"A Way With Words"

One of my favorite "feels like being back home" things to do is listen to podcasts of my favorite NPR shows and "A Way with Words" is at the top of the list. Some of you may know it. Recently Greg the quiz guy challenged Martha and Grant to play a little game: he had taken the words to a few well-known Nursery Rhymes and "Babel-ed" them. That is to say he put them into the Babelfish.com translator and took them from English to a foreign language, back to English, then to a second foreign language and back again, sometimes adding a third generation of translations, and Martha and Grant had to identify the original rhyme. The result was hilarious and I am proud to say I was able to name each and every one even before Martha and Grant did! My Chinglish exposure has taught me well. 
It is so hard for me to believe a year has passed but today we celebrate the first anniversary of our arrival as a family in Shanghai. As such I thought it would be a good time to share some of the more entertaining Chinglish examples I have come across in the last few months.   


Hanting Hotels are a local chain. We pass one on a certain route that we often take and it has this sign above it:

I was excited when the grocery store where we frequently shop advertised that it would be hosting a wine fair. This is the sign it posted with the schedule:

I've seen the following sign near a few ponds now:

Since it makes no sense to me I decided to play a little game of my own. I put "no dabbling" into Google Translator, took the resulting Chinese and reverse translated it to see if I would get something relative to water or entering or swimming: "Not involved". Maybe not.

I found this one in a menu while lunching with a friend:

Evil, Evian, maybe this translation is actually on target! (But come on, when all you need to do is copy what the label says into your menu, is there really an excuse for being so far off the mark??)

This one is on all of the fire doors in Heinz's office building. 

It makes me giggle because my first thought was that it was like a movie spoiler and my goofy mind imagined a bunch of zombies on the other side of the door waiting to grab us if we went through!

These signs identify which department you have wandered into in our local super store:

In case you are confused about what you will find in this department, (ignoring the stationary vs. stationery issue...) they have conveniently labeled some of the merchandise: 

This sign is posted at a playground where we sometimes play:

Apparently number 3 was so important that they had to list it twice. It didn't make sense the first time so it's not any more helpful the second!

I think my biggest fear is that some day these things are going to start looking normal to me. That will be the point at which I will KNOW we have been here too long... We're off and running into year number two. Will you join us?

Happy 'Harroreen'

In the end the kids had a more traditional experience for Halloween even than we might have gotten on our street back home! (Here Conrad models the mask selection at the local superstore) Our neighborhood really got into it with the previously mentioned pumpkin carving party the weekend before and we organized ourselves to do a Saturday night trick-or-treat. I would estimate that about 60 of the 100 houses in our compound participated, mostly the Americans and Brits but a few of the Europeans also got into it and even one or two of the local Chinese households (as opposed to repatriated Chinese Americans-they get lumped in with the Americans).
We went trick-or-treating with our friends and ironically, completely by accident, the boys were both Spiderman (luckily Conrad let his evil side show by choosing the 'dark' side of Spidey, with his matching rain boots!) and both girls were dragon/dinosaurs! (Although we couldn't get either one to put their "head" on)

It rained a little but at least we didn't have to wear winter coats!

The candy selection was interesting to see. There wasn't a lot of chocolate handed out (better that way, maybe that will keep me out of their stash!) probably because chocolate can be quite expensive over here. Mostly people gave out gummy candies and hard candies or lollipops. We were out for about an hour and then headed home to drop the treat bags and head to the neighborhood block party.

Dark-side Spidey takes a load off, shows us his boots and has a ciggie. (It's just a lollie but doesn't it look like a smoke?)

Then he thanks his guns for helping haul in his major stash!

It wasn't until the following morning that I got a good look at what was in the kids' bags. For the most part since it was almost all westerners participating I found that it was pretty normal stuff. Some of the flavors were a little unexpected, lychee or mango lollies, (but thank goodness no durian!) and then I found this:

Yes, look closely: that is a corn-flavored lollipop. After my initial shock wore off I thought "Hey, maybe it'll taste like Sugar Corn Pops, my all-time favorite cereal!" But no, it simply, amazingly, tastes like an ear of boiled corn. I guess it's not altogether surprising since many Asian desserts consist of a rice base topped with corn and red beans. (I was surprised not to find any red bean or green tea-flavored treats but again, this was the westerners handing it all out.) So I guess it's meant to be paired with this lollipop:

In the end I'm left to wonder:  Candy - trick or treat?



SOME things ARE simpler in China

So I'm at that point where I need to replace my running shoes. I started asking around, "Where do you buy your running shoes here?" Apparently everyone has suitcases that are way bigger than mine because they all looked at me as if I were a complete idiot and said "I stock up when I go back home". Hmmm. There just are not any stores that serve serious runners here. Well, I could go on and on about how difficult it can be to find the simplest things in China, (and truly the irony is that they are all MADE here, so why can't we just buy them here???) but I will spare you the whine-fest. However the challenge remains: find my brand, find my style and find my size.

I'm a Mizuno girl, not the most widely stocked brand even in the States so I was starting to get a little antsy. Lucky for me there is a (as in only one, in a city of 20 million, but hey, that's all I need, right?) Mizuno store and it's even on our side of the river. One down. I managed a Saturday afternoon to myself and headed out to check out what they had. Not my favorite style, but at least they have other acceptable alternatives. Two down, sort of. Probably more like 1 1/2 down. One to go. I wear a 9 running shoe, a very common size in the States. It converts to a 40 or 41 European, depending on the shoe and as a whole, most Chinese stores do not stock above a 39. Sure enough that is the case here. Okay, so I decide that I am willing to try a men's shoe (I'd rather try my luck with a shoe of the brand I love and trust, rather than start experimenting with a different brand, in a situation where it is probably impossible to find a salesperson that can tell me anything at all about the shoes in their store.) In my head I am trying to remember back to my days in the Herman's shoe department: a 9 women's US equals what in men's? I turned to the sales guy (who thankfully spoke pretty good English) and asked him "what is the men's equivalent of a women's 40?" As soon as I asked it, I realized what a silly question that was! And I really had to chuckle both at myself and the look on his face. It said "I understand your words but they are making no sense to me." (I think it is the face that I permanently wear with my mother-in-law these days!) A 40 is a 40 is a 40! How simple!

So maybe I'm taking a pretty big risk by trying a men's shoe, but the sad fact is that I need to replace my shoes 3 training runs ago so I feel like I have no choice. I'm still not enough of a runner to understand when my shoes are dead until they are DEAD and I now only have 4 weeks until my race. It could be worse, last year with our move home from Malaysia I was so out of touch with my equipment that I ended up replacing my shoes one week before the Monumental Half! I was so scared that I had ruined my chances for a good race but then I beat my goal time by over a minute. So maybe my new training strategy will be to use my shoes to the point where using them feels like I am running with boards strapped to my feet, only then buy new ones and fly like the wind! Yeah, you're right: probably not such a good idea! I'm off to give the new ones a try. Wish me luck and Happy Running!