'm talking to a housemate: "Since we don't have internet access at our house this summer, where are you going to go online?" And they'll say, "Oh, at my office." Then I'll think, of course, I can just go to my office for internet access. Then I wake up and realize my office is thousands of miles away.
Ran across this one this ad this morning on the campus of the Southwest University for Nationalities 西南民族大学. Using a video game metaphor, it says, 游戏开始了 / 你的生命正因此减少 "The game has begun. Your life is reduced because of this." Again, it's refreshing to see things like this, compared with the old man on the boat six years ago, who asked if I smoked. When I told him no, he told me, 你要学！ (You should learn!)
While eating 水饺 for dinner, I realized that I don't like expensive food. Twelve 水饺 with 白菜肉 filling (dumplings with meat and lettuce, I think... I think 白菜 in these parts is not the same as the bok choy we are normally familiar with) cost 3 kuai. Three kuai! And they were good! Of course, I am partial to delicious bits of meat and vegetables wrapped in a thin layer of dough, but still... Compare that to the 107-kuai hot pot (for two people), or juk 粥 for 97 kuai (for two people). I mean, sure, the juk was good, and the meat was tasty and whatever, but was it 20 times as good??? I don't think so.
Here's a sign, bilingual in Tibetan and Chinese, advertising new phone numbers:
ཁ་པར་ཨང་གྲངས་གསར་པ་བཙོང་རྒྱུ་ཡོད།
手机新号
Amazingly I can actually read the whole sign, which generally isn't true of the Tibetan signs around here. Although, around here it's not that important since everything's in Chinese, too. It says "new phone numbers for sale". (In Chinese, it says "new cell phone numbers".)
Please take the initiative for being old, weak, ill, incomplete, pregnant and offering one's seat.
Today I had lunch with some friends at this Shambhala Tibetan Restaurant ཤམ་བྷ་ལའི་བོད་ཟས། in the 武侯祠 district. We had tibetan tea and yogurt and groma གྲོ་མ་ (a beany kind of root, 人生果 in Chinese) and momos.
I'm staying at Holly's Hostel, whose primary selling point is that it's located right in the Tibetan district. So it was kind of infuriating to see scrawled on the "expression wall" on the third floor (where guests can write in crayon things like "I had a great time" or "greetings from Greece")---written there at least three times, in English---the sentence "Tibet was, is, and will always be a part of China." I actually saw this in Beijing on the back of someone's shirt, where the front said "I HEART China", where the heart was in the theme of the mainland Chinese flag (red background, yellow stars). Most of the time these shirts are otherwise innocuous, with, say, the Olympic logo on the back. I-heart-china shirts are very popular here. But the first one I saw was the one with the Tibet message on the back, which rather shocked me.
WHAT'S THE POINT of having separate "smoking rooms" in between the trains if all the windows are closed and all the smoke wafts back into the cabins anyway?????????
Here's a parked car, located conveniently next to a sign on the sidewalk that says "Parking is Forbidden".
I know I've seen this on the web before, since it's located in the foreigner-heavy district of Cháoyáng 朝阳, specifically Jiànwài 建外 (short for 建国门外, outside the Jiànguó Gate). It's still hilarious, though.
The magnitude of the Beijing West Train Station is not done justice by this photo, which only catches the middle of it. There are 38 or so ticket counters on the first floor, which you have to x-ray your bags to even get into. Counter number 1 promises an English-speaking clerk, and the last counter sells 1-kuai tickets to people who want to enter the platform area to say goodbye to their loved ones. The second floor has the waiting areas for the train, along with various eating establishments ranging from cheap to McDonald's. It's like an airport but for trains, and the bathrooms (which say "no smoking" but people smoke in there anyway) are more disgusting than the ones in the airport.
I've been somewhat pleasantly surprised by various things in Beijing. One interesting thing was this reusable shopping bag. The lettering says 'For a caring life / 环保"袋"回家', (environmental "bag" it home, where "bag" dài is a pun on 'bring'). So even though the streets and rivers are filled with trash, there is a growing awareness that that might be bad.
