Reverse Culture Shock III: Going to an American Movie Theater

I got another bit of reverse culture shock a couple of days ago which has definitley made me miss one aspect of movie-watching in China. This happened when I went to see Kevin Smith’s new film, “Zack and Miri make a Porno.” As usual, I got to the River View Shopping Mall’s Edwards Multiplex Cinema a bit early and plopped down into my plush reclining seat only to endear 10-15 minutes of commercials and movie trailers.

The commercials were totally moronic appeals to buy coke, beauty products, and computer games and software. This was followed by five or so trailers of upcoming films, all of which I’m sure have no redeeming cinematic merit whatsoever.

Two stick out in my mind. One was an idiotic comedy starring Anne Hathaway, fresh from her triumph as Agent 99 in “Get Smart”, about a pair of beautiful young women cat-fighting over reserving a room in a posh New York hotel for their respective weddings. The other movie, “Confessions of a Shop-aholic”, is yet another Jerry Bruckheimer atrocity about … you guessed it, some dumb but beautiful shopping obsessed bimbo. Perhaps Bruckheimer is making a lame effort to rouse the now suddenly frugal American consumers back into their big-spending habits just as the US economy slides into the dreaded liquidity trap. In any case, given the economic hard times ordinary Americans are now enduring, screening such a film at this particular moment strikes me as being rather obscene.

The nice thing about watching movies in China is that cinema goers are spared all of this pre-screening pelf. I’ve now seen about a half dozen films in various movie theaters in Beijing, and none of these movies was every preceded by a trailer for another film, much less advertising for products.

On the other hand, a movie like “Zack and Miri” would, due to its content, certainly never ever make it on to the Middle Kingdom’s movie screens. But notwithstanding its title and some of the things that happen in the film, “Zack and Miri” is hardly pornographic. Kudos to Kevin Smith for turning a tale about two down and out people making a cheap porno flick in order to get some cash—both have dead-end, low-paying jobs and face imminent eviction from the apartment they share—into a rather sweet romance and love story. And compared to "Confessions of Shopaholic", "Zack and Miri" is much more in sync with today's troubled economic times.

While Seth Rogin and Elizabeth Banks are Zack and Miri, the rest of the cast includes two people from Clerks I and Clerks II. One is the fellow, minus his long hair, who played “Jay”, or “12-Step”, one of the two dope dealers in these films who hang out in front of the convenience store in Clerks I and the fast food joint, "Mooby's", in Clerks II (his partner, “Silent Bob”, was played by Kevin Smith). And the actor who starred as the wonderfully misanthropic Randall Graves in Clerks I and Clerks II, is also in “Zack and Miri” as Zack and Miri’s video camera man.

However, my fellow laowai Kevin Smith aficionados need not despair. It will certainly be possible to download “Zack and Miri” from the internet and I have no doubt that DVDs of this movie will be showing up very soon, if they haven’t already, in DVD shops. I had no trouble buying a DVD of “Clerks II”, which, after all, featured a bit of “inter-species erotica”. Kevin Smith fans will know what I’m talking about and the rest of you can figure it out on your own, although what was actually shown in that particular scene wasn’t at all explicit (at least they didn’t get any complaints from the Humane Society).

In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying viewing mainly Chinese movies in the cinema without the highly annoying pre-screening commercials and trailers.

More on those darn pickup trucks

After finishing the earlier blog post about pickup trucks, it occurred to me to me that there might not be any word in the Chinese language for this vehicle. The word “truck” in Mandarin is 卡车 (falling and rising tone “ka” and flat tone “che”).

I then thought that the Chinese might call such vehicles a “小卡车”. The first character is a falling and rising “xiao” and means “small”. Mandarin is such a wonderfully logical language, so why not call these trucks “small trucks,” as that’s basically what they are!

However, when I emailed one of my former Erwai students, a very bright and clever young lady named 冯岑 (a rising tone “feng” and a rising tone “cen”) about this, she informed me that 小卡车 doesn’t really refer to a small truck, but a truck that is used to haul automobiles. Such vehicles, of course, would be a good bit larger than a standard sized American pickup truck.

There are only two other Mandarin words for truck. One is 房车—the first character is a rising tone “fang” and appears in the Chinese word for “home”, or 房子—which refers to a vehicle or mobile home one can live in. As was said a moment ago, Mandarin is very logical in the way it pairs different characters together. The other word is 大车, which literally means “big truck”. The first character in this couplet is a falling tone “da” and means big, in the sense of size, in Chinese.

The story illustrates how a language is rooted in its underlying social and physical environment. Since there aren’t any pickup trucks in China, Mandarin doesn’t have a special word for these types of vehicles. Conversely, the language spoken by Inuit Eskimos has 30 odd words for “snow.”

I studied German as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California and still speak and read it fairly well. I checked in my dictionary and, unlike Mandarin, the German language appears to have two separate words for “pickup truck.” When in Germany, you can call this vehicle either a “kleiner Lieferwagen” or “Kleintransporter.” I guess, in contrast to China, “Im Deutschland gibt es Lieferwagen” (there are trucks in Germany).

In order to be fair and balanced ...

In my "Reverse Culture Shock I" post, I invoked John McCain's problems with geography to illustrate how even leading American statesman don't know that much about the world. Lest anyone think that this blog isn't "fair and balanced," I'll be the first to concede that many Democrats are similarly challenged when it comes to knowing about the outside world. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, was notorious for his ignorance of other countries; indeed, had he been better informed and more sure of himself in this area, America might have been spared all that unfortunate business in Vietnam.

However, the best illustration of Democratic ignorance in this area is a comment I vaguely remember being made by Richard Daley, the late and unlamented mayor of Chicago. He famously insisted, "No man is an Ireland." Well, Ireland is an island, so he was sort of on the mark in saying this. And the statement is literally true, as no man is indeed big enough to be an Ireland!

This quote, along with other hilarious comments, like Thomas Watson's infamous statement, "There is a market for exactly one personal computer," is in Victor Navasky and Christopher Cerf's great compendium of expert misinformation, THE EXPERTS SPEAK (Watson, of course, was the founder of IBM). Indeed, this book makes for an excellent post-meal dinner party entertainment helper--one can amuse one's guests with similar comments like that made about Willie Mays ("a so-so center fielder"), Mick Jagger ("the lead singer will have to go"), and rock and roll music as a passing fad ("Maybe next year it will be Hawaiian music").

Reverse Culture Shock II: We don't have these vehicles in China

On my second or third day home, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood to see how it’s changed and get some exercise. I’m staying with my folks, and they live out in the countryside, beyond even the Clovis suburban fringe—the Chinese word for suburban fringe is 郊外 (flat tone “jiao”, falling tone “wai”; countryside is 乡下, flat tone “xiang” and falling tone “xia”).

Since I was walking about on what was basically a country road, the majority of the vehicles driving on the streets were pickup trucks. After the sixth or seventh truck passed by, it dawned on me that I have never seen such vehicles in the Middle Kingdom. The absence of pickup trucks in China is not at all surprising: most Chinese urban dwellers live in small apartments and have no need to haul about trash or other things from their homes.

People living in expensive villas are wealthy enough to simply pay someone to come out and haul stuff away rather than using their own vehicles to do it. Many of these folks do have SUVs and have formed SUV off-road clubs and drive these vehicles in the mountains around Beijing during weekends.

Finally, farmers, who still comprise the bulk of China’s population, are too poor to afford a pickup truck. Even well-off farmers typically have just one tractor and they drive it into town, pulling a cart, to sell produce, such as watermelons, apples, and the like. Really poor farmers will haul that stuff into town on horse- and mule-drawn carts.

Several of these carts would typically show up every weekend outside the north gate of my first Beijing home, the Beijing International Studies University, which is located on the Beijing 郊外just east of the Fifth Ring Road. Indeed, I’ve seen farmer’s horse-drawn carts appear a bit further into Beijing, on the fourth ring road.

Since China doesn’t have pickup trucks, it also doesn’t have the hick-redneck pickup culture. I should state here that most pickup drivers, of course, aren’t part of that subculture—most drive pickups for very practical reasons, like one of very best friends in CA who has done excellent writing about the Sierra Nevada mountains here. He drives, or used to drive, a pickup truck simply because it was the best way of getting about the mountains and a very good vehicle to camp out of to boot.

That said, there are a not insubstantial number of young rural American men who drive pickup trucks not because they need to use them to haul things about or camp in the outdoors. The vehicle rather serves as a statement identifying themselves as young men who are not only “rednecks”, but might proud of being “rednecks.”

They consequently adorn their vehicles with gun racks across the back window—in China, of course, gun ownership is strictly regulated—and redneck pride bumper stickers. And many of these vehicles, including several that passed me by during my countryside stroll, sport big oversized wheels that thrust the vehicle way up from the ground. I can’t think of any practical purpose these wheels serve, so they must have been put on to make some kind of a statement about the size of the driver’s sexual organ.

Although I haven't missed this aspect of US society while living in the Middle Kingdom, there are certainly many other facets of America I do miss. These include its beautiful scenery, vibrant urban popular culture, jazz music, and above all, its multicultural tolerance. One can certainly disagree with Obama’s policies, but everyone in America ought to be very proud of the fact that the country could elect a black president just three decades after scores of blacks and whites involved in the civil rights movement were murdered because they agitated for equal schools and an end to segregated drinking fountains.

As the Chinese would say, 美国最近在这个方面进步很多—“mei[falling and rising tone] guo[rising tone] zui[falling tone] jin[falling tone] zai[falling tone] na[falling tone] ge[falling tone] fang[flat tone] mian[falling tone] jin[falling tone] bu[falling tone] hen[falling and rising tone] duo[flat tone]—America has recently progressed a lot in this area/sphere. I could add that all my Chinese friends were very happy about Obama’s election and believe that Sino-American relations will improve a lot under this watch.

Reverse Culture Shock I: Who's that on the bill?

It’s been two years and three months since I was last in the United States. I’ve been back in the states since last Thursday and am experiencing big-time what expats who’ve lived overseas for long periods of time call “reverse culture shock.” That’s when one has become so accustomed to life overseas that one finds life in the old country to be all strange and different.

The first day I was home, for example, I was given a stark reminder of how absolutely and pathetically parochial and uninformed most ordinary Americans are about the broader world. My folks picked me up at San Francisco International Airport and drove me back to their home town of Clovis, CA, which is located just east of the larger and better known city of Fresno.

Just before getting home, we stopped off at my bank to deposit a chunk of cash I had brought back to the states from China. As the teller was counting the American money, I asked her if she’d like to look at some Chinese money—I had taken all my RMB with me, as I didn’t want to leave any cash in my apartment. When I showed her a 100 RMB bill, she asked me “who is that on the bill?” Of course, like 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 RMB notes, 100 RMB notes have the facial portrait of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, on the front of the bill. Indeed, since the 100 RMB notes are red-colored and have Mao’s picture on them, we laowai call them a “Red Mao.”

To be sure, Mao died some 30+ years ago. Yet whatever one thinks about him, everyone would have to agree that he was one of the 20th century’s most influential figures. Due to his impact in changing the course of Chinese history, one could also argue that Mao did more than anyone else to alter the course of world history during his lifetime. And this teller wasn’t the only one who couldn’t identify who was on the front of Chinese money. Clerks at several other stores drew a blank, until one fellow at REI—I stopped there to buy some hiking boots, as I anticipate using them in future trekking in Sichuan and Yunan’s mountains—said, “Oh, that’s Chairman Mao!” (His co-worker thought it was Zhou En Lai.)

This ignorance extends beyond ordinary Americans right up to the country’s leading statesman. For example, during the recent presidential election, McCain started blathering on about the Zapatistas in Mexico when someone asked him on a Spanish language radio station about his views regarding Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Zapatero.

Well, as that oldie and baddie 1950’s pop song went, “Don’t know much about history/don’t know much about geography …”

Yes, this place does indeed exist

I first noticed this place while walking down the Dongzhimen Dajie after getting off the bus following my National Day Holiday visit to Beihai Park. “Waiting for Godot” is, of course, the title of a very famous play by Samuel Becket, who was born in Ireland, but lived in Paris for most of his life. I love the photo of Becket below, as it shows him doing what most people spend lots of their time doing in Paris, namely sitting in cafés.

Beckett moved to Paris in the late 1920s, after graduating from Dublin's University College, and wrote a number of novels before the Second World War. One has of them has the very interesting title, MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS. Beckett remained in Paris after the Germans occupied France in 1940 and worked for the French Underground as a messenger and translator.

In 1942 one of the members of their resistance cell was arrested and revealed the names of the other members of Beckett's resistance cell to the Gestapo. Beckett and his girlfriend escaped literally minutes before the Gestapo showed up at his doorstep and spent the rest of the war hiding in southern France (these two lived together for decades before marrying and then divorced quickly after tying the knot).

“Waiting for Godot” was written and performed in Paris shortly after the Second War. Beckett wrote the play in French and translated it into English. This work made him famous overnight and he went on to write other, even bleaker plays like “Endgame” and “Happy Days.” “Waiting for Godot" is a play in which nothing really happens—two tramps named Didi and Gogo (or Vladmir and Estragon) are waiting on a road by a tree (the tree is the only stage prop) for a fellow named Godot. Unfortunately, this Godot chap never shows up. The most famous exchange between the two actors is, “Let's go/We can’t/Why not?/We're waiting for Godot/Oh!”

They thus pass the time discussing sundry subjects, like the merits of auto-erotic strangulation, and are briefly visited by the play's two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. The former literally has the latter on leash, and Lucky spends several minutes rapidly spewing out some meaningless and unintelligible blather. That was Beckett's way of heaping scorn on highly refined, hyper-intellectual, but ultimately meaningless discourse (he would have had field with the likes of Jacques Derrida and other so-called “deconstructionists”).

The Chinese characters in the first photo are a falling and rising tone “deng”, rising tone “de”, first tone “ge”, and a first tone “duo.” The 等得 character combination means “waiting for,” while 戈多, or a flat tone “ge” and “duo,” is a transliteration of the name “Godot.”

Because Mandarin is a character-based language, when the Chinese want to write out a foreign proper name of a country or object, like a country, they typically select a character combination that sounds like the way the name is said in its native language. Thus the combinations are often nonsensical—the Chinese “Godot” translated word for word means “dart/lance” (戈 is the dart/lance radical) “many/much” (多).

My favorite example of this is the Chinese way of writing the common Russian given name of “Dmitri.” Last January I attended a New Year's performance by the China National Ballet with a Chinese friend and the program included music by Dmitri Shostakovich. We noticed that “Dmitri” was transliterated as 德 (rising tone “de”) 米 (falling and rising tone “mi”) 特 (falling tone “te”) 里 (falling and rising tone “li”). Translated word for word, this means “Virtue rice special inside.”

Several days after first noticing the café, I paid the place a visit. It's a pretty cool establishment. In keeping with the existentialist thrust of Beckett's plays, the walls are all black, with small, scratch-like graffiti covering their surfaces, while the interior is dimly lit by a few floodlights hanging for a myriad of pipes below the ceiling. I found a comfortable chair, switched on a reading lamp beside it, and spent a very enjoyable two hours reading and drinking coffee. I certainly plan to return and other laowi and Chinese people living in or visiting Dongzhimen might want to go there as well.

Something fishy at Yuyuantan Park (玉渊潭公园)

The first three characters in the brackets above can be translated as “Deep Jade Pool”. “Yu”, which is a falling tone, means “jade,” while the flat tone “yuan” and rising tone “tan” are the “deep pool” part of the park's name (the last two characters, a first tone “gong” and rising tone “yuan”, mean “park”).

I spent an afternoon during the National Day Holiday strolling about this park with my Chinese lady friend before we headed over to a Mongolian restaurant in West Beijing for dinner (this lady is Han Chinese but hails from Baotou in Inner Mongolia). She pointed out the fish-shaped floral arrangement in the above photo to me; otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed.

In addition to the flowers, Yuyuantan Park boasts a small lake. A picturesque arched bridge connects the lake's north and south shores to a little island located in its center. There are also lots of nice trees and paths along the shoreline. Here are a couple of photos:

However, Yuyuantan Park's main attraction is its cherry trees, which are located at the north end of the park. I can hardly wait to go back there this spring with my camera and take a lot of photos. And you can surely bet that I'll be posting them on my blog.

For people interested in visiting this lovely and tranquil place, you can get there by taking the Nr. 1 Subway Line to the Military Museum Station in West Beijing. It's about a 15 minute walk from the station to the park's south entrance. This can make for a pleasant stroll by itself, as one will pass through a nice flower garden on their way to the park.

Fall flowers in front of the Forbidden City

I was busier than usual during this year's National Day Holiday, but still managed to squeeze in a relatively quick visit to Tian'anmen Square on the way over to the Cui Wui shopping mall/department store in West Beijing. Each year our company gives us a card worth 2,000 RMB to shop there or at the North Star Shopping Mall opposite our Ren Ming Plaza corporate headquarters near the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium.

Unlike the rest of the National Day holiday, this particular day was a bright and sunny blue sky day. As is usually the case when I'm out and about in Beijing, I had my camera with me and spent about two hours enjoying the weather, people-watching and taking photos.

The Olympic floral display photos were not the only shots I took that day at Tian'anmen Square. I also shot the photo posted above of the Forbidden City's South Wall and Entrance. In addition to the beautiful shrubs and flowers, I quite impressed on this occasion, as on other similar occasions while visiting this place, by all of the banners fluttering in the stiff breeze.

What does it mean?

Everywhere one goes in China, one sees lots of banners in public places. Tian'anmen Square, in the very center of Beijing, is no exception to this rule, particularly around the National Day Holiday, or 国庆节 (rising tone “guo”, falling tone “qing”, and a rising tone “jie”). The National Day Holiday and the Spring Festival are China's two one-week long holidays. National Day falls on the first week of October and celebrates Mao's October 1, 1949 proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which he made from the south entrance of the Forbidden City to a huge crowd in Tian'anmen Square.

I took the above photo a couple of weeks before this year's National Day holiday. The obelisk like tower in back of the banner is the Monument to People's Heroes, while the flat roofed building just poking above it is the Mao Memorial House. The banner’s Chinese phrase, “改革开放共谱和谐篇章,” is said as “gai (falling and rising tone) ge (rising tone) kai (flat tone) fang (falling tone) gong (falling tone) pu (third tone) he(rising tone) xie (falling rising tone) pian (flat tone) zhang (flat tone).”

The slogan on this banner is best translated into English as “Together we play a harmonious tune.” The characters 开放 is the verb to play, as in play music or open up a concert—Mandarin uses an entirely different verb, 打 (falling and rising tone “da”), when it comes to playing most sports—while the last two characters, 篇章, are used to denote both a tune and chapter in a book. Finally, the 和谐 character combination means “harmony” and “harmonious”. This banner's content is very much in line with the current emphasis the government here places on building a harmonious society, or 和谐社会. The last two characters in this quartet, a falling tone “she” and “hui”, is the Chinese word for “society”.

As long as I'm doing a Mandarin mini-lesson, I could note that the characters in Tian'anmen, 天 (tian [flat tone]), 安 (an [flat tone]), and 门 (men [rising tone]), stand for “heavan”, “peace”, and “gate” respectively, or “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” This name was also the title of what I believe was the first book I read on Chinese history, which was written by the eminent Yale historian, Jonathan Spence; it was subtitled, “The Chinese and Their Revolution.” This was one of Spence’s early books, and he went on to write many others, the most notable of which was TREASON BY THE BOOK. One could a lot worse for reading material about Chinese history!

Tian'anmen Olympic Floral Displays

From gas to flowers, what a change! But it's time to get off my energy/environmental soapbox and talk about a more pleasant and beautiful subject. Both before and after the Olympic Games, really gorgeous flower displays graced Tian'anmen Square. The display in the photo above was located on the northeast corner of Tian'anmen Square, while the Para-Olympic floral display was in its center.

By the time the National Day holiday rolled around at the beginning of October, the Para-Olympic display was replaced by the one in the photo below, featuring the large and really cool traditional Chinese lamp.

Good news about the subway system

Of course if people are going to drive less, they've got to have other ways of getting around. Beijing's buses are often pretty crowded and have to fight their way through traffic. While the subway trains are also usually crowded, they don't have to fight the traffic and are hence a much quicker way of getting from one place to another.

There is some really good news here. Beijing's subway system has gotten much better since I moved here in 2006 and will get even better in the near future. I've inserted a map of the planned subway system above. The only lines operating in 2006 were the Nr. 1 (East-West, Red line), 2 (Loop/Ring line), 13 (Orange Line), and Batong Line (extends east from the Nr. 1 Line). The 5 (Green) line opened up on 2007 and the 10 (Pink) line and airport (Brown) express became operational in 2008. Further expansion is slated to occur over the next three years. For example, the Nr. 4 line, which makes a slanting east-west run through central Beijing, will open next year.

(I should note, the map gets the colors of most of these lines wrong: the 1 is red, but the 13 Line is yellow, the Batong Line is orange, the Nr. 2 Loop line is dark blue, the North-South 5 Line is purple, and the 10 line is light blue; sorry for the confusion, but visitors to Beijing can sort that out pretty easily after a couple of days here.)

While I do miss at times the convenience of using a car to get to places, I don't miss the costs associated with car ownership. I reckon that I spend at most 100 RMB, or around $14 at the current exchange rate, a month on transportation, mainly because I mainly use the buses and subway to get around (I hardly ever ride a cab except when I'm returning home late at night, after the subway and buses have stopped operating). So by not having and driving a car and using public transportation instead, I'm doing both the environment and my pocket book a favor.

You've wondered about the price of tea in China, but what about the price of gas here?

Another way to get people to drive is less is to raise the price of gasoline. According to one of my Chinese colleagues at work, she is paying 6.24 RMB per liter of 93 octane gas. This works out to $3.47 a gallon at today's (11/17) 6.83 RMB for $1 currency exchange rate. It also about matches a figure a saw cited on a CNN story I shagged on the internet, which stated that motorists are charged $3.24 for a gallon of gas here.

Thus gas prices here exceed somewhat those in the US. The latest check on the internet reveals that they're back down to well under $3 a gallon, due no doubt to sharply falling crude prices brought by the current global economic slump. However, Chinese gas prices are nowhere near what motorists in Europe pay for fuel. Due to heavy gas taxes, drivers in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, drivers pay from $8-10 for a gallon of gas. No wonder European motorists drive more fuel efficient cars and make greater use of public transportation!

But the Middle Kingdom is nudging in the right direction. Fuel taxes have been recently boosted, which is why gas prices have risen from under $3 a gallon to their current level. One does have to commend the government here for taking such steps, which are naturally not very popular.

We'll see if Obama and the Democrats can show the same kind of political courage. As any economist will tell you, a carbon tax is the best way to reduce oil consumption and all the bad externalities that go with, most notably air pollution and global climate change. It's certainly much simpler and more workable than a cap-and-trade system. And America will have hard time telling China to take serious measures to address this crisis if it continues to delay getting its own house in order.

The Olympic Games are over, but some of the measures adopted for the games remain in place

Even though the Olympic Games ended almost two months ago, two measures put in place for the games remain in force in Beijing. One is the mandatory screening of all bags, including handbags, at subway stations. This precaution clearly helped prevent a bombing attack on the subway; a few of my laowai friends, I might add, were certain that something like that was very likely to occur.

Thus this measure is a minor inconvenience I'm more than happy to put up with. Better to endure a slight delay in going through the entry gate/turnstile than to endure greater risk of a either a Madrid style bombing or the 1995 Sarin Gas attacks the Japanese cult group, Aum Shinrikyo, mounted against the Tokyo Subway. Some readers may know from my profile that one of my favorite novels is Haruki Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD. One of Murakami's other famous novels, HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD, was written in reaction to the Tokyo Subway Sarin gas attacks.

In addition to tightened subway security, driving restrictions, albeit not as draconian as the odd-even regulation, have been re-instituted in Beijing. Under the odd-even system, motorists with odd-numbered license plates drove on odd-numbered days, while ones with even numbered license plates drove on even numbered days. Those caught driving when they weren't supposed to be driving were heavily fined.

About a month ago motorists were told that they could not drive on certain weekdays, depending on the last two digits in their license plate numbers. Thus drivers whose license plate number ends with a “one” and “six” are not permitted to drive on Monday. The same goes for other digits for different weekdays. Basically, this means that people can't drive their one weekday every week. Motorists caught breaking this rule are being fined 100 RMB.

My current Chinese lady friend lives in Southwest Beijing and works near Chaoyang Park. She thus has to drive all the way across town on the Third Ring Road—during the rush hour, this highway is as jammed as Los Angeles’s San Diego. We often say here that during such times, the Third Ring Road, or 三环 (flat tone “san” and falling tone “huan”), is Beijing's biggest parking lot. Despite all of this and even though her commute by car lasts two hours one way, my lady friend still drives because going by bus and subway takes even longer, namely 2.5 hours one way.

Of course, the best way to solve this problem is to do what was done in London, namely allow people who want to drive into the central city to do, but force them to pay a congestion charge. Under this system, motorists retain the freedom to drive into the city center, but bear the full costs of this behavior. The proposal worked wonders in London: when motorists faced the prospect of being charged for externalities, like clogged traffic, they quit going into Central London by car for non-essential errands and the like.

However, the restrictions, while flawed, have made a noticeable impact in lowering congestion. I commute to work by using the bus—I'll put some bus stories in another post—and, on the way home at least, have been stuck in traffic far less than was the case before the driving restrictions were put into place (I typically get on the bus at 6:05 in the morning and arrive at work at 6:35, so congested traffic isn’t a problem commuting to work). And the air does seem to be a little better, with more blue sky days. Be thankful for small blessings!

A bit more on the Dongsishitiao Subway Station Area

Like the area around the Dongzhimen subway station—see my earlier October 23rd, “That was then, this was now” post—all kinds of new construction had been going on around the Dongsishitiao subway station. For example, the lighter colored building off to the side in the photo above, which is a luxury apartment community, was still under construction during the spring of 2007.

Two other luxury apartment complexes, “Sun City” and the “Seasons,” are located a little ways further down the Dongsishitiao Dajie and a bit off to the other side of the street. For three months or I visited the “Seasons” every Sunday to I tutor seven year old Chinese girl in oral English and earned around an extra 2,500 RMB in cash.

While a majority of the residents are rich laowai holding high level positions in foreign companies and joint venture enterprises or in Non-Governmental Organizations, a not insubstantial number of wealthy Chinese families own apartments here. The husband in this particular family was a Bank of China Vice President while the wife worked for Oracle Software. She drove an Audi, and the family also had a driver, who took us down to the Wangfujing Pedestrian Mall's Foreign Languages Bookstore when I wanted to pick out study materials for their daughter.

The apartment itself would not have been out of place in Manhatten's Upper East Side or in some posh London neighborhood. The sitting room was very big, the furniture in it was French provincial style, and there was a big plasma TV set. The entry hall boasted a shrub in a small, shallow pool with running water. There was a large dining room and a western style kitchen and bathrooms. Finally, there were clearly more than two bedrooms in this apartment—the one bedroom that I could seem from the entry hall area was being used as a home office.

Decades ago Deng Xiao Ping proclaimed that to get rich is glorious. China now has lots of wealthy people. And like wealthy people in the West, these people are indeed different from the other 99% of the Chinese because the lives they lead are, well, quite different from those led by the Middle Kingdom’s ordinary and less well-off citizens.

Another Really Memorable Para-Olympic Related Event

As the above bit of Chinglish shows—a former laowai teacher colleague during my first teaching job in Henan passed it on to me—the Middle Kingdom's attitudes vis-à-vis handicapped people could use some adjustment. However, like many other things in China, change for the better is taking place here. Having the Para-Olympic Games certainly helped raise public awareness and understanding on this issue. For example, lifts for wheelchairs were installed in all of Beijing's subway stations before the Para-Olympic games.

As part of the Para-Olympic Games opening celebrations, the China National Disabled People's Performing Arts Troupe put on a show at the Poly Theater. I've included a photo of this beautiful facility, which is located right on the Dongsishitiao Subway station and is about a half hour walk from where I live.

Our company gave all of the foreign workers free tickets to attend this show, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to go see it. It was a truly memorable and moving event; I have to confess that my eyes got more than a little misty toward the end of the performance.

The acts included singing by paraplegic and blind singers and a dance performance by blind people who were attached to each to form a human chain. Another highlight was a dance number that included two fellows missing both of their arms. These young men used their shoulders and feet to do interesting things with poles that had water buckets hanging from both their ends.

However, I think that the best highlight of the show was a traditional dance number done by beautiful young deaf women dancers. I shagged a photo of this act off the Troupe's website and place it blow in this post. Non-handicapped performers, of course, move to music while doing this dance, which one of my Chinese friends, Vivian Wang, told me was based on the Buddhist divinity, Kwan-Yi. This divinity is said to have a thousand arms, so the dancers will form a line, and do most of the motion in the dance with the arms, so to resemble this Buddhist figure. They move to music, and the deaf performers obviously couldn't do that, so they were cued with sign language by people standing off to the side of the stage.

It is impossible not to deeply admire the courage and fortitude shown by these people in overcoming their physical handicaps. I'm going to try very hard to keep them whenever I feel down or am dealing with some relatively minor problem in my own life.

Inside the "Water Cube;" plus, the German Embassy was under wraps during the Olympic Games

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Olympic Games showcased two iconic sports facilities. One was the Niao Chao track and field stadium. The other was the equally stunning “water cube” swimming and diving arena.

According to my friend, Flora Lu, the Chinese have two names for the water cube: 水立方 and 国家游泳中心. The first set of characters, a falling and rising tone “shui”, a falling tone “li”, and a flat “fang” can be translated as “water cube.” The second set of characters, a rising tone “guo”, flat tone “jia”, rising tone “you”, falling and rising tone “yong”, and flat tone “zhong” and “xin,” means National Swimming Center.

I alas never got inside the Water Cube. However, my Chinese friend who did the Niao Chao that appeared in a recent post did pass on one of her photos of it to me. As you can see, it truly is an amazing and beautiful facility.

This bit on the Water Cube gives me an excuse to note something interesting about the German Embassy during the Olympic Games. Beijing has two embassy areas: the one off the Jianguo Dajie mentioned in the previous post and another near Dongzhimen, fairly close to where I live. Indeed, if I'm not in any kind of hurry, I can walk to the German Embassy from my apartment.

Alone among all of Beijing's foreign embassies, the German Embassy really got into the Olympic Spirit by putting some blue plastic bubble wrap around its exterior. This bubble wrap had large bubbles, resembling the ones gracing the exterior of the Water Cube. I guess the Germans figured that if they let the visionary artist Christo wrap the Reichstag during its renovation, why not do something similar to their Beijing Embassy to mark the Olympic Games. They at least got my thumbs up. Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of this, but the memory will last quite a long time!

The other "Niao Chao" (Bird's Nest)?

That's at least what the famous “Silk Street”, 秀水, called itself with respect to shopping during the Olymic Games (the two characters are a falling tone “xiu” and falling and rising tone “shui;” the second one means “water”). I saw this sign, “Merchant’s Bird Nest,” flashing while visiting the market during the Mid-Autumn Festival and couldn't resist taking the above photo.

The Silk Street market is located beside diplomatic compound and foreign embassy area on the north side of this stretch of the Jianguo Da Jie. The buildings over to the left of Silk Street in the photo above are some of the diplomatic residences.

One can surmise from all the laowai sitting about in that photo, Silk Street's clientele consists mainly of foreign tourists and foreigners living in Beijing. Tourists visiting here will find that this so-called “market” is unlike any kind of store in the West. It consists of literally hundreds of small stands—the individual shopkeepers lease space in the market building.

These people sell everything from clothing and apparel and foot ware to jade, pearls, tea sets, and small consumer electronic goods. While the place is always crowded, it’s not nearly as jam packed as the Xidan, 西单, in West Beijing; that market's customers are almost entirely Chinese (both “xi” and “dan” are flat tones). As one walks past Silk Street's stalls, many of the shopkeepers will literally grab you and say, “Lookie, lookie!”

Of course you can buy lots of things for a fraction of what they'd cost in North America or Europe. However, you need to be a hard bargainer, particularly if you're a laowai. The shopkeepers routinely charge extra high prices for us folks, figuring that we're rich and can pay them.

In fact, during a 2007 National Day Holiday visit to Silk Street, one of the merchants told me, “You can have these shirts for 14 RMB ($2-3 at the current Dollar-RMB exchange rate), business is really terrible right now.” Since I needed a couple of short-sleeved dress shirts to wear to work during Beijing’s stifling hot summers, I was only too happy to purchase them. Those kind of prices are the ones you can get at the Ya (rising tone) Shua (flat tone) market (牙刷), which is located at the south end of the Beijing’s so called “Bar Street,” the 三里屯 (flat tone “san”, falling and rising tone “li,” and rising tone “tun”). After being offered this price, I was immediately told not to repeat it to any of the other laowai shoppers.

Thus when my mother visited me in Beijing in May of 2007 and wanted to do some shopping at Silk Street, I had two Erwai students, one of whom was said by all her classmates to be a champion bargainer, go with her. These young ladies ensured that my mum wasn't ripped off by the rapacious 老板 (falling and rising tone “lao” and “ban”), which can be translated as both “boss” and “shopkeeper” into English.

One person who really fell in love with Silk Street, particularly its inexpensive ties, was Rupert Murdoch. One wonders, was he “fit to be tied” on the he first visited Silk Street?! That's at least what Bruce Dover says in a ripping yarn he wrote about this Aussie’s adventures or, better put misadventures in China entitled, RUPERT MURDOCH'S CHINA ADVENTURES: HOW THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MOGUL LOST A FORTUNE AND FOUND A WIFE.

Dover worked for Murdoch during his ill-fated efforts to break into China's media market, so this is truly an insider's account of what was a long-running debacle, lasting more than a decade. While Murdoch found he could easily get his way with Western Governments by a combination of schmooze, threats, and manipulation, he found that dealing with the Chinese Government was an entirely different kettle of fish.

I'd have to say, given his role in utterly debasing TV news journalism in the US through that appalling and tabloid Fox News Channel, that this monster got his just desserts, comeuppance, call what you may, in the Middle Kingdom. I should note, in the interest of being “fair and balanced”, that Fox's British counterpart, Sky News, isn't all that bad and is a genuine and serious news network. Oh yes, the Chinese name for Fox News is 福克斯, or a rising tone “fu”, falling tone “ke”, and flat tone “si.”

However, Murdoch did find a new wife here, Deng Wendi, who's several decades younger than he is. The former's Chinese name in characters is 邓文迪—the tones in this name are falling, rising, rising—while Murdoch's name is transliterated as 默多克, or “mo” (falling tone), “duo” (first tone), and “ke” (falling). Ironically, that first character means “silent” in Chinese, and Murdoch has spent his life being anything but silent.

I include two photos of the charming couple. Two former Erwai students I had lunch with on November 16th told me that Chinese people despise Deng Wendi, believe that she is a gold digger, and find her quite unattractive to boot. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I'll leave it to me readers to judge for themselves Deng's looks after looking at the photos.

I heard somewhere that they have a huge, luxury traditional style Siheyuan Courtyard House. The Chinese word for these classic Beijing dwellings is 四合院, or a falling tone “si,” rising tone “he”, and rising tone “yuan”. Murdoch's China digs are located around Hou Hai. Hou hai, 后海 (falling tone “hou” and a falling and rising tone “hai”) is the city’s hottest new entertainment and bar district, plus is an exclusive residential neighborhood. It's located north of the Forbidden City and Jingshan and Beihai Parks. I certainly plan on doing some future posts about this area.

Getting back to Silk Street, like the rest of Beijing, this place has changed radically over the past decade. Up through the late 1990s, it was an outdoor market. The structure shown in this post's photographs is less than a decade old. Since most of Silk Street's clientele are well heeled laowai, the bottom floor of the structure boasts a number of cafés, including SPR coffee, Sarpino’s Pizza, O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Shop, and the Flat White Café.

The last place was formerly known as the Café L'Affaire. Even though its Lattes are a bit steep at 32 RMB a cup, the place has good house, techno, and acid jazz music. I thus occasionally go there, as it is a cool place to spend some time people watching. A photo of it is below.

Niao Chao Views

Of course the Niao Chao gets its name from the steel lattice like webbing, which resembles a “bird's nest,” enclosing the actual stadium. While I never got a good picture of the stadium, my Chinese friend in our sister company passed on to me a really nice shot she took of it while carrying out her liaison/hosting duties.

After we finished paying a quick visit to the Niao Chao's upper level seating areas, Mike and Xu Mei headed off to visit the Olympic Green area. I stayed in the Niao Chao for a bit longer. On the way over to the upper level seats, it struck me that I could get some cool photos shooting through the open steel lattice work and using it to frame the views looking out from the Niao Chao.

The blue building in the photo below is the 34 story Ming Ren Plaza (名人广场; rising tone “ming” and “ren”, falling tone “guang”, and a falling and rising “chang”), which is where I work in Beijing.

The next photo is the so-called “Pretty” shopping mall and high rise, which is across the street (the Anli Lu) from the Ming Ren Plaza.

The next photo is a shot looking north toward a media communications tower outside the Niao Chao.

And the last photo is also looking north, this time to some high-rise apartment buildings.

Chinese Fans, Young and Old

Shortly after Mike, Xu Mei, and I sat down to watch the track and field events, a group of elementary Chinese schoolchildren occupied the empty seats over to our left. These kids were all pretty adorable; as the Chinese would say, they were 很可爱 (falling and rising tone “hen” and “ke” and a falling tone “ai”). I've got a photo of them above.

As we walked up to the lower level exit, I shot these pictures of older Chinese fans. As the photos indicate, China had just won another gold medal, this time in the long jump. Even a jaded old cynic like myself was genuinely moved by and glad to see the enthusiasm and happiness displayed by these ordinary Chinese people.

Getting into the Niao Chao and Seeing the Para-Olympic Games

While I made it to the Wukesong Basketball Arena during the regular Olympic Games, I never viewed any of track and field events inside the so-called Bird’s Nest Stadium (鸟巢 falling and rising tone “niao” and rising tone “chao”). The above photo was taken by a Chinese friend who works at one of our Chinese company's sister companies. She spent the Olympic Games assisting VIP guests her company had invited to Beijing to watch the events.

However, I did make it into the Bird’s Nest to see those other Olympic Games, namely the Para-Olympics, or 残奥 (rising tone “can” and falling tone “ao”). If someone had told me before the Olympic Games started that I would be seeing not just one, but two events, I would have told them they were crazy. However, once again I have a laowai friend, in this case one who is also an excellent colleague at work, to thank for giving me the opportunity to see first-hand an Olympic event.

This particular laowai's name is Mike Watts. He's a native Londoner, but spent two decades living in the Middle East, in Bahrain, working for the Bahrain National Oil Company before moving to China two years ago. I took the photo of him and his Chinese girlfriend, Xu Mei (I'm not sure about the second character in her name) just before we entered the Niao Chao to watch the Para-Olympic track and field semi-finals and finals.

Mike and his girlfriend, Xu Mei had bought an extra ticket for one of Xu Mei's friends. This individual is a young fellow attending the Beijing Sports University, who was living with them at the time. He decided to go home during the Mid-Autumn Festival long weekend—the ticket was for September 14th—to visit his mother. He hadn't seen in a year and felt guilty about that.

So Mike offered to sell me ticket for 60 RMB, or less than $9 at the current exchange rate, which I thought was a steal. I had planned to visit the Niao Chao during the early October National Day Holiday, when the Government would open up the Olympic facilities for visitors. I feared ticket prices then would be just as much, if not more, and that the crowds would also be terrible. I thus didn't hesitate to take Mike up on his offer and go with him and Xu Mei to the Para-Olympic Games. I could add that the crowds jamming the Niao Chao during the National Day Holiday were indeed really terrible.

Our tickets were good for the whole day, but we decided to just go in the morning. We arrived at the Bird’s Nest at 9:00 am, before it really started filling up. The attendants told us we could sit wherever we wanted. We thus got good lower level seats at the west end of the stadium

Javelin throwing was being held at this end of the Niao Chao. The Mandarin word for this event is 标枪 (flat tone “biao” and “qiang”). The discus and shot put events were at the opposite end of the stadium. The Mandarin word for “discus” is 铁饼 (falling and rising tone “tie” and “bing”), or literally “iron cookie”, while shot put is 推铅球 (flat tone “tui” and "qian" and rising tone “qiu”).

The long jump took place at the middle of the Niao Chao’s long north side. “Long jump” in Mandarin is 跳远 (falling tone “tiao” and falling and rising tone “yuan”). The first character means “jump” and appears in the word for dance (跳舞; the second character is a falling and rising tone “wu”) and “dive” (跳水; the second character, which means “water” is a falling and rising tone “shui”).

I naturally brought my camera and clicked a few shots of the events, notably the track competitions. Alas, as I stated in the earlier post on Olympic Basketball, my digital camera doesn’t have a zoom lens. Thus the visually impaired athletes—they had to be guided around the track during the race—may be a little difficult to see in the photo below.

The next photo was shot while the during medal awards ceremony for one of the events. Of course the flags of the countries represented by the gold, silver, and bronze medal winners were raised as they medals were being awarded. I think a Chinese or Greek athlete took the gold medal for this particular event, but I can't remember what exactly that event was.

By 11:00 or 11:30, all of us had had our fill of watching track and field events. The three of us quickly popped up to the Niao Chao’s upper two decks. I took several photos of the stadium from this vantage point, one of which is posted below.

I was very happy to have had this opportunity to see the Para-Olympics and watch them within the Niao Chao's superb confines. It really is a magnificent facility and one which everyone in China can be very proud of.

Volunteer stories from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games

The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games was a big event in every respect, including the number of volunteers who assisted spectators visiting the capital. According to a figure I shagged from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games website, the number of volunteers for the regular and Para-Olympic games totaled 100,000—70,000 volunteers for the former, and 30,000 for the latter. This figure is over double the 47,000 volunteers who participated in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games (both figures are from the official websites of the 2000 and 2008 Summer Games).

From August through mid-September, you could spot these volunteers, sporting their distinctive blue and white shirts, all over the city, including places not in the immediate vicinity of the Olympic events. For example, I took the photo above of an Olympic volunteer waiting at a bus stop while visiting the Wudaokou area in north Beijing. I'll have more to say about this really cool area in a later blog post, but for now will note that it's not very close to the Bird's Nest Stadium and Water Cube Swimming and diving arena (Wukesong and other venues are located even farther away from Wudaokou).

Most of my former Erwai students were naturally very keen to volunteer. And since they speak relatively good English, they had little difficulty getting chosen as volunteers. I've stayed in touch with some of them since leaving the university to work in a Chinese company as an English teacher, writer/editor, and corporate trainer. I post of a few of their photos and pass on their volunteer stories in this blog post.

The young lady wearing glasses in the photo above is from Northern Beijing and was one of my very best freshman spoken English students (her friend was also a very good student and is from Shandong Province; she went back home for summer). This former student worked as a volunteer in the five star Prime Hotel, which is on Wangfujing Avenue, north of the famous Wangfujing pedestrian mall.

She informed me that her volunteer work consisted of answering basically the same tourist questions over and over again. However, she did become friends with one of these foreign visitors and spent a few days guiding that individual around the city and getting lots of good practice time in with her oral English.

My former upper-class Erwai students had better volunteer jobs. Two of them worked in the Wukesong Basketball Arena. They're in the photo above. One is the young lady on the right, who was mentioned in and whose photo appeared in an earlier post. The other student is the young lady on the left (looking at the picture, not from the perspective of those in the photo). She is from Shanghai and was among one of my very best former students. They weren't on duty the night I saw Germany, China, the US, Spain play basketball.

However, my friend, Flora Lu (路红艳) was there that night. She was doing some tasks for that Australian events management company she works for as a translator. Unfortunately, since Diarmuid and I barely got to the game on time, I didn’t have a chance to say hi to while visiting the facility that evening.

Two other former students worked in the Olympic water park, where the rowing events were held. One of them is a really sweet and pretty farm girl from Sichuan (my mother really liked this former student when she visited Beijing in May of 2007 and was ready to take this gal home with her).

The other student hails from Xi'an and had hands down the best writing skills of any my former students. In particular, she had the good sense to keep her sentences simple and ignore the terrible advice many Chinese English teachers, particularly the older ones, pass on to their students.

These nitwits urge students to write long and grammatically complicated sentences on all those English assessment tests they constantly seem be taking (more on that in a latter post). Their rationale is that if that writer such sentences, the students will be showcasing their writing skills. Of course, the more complicated the grammar, the greater the scope for making mistakes and demonstrating that one doesn’t have very good written English skills.

My former Xi'an student told me in an email that she met Princess Anne, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, and some European heads of state. She added that many of the latter made a point of watching this event, as the Europeans excel at this sport (and the Chinese are just beginning to get the hang of it). I believe the Brits won the gold medal for rowing in the Beijing Olympic Games.

Another former student also had a good volunteer assignment. This young lady is a very beautiful former student from Wuxi, a medium-sized city near Shanghai. She worked in the judo [柔 (rising tone “rou”) 道(falling tone “dao”) and tai kwan do [跆 (rising tone “tai”拳 (rising tone “quan”) and 道) arena. This particular volunteer’s supervisor was really cool and frequently took her and the other volunteers working for him out to dinner and then to karaoke-TV.

However, probably the best volunteer assignment went not one of my former students, but to an Erwai student friend. This young lady’s name is 刘洁 (rising tone “liu” and rising tone “jie”) and she hails from Xiamen in Fujian Province. She served as president of Erwai's “Baby English” club and we met and became friends because I judged one of their speaking events. Liu Jie’s assisted the Sports Minister of Luxembourg during the Olympic Games.

Two photos of her are below. The other gal in the second picture is Liu Jie's friend from Yunnan Province who is studying traditional Chinese medicine. I shot this photo shortly before we all had dinner at a Yunnan restaurant in Dongzhimen that is located opposite the German Embassy.

Since I gave the Mandarin words for a couple of sporting events above, I’ll pass on the term for “volunteer” while I’m at it as well. For those readers who are interested, it’s
志愿者 (falling tone “zhi” and “yuan” and a falling rising tone “zhe”).

Even with the Olympics over, Wukesong is worth visiting (at least for expats living here); plus sundry comments one of Mandarin's mysteries

Yes, if you're just visiting the city and won't be here very long, then you should go to other better known places in Beijing. However, expats living in the capital might consider visiting this place from late spring through early autumn to savor its tall and beautiful old trees.

The Mandarin word for “old tree” is 古树/古老树. 古 is a falling/rising tone “gu”, 老 is a falling/rising tone lao, while 树 is falling tone "shu." 古 means “ancient,” while 老 means old, and the latter character appears in the Chinese word for “teacher”, 老师 (that second character is a flat tone “shi”).

In addition to the trees in the photo above, Wukesong has some very pretty flowers, which are shown in the photos below.

Best of all, unlike Beijing's larger and more well-known parks, this place is not very crowded. I went there one late afternoon just before the mid-September mid-Autumn Festival holiday. I was meeting a Chinese friend, Flora Lu, who works nearby in an Australian sports and events planning firm as a translator, for dinner that evening and spent an hour or so strolling about and taking pictures. As the photographs make clear, hardly anyone else was there.

Wukesong is right beside the Nr. 1 subway line Wukesong subway station, or three stops west of the Military Museum subway station. The name in Chinese characters is 五棵松, which means “Five Pines.” 五 is a falling/rising “wu” and means “five”, 棵 is a falling tone “ke” and is the measure word for 松, or “pine,” which is a flat tone “song.”

This name provides a good segway for introducing one of the many reasons why Mandarin is such a hard language to learn. Practically every Chinese noun has a so-called “measure word” that goes in front of it when preceded by some numerical quantity or an article, like “this” (这, a falling tone “zhe”) or that (那, a falling tone “na/nei)—there is no equivalent to the English definite article, “the,” in the Chinese language.

So while an English speaker would just say “that tree/this tree,” Chinese speakers have to say “这棵树/那棵树,” or insert the measure word for tree, 棵, between the article and the noun. And the same goes for saying “five pines”—hence the place is named 五棵松, not五松. About the only exception to this rule are nouns that are themselves measure words, such as “year:” like English speakers, Chinese speakers just say “five years,” 五年 (the second character is a rising tone “nian”).

Of course the English language also has measure words. For example, we don't say, “our company ordered five irons;” we instead say, “Our company ordered five sheets of iron.” However, such nouns are fairly exceptional.

Fortunately, for us laowai struggling to learn Mandarin, there are some simple and easy to remember rules regarding Chinese measure words. For example, the measure word for any long and narrow object, like road (路, falling tone “lu”) or river (河, rising tone “he”), is 条, which is a rising tone “tiao.” And the measure word for any flat paper object, like a ticket (票, falling tone “piao”), is 张, which is a flat tone “zhang.”

And there's further good news here. Since Chinese is a character based language, very few have a plural form (the character based writing system pretty much rules that out). So the character for tree, 树, stays the same when one is talking about “this tree,” 这棵树, or “five trees,” 五棵树. No wonder so many Chinese people learning English have trouble with plural form of English nouns!!

That other event at Wukesong

Basketball wasn't the only Beijing 2008 Olympic sports event held at Wukesong. The Olympic baseball stadium is also located here. I shot the above and below photos on the same day I took the picture of the basketball arena that was my previous blog post.

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games are the last Olympic Games to feature baseball as an Olympic event. My colleague and good friend, Mike Watts, couldn't happier about that. Mike is from Britain and was an avid cricket player and has also refereed cricket matches here in Beijing. He naturally believes that American baseball is a bastardized and lower form of cricket.

I did learn from him the background behind the phrase “sticky wicket.” A wicket, of course, is what the Brits call bats in cricket and in the past, these wickets were often left outside during the night. When this happened, the bats would naturally get wet from England’s miserably damp climate and then the ball could literally stick to the wicket, making things difficult for the batsman. Difficult situations then started getting referred to as “sticky wickets.”

The absence of Olympic baseball will make for a bit less grist for the ONION magazine’s satirical mill. One hilarious Olympic Games spoof news story carried by this fine on-line magazine—“America’s finest news source”—was entitled, “Dutch Women's Softball dragged kicking and screaming on the field to face their American opponents after receiving 10 minutes of beginning instruction on how to play the game.” Well, the title was certainly shorter, but this conveys what the article was about. The “instruction” consisted of being of told, among other things, “This round and long stick is a bat. You hit the ball with it,” etc. The magazine also did a very funny story on Mark Phelps and his eating habits (we should all be so lucky to be able to eat 9000 calories a day and still have problems retaining weight!).

Actually, I rather enjoy watching baseball, provided I'm at ballpark and enjoying a cold beer. Alas, soaring ticket and concession prices have made going to see major baseball games a rich man's pastime. Besides, I'd rather be hiking and backpacking in the mountains anyway, and it costs a lot less money to boot. More on that activity in China, plus nostalgia for the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in future blog posts.