The 粥店 part means they serve jook, etc. (the etc. part being noodles). The 茶餐廳 part means they serve milk tea (奶茶) and other drinks, and Hong Kong-style breakfast (A餐 B餐, etc.). Before you go, brush up on your Chinese---I didn't see any English menus.

Wikipedia on 茶餐廳:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_chaan_teng

and the Cantonese version:

http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/茶餐廳

"冇啊," she said. "有嗰陣時又冇人要。" ("No, and when we do no one wants them.")

I laughed. I guess the preference for light paper bills over annoying, heavy coins is universal (note the reluctance of people in the U.S. to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin).

OK, here's the answer: 四川省互惠商业有限责任公司. I found it on the side of a package of toilet paper, right about the time one of the ladies in the store walked over to me and said, sir, you can't take pictures here.

Peh! This does not make me want to visit other museums in southwest China.

I found the collections to be rather sparse and superficial. I suppose it was, perhaps, worth the 10 kuai student admission (about USD 1.50---I actually had a conversation with myself to convince myself that it would be worth that much to take a look even if it sucked), and their "ethnicities" section dutifully displayed artifacts and clothing from Tibetans, Qiang, Miao, Naxi, and Yi, but it hardly does justice to the complex ethnographic and linguistic make-up of southwest China. The language that I'm studying, for example, is not even mentioned (since it's subsumed under the general category of "Tibetan", even though the language isn't Tibetan at all). The English descriptions posted on the walls were passable at times, and utterly nonsensical at others.

There's a kind of interesting archaeology section in the basement, but it too is superficial. It briefly introduces various archaeological sites that have been excavated in Sichuan, displays some artifacts from them, and shows you the innards of a scaled-down model kiln. I still have no idea how a kiln actually works. (Maybe you stick bricks in one end, and plates and bowls come out the other...) But there's so much more they could have said. What was significant about these discoveries? How did they change our understanding of history and pre-history? How does modern development, e.g., the building of the Three Gorges Dam, affect archaeological excavation? For the ethnography section, which groups have become more Sinicized, and which groups have maintained their own language and culture? How are people dealing with the loss of language and culture in the face of Han expansion? Are there efforts being made to preserve or at least document these cultures? None of these questions are addressed in the museum exhibits.

I expect the party line in tourist brochures and web sites. But from a museum affiliated with an academic institution, I expect better.

(To be fair, the shadow puppets were pretty damn cool.)

There is a brief moment of levity at every bus stop in Chengdu, when the name of the stop is announced (prerecorded) in both Mandarin and English. The English version is the following: "Now. [insert name of stop in Mandarin here]."

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/.

We walk out of the travel agency, and the important thing is, I have my half-price plane ticket in hand.