The Guizhou Girl sent me a message . Her little sister's in town, can I show her around? Well, sure, GG showed me around Guizhou, it seems an obligation. Then another message. Can you take her to the Great Wall tomorrow? Wow, not much time to arrange that. Then, after 10 pm, oh, she'll have two other girls with her. ...........
Ok, seems like today I'll be figuring out how to get 3 -10 year olds to the Great Wall and back. It should, at least, be interesting.

If there aren't any posts here for several days y'all might want to send rescue.

If I survive it I've promised to post pics.


Well, I survived. It was fun  There were only 2 students when I got to their school, so I had two little girls to take to the Great Wall. We took a tour bus, which went to the Ming Tombs and some museums as well as the wall.

The girls were well-behaved and seemed to like their trip. I had a good time too, since I haven't done anything with kids that age since my own daughter was 10.

People's reactions were interesting. Lots of people asked if we were together. One woman at a subway station came up and asked the girls why they were wandering around alone. I was standing right beside them at the time, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with flowers on it. The kids and I assured the woman that we were fine. The girls just said I was their uncle, "Fufu" in their dialect, "shushu" in Putonghua. That was fine with me.  So I was Fufu for the day. People treated us very nicely, many were apparently amused by the foreigner with two little chinese girls.

Not a bad day at all. I have pics.

The weekend was busy, I got sidetracked from memories. 

I had an 'incident' on the subway that got me thinking about cultural differences again.  I was standing in a fairly uncrowded subway car, ( only a few people standing).  Someone got up, and I motioned for the lady beside me to sit. She instead said that I should sit. We did the Alphonse-Gaston routine for awhile, then I gave up and sat down.  Then I realized that the guy sitting next to me had his girlfriend standing in front of him. He had his hands on her waist anyway.  In the US, I'd expect a guy with his girlfriend to insist that she sit.  Looking around, it seemed opposite to what I'd expect in the US.  Kids sit, older people stand. Men sit, women stand. The opposite of what I'd expect in the US.

There was an exception, an elderly lady got on the car and a young man stood up and gave her his seat. No difference there.

There are other differences, on the New York City subway people push and bump into each other, but the Beijing subway gets ridiculous. People stand in front of the door and when it's open try to shove their way in, pushing the people who are trying to get out back in the subway. The 'act civilized on the subway' campaign is helping, but it still gets annoying at times. I keep thinking that on the NYC subway fights would start.

A big difference is traffic. People often talk about how bad Beijing traffic is, but I regularly ride a bike all over the city. I rarely feel that I'm in much danger, as long as I look around me. Riding a bike around Southern California got downright dangerous.
That includes the fact that I've been hit by cars twice now in Beijing. The first time I came into an access road from a side street and a car came into it from the main street. We both braked but ended up with my front tire banging into his bumper. Not serious at all, we waved, untangled and took off. The second time I was in a crosswalk with a green light and a car drove right into the crosswalk and I just managed to vault his fender to clear the car. Fear makes us all atheletes. That guy should drive in NYC. 
My point being that Beijing drivers don't seem to follow traffic rules well(or at all)  but there don't seem to be a lot of serious accidents. LA drivers do usually follow the rules ( except for speeding) but there are a lot of serious accidents. I don't think traffic density accounts for it either. LA has lots more cars and higher speeds, but Beijing has bicycles, tricycles, scooters, pedestrians, delivery trucks, mule wagons and about anything else that moves.

Another traffic quirk that I've noticed is that everyone - pedestrians, bicycleists, cars, buses, - all try to pass in front of other traffic. This can be a problem for me as I'm used to traffic often slowing slightly to pass behind other traffic.

More on culture differences I've noticed later.

It's cool outside, like autumn is here already.  It's my favorite time of year in Beijing.  Warm, clear days and cool nights. The kind of weather where you can be outside without heatstroke or frostbite. I.e. summer or winter in Beijing! 

Wandering around Beijing during the summer got the memories flowing. It's funny what pops up when my mind isn't otherwise occupied. Some things that surfaced -

Standing in Times Square in NYC at midnight, watching snow fall. Times Square is usually noisy and crowded, but at midnight it was relatively peaceful and the snow muffled sound.
I was in NYC for a software upgrade at the world's largest bank. Upgrades tend to be stressful since you need to do them quickly so as not to keep an expensive system down for long, but you also have to do it accurately - can't leave the client with lots of problems. Hence I'd been in an office from dawn til after dusk. The unexpected snowfall brought me from the subway station out into the Square, just to stand and watch.

another -
Watching the sun set behind the Adriatic islands west of  Zadar, in Croatia. Again I was there for a software project for a bank. This project was poorly (un?) planned, so again stressful. I walked out across the cathedral square, across the old Roman forum, to the seaside park to watch the sun set. Really beautiful.


The New Years celebration in the city square in front of the government building in Manchester, UK.  It was cold and rainy ( of course) but the fireworks were bright and loud and the crowd was happy and lively.  

Remembering the valley of the Mei river in GuiZhou as I stood in a tea plantation on a mountainside and looked across the valley. Small town, winding river, high mountains on the other side. One of the few days in Meitan when it wasn't raining. It looked like one of the old landscape paintings.

Out of time. Gotta run.
more later

Dancing Girls' blog entry about being a translator got me to remembering the days when I was a translator. Her job seems nice. I remember things like :

Riding in an ambulance at five o'clock in the morning with a woman having a baby. The attendants kept yelling instructions for me to translate for her - guess what guys, I was a diplomatic/military interpreter, that doesn't include vocabulary for talking about delivering infants. 

The Military Police called for an interpreter. I walked up and found a really beautiful Vietnamese girl. Too bad I don't speak Vietnamese. But she was really nice! I had to take french in high school; hmmm "Parlez-vouse francais, madamoiselle?"  heh, interpreters have to be resourceful.

Another interpreter and I meeting some Hare Krishna's in an airport. They wanted to sell us one of their books that had Sanskrit writing in it. He pretended not to speak English, I acted as 'interpreter'.  He looked at their book, got angry, started saying things to them in Khmer. I told them that he said their book was heresy.( he was really saying "let's have fun with these idiots".)  They were shocked, but did ask why a Cambodian had blonde hair and blue eyes. I told them it was really offensive to bring up 'irregularities' in someone's ancestry. We kept it up until we couldn't think up more outrageous things to say to them.
We laughed all the way down the concourse.

Walked into a Cambodian restaurant. In Khmer asked the waiter if they had a kind of noodles. Got a fierce stare, he threw a menu on the table and pointed. I nodded, he turned and walked away. I wondered if I should run for the door before I had to fight my way out. The waiter comes back, smiles, says " Sorry I was rude, I never heard a white person speak my language before, I was really surprised". I got great service after that.

I was at the airport to meet someone described as a Buddhist Monk. The guy who got off the plane had all his hair, was fashionably dressed, and had a nice-looking young lady holding his arm. Ok, maybe some Buddhist sect I never heard of. (I want to join though)
Went up to him, said (in Khmer)  "Sir, I'm here to greet you and accompany you to your destination".  He says " No speak English". Hunh!!??  "Sir, I'm an interpreter here to meet you".  He looks annoyed and says loudly " NO SPEAK ENGLISH".  Hmmmm "Sir I"m not speaking English".  Blank stare.  Then his wife (as I soon found out) started tugging his arm. He looked at her and she told him "He's not speaking English, he's speaking Khmer!".  Things got better after that.
Turned out he was a Buddhist scholar, but not a monk. .

Some time later, in school, I was puzzling over an amplifier circuit schematic. One of the Vietnamese students came over and started explaining it in Khmer!  Never expected that. I understood the circuit after he explained. Foreign languages can be useful.

Being an interpreter wasn't all odd situations, but the humor helped. I spent a lot of time working with customs or immigration, and eventually got pretty good with medical terms because I spent a good bit of time in hospitals interpreting for doctors.

It was an interesting job and I think learning to speak in a language very different from your native language teaches you different ways to think.  Now that I'm learning  the  PuTongHua  I sure seem to think differently.

More stories later.

Dog days is what they used to call this time of year back in Georgia. I don't really know why. It does seem appropriate though.

I've gotten moved (finally) and mostly settled in.  The new place is off  中关村南路　(South Zhong Guan Cun Road).  It's pretty convenient, easy range of Wu Dao Kou and still near Central.  Looks like I'll be at Central another year, which isn't bad because I like it there.

Didn't get into extensive travel, just short trips out from Beijing. Lots of personal stuff kept cropping up and confusing the plans.  I went down to the RR office a couple of times, looking at places, times and prices, and decided I wasn't in the mood for riding trains all summer. Been there done that.  It's not bad, though, there are some surprisingly nice places kind of hidden in the clutter of big tourist places. Also I lined up tutors, studied Chinese and bicycled around Beijing. It's interesting how many places aren't all that far away by bike. I get to meet lots of people and talk about lots of things.

My speaking ability is improving but is still frustratingly inept. Sometimes really simple things confound me.  It's all part of the  deal, I guess.

The cool thing is that every day becomes an adventure. Many people want to talk to a foreigner, so just saying a few things will start a conversation. I try to be careful with pronounciation, don't want to directed to a barber shop when I want to buy a goldfish.

I met a Cambodian student at Central, so I've been practicing the Khmer a little too. It's interesting because I've forgotten a lot, but I can nearly always understand him. I just can't remember what to say for an answer. Conversations between us must sound strange to an outsider, because we both switch between Cambodian, English and Chinese as we don't know words or just get confused. The languages aren't related to each other, so grammar, syntax and pronounciation are different for all of them. An experience.

J. set me up in a singles meeting last week. I sat with a beautiful girl and instead of talking my way into a date talked my way into a job interview. Hmmmm.   Priorities, right?   

Better knock this off, getting late and I got a class I want to get to in the morning.
Y'all come back now, hear?