Beijing Forecast

I returned to Beijing over the weekend. There is a very convenient direct flight from Chicago to Beijing – about 13 hours duration.

United has automated video screens at each gate in O’Hare International Airport. These screens provide details about the flight (destination, duration, type of plane, flying time, departure status, etc). It also includes a summary of the current weather.

I laughed at the Beijing weather summary provided by United Airlines on departure from Chicago.

At 1:30 AM on Sunday, January 8, Beijing Capital Airport was zero degrees Celsius with conditions described as Smoky.

I arrived to what I would describe as your normal winter day in Beijing. I guess you get used to the smoke.

Shen Dan Jie Kuai Le

beautiful_assI have a 5:30 PM flight Thursday from Beijing to Chicago.

Home for the holidays.

Since I have not been in the US for 12 months, I wanted to share with you the most important reason why:

I am so excited to get home

I will be sad to return to China in January.

I love my wife and am looking forward to spending some quality time with her in Chicago.

Shen dan jie kuai le translates to Merry Christmas.

Hope your Christmas present is as beautiful as mine.

Shipment to USA

The countdown to home continues.

The movers came again. The result this time was only 19 assorted size boxes. Within 90 seconds of arrival, the drum had been wacked.

It is about 45 days door to door by boat from Beijing, P.R. China to Chicago, Illinois USA.

One of the forms said no pornography, so the 2004-2005 Playboy collection will not be making the trip. The Sex Chair was packed securely and I am optimistic it will not be categorized as pornography and impounded.

Linda – please trust the Christmas decorations and everything else I had been instructed to ship are on the way.

Here are before and after pictures of the drum.

drum
drum_box

Candy’s EngRish Manu

lee_candyI stole both the idea for the title of this post and these pictures from our friend Candy. Candy is from Hong Kong and currently lives in Washington D.C. Candy married a high school friend of mine, Lee. Not sure how he got such a pretty wife, but good for him.

Most American’s living in China keep a collection of translation photos. Chinese is a colorful language and one of the first things my tutors explained is that you just can’t translate words directly from English to Chinese and expect it to make sense. Our photo collections also demonstrate that the inverse is also true – you can’t translate words directly from Chinese to English and expect sentences to make sense.

In Chinese, there are many more examples of phrases (especially food) that are non-descriptive but that everyone in China understands. An English example is tiramisu. Unlike a ’64-ounce Steak for Two’, the word tiramisu doesn’t suggest anything about a:

light dessert of sponge cake or ladyfingers dipped in a coffee-liqueur mixture, then layered with mascarpone and grated chocolate.

These photos and the collection posted here are purportedly from a restaurant menu in Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong in southern China. Having seen many manus posted on restaurant storefronts, those of us in China believe these photographs to be authentic.small

My favorites:

Fuck to Fry the Cow River

The Chicken Hates the Soup

Butter Many Privates

Elder Brother the Ground is Second

I have been saving our photos in hopes of someday taking the time to create a ‘Lost in Translation’ collection. However, these were just too good to pass up posting immediately.

Frog gruel for two, anyone?

menu

Thanksgiving Update

Here are some more pictures of food and shopping in Beijing.

dirtydeeds

Jeff and Becca Around the World

Our Chicago friends Jeff and Becca Zanatta quit work and are going on an 8 month around the world adventure.

Click here to read about the preparations, provide suggestions, and follow them on their adventure.

Travel safe – sorry I could not send you off in person.

Gan En Jie Zai Beijing

turkey

Thanksgiving 2005 was a surprising success. Linda purchased a 9 kilo (19 pound) frozen turkey from a Canadian man. We invited friends to our apartment, cooked the turkey, and then ate the turkey. The next day we went shopping and ate leftovers. We are still eating leftovers. Just like home, except there was nowhere in the whole of either Beijing or Shanghai to buy a can of those dried onion things for the green bean casserole.

Our House in Beijing

Dean and I have an apartment in Beijing now. It is a three bedroom, with one of the bedrooms used as a den.

jindi

Some advantages of this apartment compared to the one we had in Shanghai include:

Dishwasher – in the US, it is hard to imagine a home without a dishwasher, but in China, hardly anyone has one.

Separate washer and dryer – in China, most people have one machine that does both or just a washer. Most people here prefer to hang their clothes out to dry. Ironing is also very common as many people wear cotton clothes, especially in Shanghai. It is always easier to iron clothes that have not been dried in a dryer. My Scottish friend reports that dryers are one of the most energy sucking machines possible and suggests maybe dryers are an American thing.

20th Floor View – here in Beijing, we live in apartment number 20C. We lived on the third floor in Shanghai.

Pantry – I have never had as nice a pantry as the one I have here – great big with excellent storage including drawers and shelves.

Beijing as a City

Also see my Beijing visit page.

jindiWe are regularly asked for a comparison between Beijing and Shanghai.

Beijing is historic in a different way than Shanghai. I think Shanghai is a great place to visit for the history of western influence in China. It is a fascinating city of interesting architecture, and a city of neighborhoods, like Chicago.

Beijing has important historic and government sites for China. You visit Beijing to go to the Great Wall, one of my favorite sites in the world. You can also visit the Ming and Qing dynasty temples and palaces in Beijing. Beijing is the capital, with Tiananmen Square at its center.

Food is also very different in Beijing and Shanghai – I’ll write more about this later as food is always one of my favorite topics. Simply said, people grow and eat different foods in the North of China than the South – just because weather is different.

Shanghai is an easier city for walking, though Beijing may be a good walking city too, I just may not know any good routes.

Would I like Beijing as much as Shanghai if I lived here? I don’t know. Shanghai is vibrant, so is Beijing, but in a different way. Beijing is a center of Chinese culture, Shanghai of international culture – they feel different when you visit.

New Address

The plan is set for our full return to Chicago. Here is our new address, effective Friday, December 16, 2005:

Dean Cowan and Linda Schnetzer
747 North Wabash Avenue
Apartment 1809
Chicago, IL 60611

Our new building is called The Bernardin. Here is the floorplan. To map it, click here, courtesy of Google Maps.

My assignment in China will end on January 31, 2006.

Updates

2001 Tignanello

Delivered safely by UPS and locked securely in our wine cellar by the fine folks at The LockUp. Linda confirmed delivery and said she didn’t drink any. I will double-check in December.

In the original post, I also failed to note that our wine cellar is not new to the Antinori family. Several bottles of Antinori Peppoli (a Chianti) happily reside with us, too.

Text / HTML Editor

This post was written using the free version of NoteTab. I plan to upgrade to NoteTab Standard for US$9.95. The standard version basically adds a spell checker. The text editor functions are fine – it has a nice tabbed interface which is useful for keeping open multiple documents.

There is also an HTML library with a ‘highlight and click’ function to quickly add HTML tags (i.e. text formating and such). I formatted most of this post directly in NoteTab as opposed to the WordPress text editing facility.

Thumbs up.

Ayi or Ayis

Still not clear so, for the purposes of www.deanandlinda.com, ayi is both the singular and plural form of ayi.

According to my tutor, my initial analysis of the different ways to describe a collection of ayi in Chinese was generally correct. My tutor, Fan Hang Ying, agreed that the ‘few’ or ‘many’ structure was acceptable (few ayi or many ayi) and also suggested the concept of an ayi ‘group’ – ayi men.

My building has a group of ayi = ‘wo de hao lou you ayi men.’

There has been much discussion about the fact that my ayi is male and therefore not technically an ayi. Fu wu yuan (kind of like helper, I guess – used most frequently for a waitress / waiter) and nan ayi (male ayi). Opinion seems divided, so since he introduced himself as ‘ayi’ I will call him ayi.

Cascading Style Sheets

I still have not received my CSS / XHTML book – I expect it this week. My vision for the photo page layout needs to be explored further. From the WordPress Codex (aka help guide), I have educated myself to the point of waiting for the book.

A WordPress page is made up of ‘parts’ – a header, a body, a footer, etc. Within a broad set of rules, you can have many different parts, all of which are highly customizable. Each part is basically a file (*.php) that describes layout and formating rules. The parts are ‘glued’ together by a style sheet (style.css) – I previously edited my style sheet to allow for basic picture formating.

To do what I want, I just need to (a) add a new part called something like picturepage.php, (b) figure out how to set the layout and formating rules I want for the new part, (c) add this new part to the style sheet, and (d) identify the rules for how to tell WordPress when to use the picturepage part versus the regularpage part.

It’s all about parts.

I estimate my chances of doing this successfully at about 50%. I did learn how to back up my WordPress site, so if I mess everything up I should be able to just start over. Again, that is a theoretical exercise at this stage, so I suggest you read everything now just in case.