In the comments, please explain why "Inception" was such an amazing movie.

I watched this movie on the airplane over here and was like, 'okay... for three months I managed to avoid hearing/reading anything about a movie that was super straightforward and not at all psychologically thrilling...'
So I'm pretty sure I'm missing something. Can anyone fill me in?

Car horns were invented for Chinese drivers

 An okay photo of  the traffic a typical intersection in China. It is usually much messier than this :) .

Scott gave me an entertaining book for Christmas, Lost on Planet China, by J. Maarten Troost. [Thanks, Scott!!] I like how he describes the ridiculously constant blaring in the streets.

"Chinese drivers, I was discovering, speak with their horns. They blast it when they're about to pass someone. They blast it while they're passing. They blast it when they're done passing. Then they blast it some more just because."

It gets old, fast.

♪ In the Ghe-tto ♫

Ramshackle, neglected, densely-packed housing is a fact of urban booms (Cabrini-Green, what-what!), and for the first time in my privileged life, I'm experiencing it for myself! Here's the view from my apartment:

It looks way worse than it is. I have a strong water heater, a Western toilet, a room heater, a large bed free of bed bugs, consistent electricity, a considerable freezer, and a neighbor's insecure internet connexion to leech off of. And if the weather gets hot this summer, the draftiness is going to rock!! Also, see the white building with the orange stripes peeking through on the upper left? That's one of the school buildings- I'm wicked close!

In related news:

Adventures in Chinglish

Found on my supervisor's computer.

Woot! Chinese Candy!

Silly China! Vegetables aren't candy flavors!

Seriously though, red bean is a common enough flavor on the West Coast so no surprises there. [I'll eat it, but only really enjoy it in isolated treats.] But the corn-flavored candy? Has anyone ever seen that? It tastes just like you'd expect: sweet corn. Not at all my cup of tea.

When there are 1 billion people in your country...

...health standards appear to be the least of your concerns. I'm surprisingly okay with it- I mean, it's not like I have a choice right? On the other hand, here are some unhygienic oddities for your entertainment:


Water in public places is served hot because it has to be boiled before it can be consumed. (Bud, you think you dislike the taste of the water at Ma's house? I can literally taste dirt in the clear sink water I use to rinse after brushing my teeth.)

By Chinese custom, the school's department heads took me out to dinner on Tuesday. My supervisor had to use the restroom before we walked home. One of the waitresses was washing utensils in the public restroom...

I guess just rinsing produce is not good enough to sanitize it, because all the dish soap bottles have some variation of this suggestion:

"You obviously haven't tasted my Palmolive potatoes!"

I attended a Christmas Eve celebration put on by the local, private language school, and look what drew its last breath on my delicious pancake-bread-treat:

[sigh] I just pulled off the top layer and continued eating

Merry Christmas!

Chopsticks

Dear fork, I loooove you and am counting the days until I'll have the privilege of using you again.
Tonight, out of necessity, I managed to eat dinner with chopsticks. And not even the awesome tweezer kind that Christel gave me either. Real chopsticks! I do not appreciate them in the slightest. They make dining kind of a tedious task, and are not conducive to Western table manners.

Reading Chinese is not super difficult, but understanding it can be!

I bought what turned out to be a very excellent book with basic characters for travelers, I Can Read That. By the time I got off the plane, I could recognize several basic, common characters, some even out of context! But because of the compound nature of many Chinese terms, actually understanding a line of characters sometimes takes greater creative interpretation abilities than I possess. See if you can figure out what these two mean:

1. public use electric voice

2. prohibited peace times exit



Sidenote, Wikipedia has an entry for Chinglish :) .