Pick-Up Lines

RIP - Flight 370

    The painting above is by a Uighur artist named Memetjan Abdullah.  He took part of a cultural exchange program recently, between China and Malaysia, titled "Chinese Dream : Red and Green Painting".

    When the show was over, Memetjan had the misfortune to board Flight 370 for the long trip back home to Beijing.  The flight that is still missing, but which pretty much certainly crashed into the South Indian Ocean.

    All too often, we think of airplane crash victims - especially foreign ones - as a group of nameless, faceless, featureless people for whom Kismet rolled an extremely unlucky Lot.

    But they're not an amorphous glump of humanity.  They were fathers, mothers, and in one case, a 5-year-old child.  They had loved ones who will grieve and die a little each day for the rest of their lives.  They had hopes, and they had dreams.  And for one Chinese/Uighur painter, a extremely promising artistic career  

Happy New Year!

    Chinese New Year, that is.  This is the Year of the Horse.

    The two years that I took Mandarin Chinese at the local community college, we always took a "field trip" to the nearby Chinese Cultural Center to soak up the festivities and celebrate this most important Chinese holiday period.  We were required to purchase or ask about something, but of course we had to use only Mandarin, and were graded (leniently) by our Chinese professor.

    It was fun times.  Most of the Mandarin vocabulary (and Chinese characters) have receded into my long-term memory cells.  But the culture we absorbed as a by-product of learning the language will stay with me forever.

Chopsticks in China

    Funny cartoon.  But the truth is, if you are going to spend any amount of time in China, you'd better learn how to use chopsticks.

    Most restaurants, excluding those at the fancy hotels, have no idea what knives, forks, and spoons are.  And even if you somehow communicate to them what they are, they don't have any.  And even if they do have any, they're dusty, dirty, and were sitting on a back shelf for months in less-than-hygenic condtions.

   I know.  I spent in week in China once.  And deeply regretted not being chopsticks-fluent.  OTOH, I think I lost 5-10 pounds during that week.

Xinnian Kuaile!

   

    Happy Chinese New Year, everyone!  Today, two weeks of celebrating commences.  It's the Year of the Dragon (hence the pic, above), and the Chinese year is 4710.

    The Phoenix Chinese Cultural Center is about a mile from where I work, and back when I was learning Mandarin at the local community college, we'd take a field trip each (new) year there to enjoy the festivities and soak up Chinese culture.  The only catch, of course, was that we had to do all our conversing in Mandarin, with our professor watching.  It was a blast, although I'm sure the Chinses merchants "forgave" a lot of errors on our part.

Why chopsticks?

    There's a lot of truth to this.  Some years back, I spent 10 days on a business trip in mainland China.  We were in the Hangzhou region, and on the road a lot.  The little restaurants we ate at did not have knives, forks, or spoons.  So I had to make do with chopsticks.

    I suck at using chopsticks.  I lost about 10 pounds on that trip.

Ni hao!

Wow! Steve Benson's calligraphy is much better than mine, unless he cut-&-pasted this. Which, given his artistic talent, I kinda doubt. Anyway, having studied Mandarin Chinese for two years a while back, I always enjoy posting something that has Chinese script in it. . FWIW, that really does say "China", and in Mandarin it's pronounced "Zhong Guo" (high tone, rising tone). And it's one of the few glyphs that I can still recognize.

Jobs that suck

Join the People's Army, and enjoy the perks year-round. .

LMAO

Because I just finished reading a book about the Korean War from the Chinese perspective.