4.16.2006 : 10:58
Sorry about the wait, but the suspense is over. Ugh, kind of a rough week. The only thing about traveling is that I get back completely unprepared for class due to my tendency to procrastinate.
So, about this tattoo. Now I had made plans to get this tattoo long ago. And the great thing about this tattoo is that the Chinese think it's funny and I can tell Westerners (or anybody who doesn't read Chinese) that it means...well, whatever I want. So this was the plan, but since only my closest friends (and possibly students) read this site, I'll let you know what it means just this once. But if I come home and tell somebody else that it means "Great Dragon Master" or "Warrior King of Mt. Wu" don't go spoiling the surprise.
Ok, so the first character is "Mei" (pronounce "May") and it means beautiful. The second character is "Guo" (pronounce "goo+aw", sort of) and it means country. Now when the Chinese assign a Chinese name to a non-Chinese country the do it one of two ways. The first is to take a character that sounds like one of the sounds in the country's name, like England becomes "Ying Guo", because "Ying" sounds like "Eng" and "Guo" means country. So, "Ying" country or England. The second is to take characters that sound like the syllables of the country's name. So Italy becomes "Yi Da Li" and Canada becomes "Jia Na Da". Sometimes this gets a little weird like when Australia becomes "Ao Da Li Ya"(sounds like "Ow Dah Lee Yeeah") and Wales becomes "Wei Er Shi" (sounds like "Way Are Shur"). So (you guessed it) "MeiGuo" is the name for the United States. I guess because "Mei" sounds like aMERica. not really. The last character "Ren" (pronounced "Run") means person or people. This gets used for all sorts of stuff, but in this case just means person. So (all together now) America + person = American!!
Now so far this has draw exactly the reaction I was hoping for. An American walking around with "American" written on his arm in Chinese is pretty funny (Or confusing) to the Chinese. I'm going to do a lot traveling this summer and this way I have one less question to answer ("Ni shi na li ren?" or where are you from?)
I've been looking for an excuse for weeks to give a Chinese lesson so there you have it. As for the rest of Nanjing there's nothing much to tell, after we got tattoos we had dinner and then went to bed so we could get up early, get on a train, and prepare for classes on Monday.
As for this week it's Mid-term review, and next week is Mid-terms, and next next week is May Holiday yeah!, which is the Chinese Spring break. So we get a week off and we're using it to go back to Changsha! So lots of pictures and good stories I hope. I guess I'll go now and finish labeling the pictures from Nanjing now. Peace out.
_Nathan
Sorry about the wait, but the suspense is over. Ugh, kind of a rough week. The only thing about traveling is that I get back completely unprepared for class due to my tendency to procrastinate.
So, about this tattoo. Now I had made plans to get this tattoo long ago. And the great thing about this tattoo is that the Chinese think it's funny and I can tell Westerners (or anybody who doesn't read Chinese) that it means...well, whatever I want. So this was the plan, but since only my closest friends (and possibly students) read this site, I'll let you know what it means just this once. But if I come home and tell somebody else that it means "Great Dragon Master" or "Warrior King of Mt. Wu" don't go spoiling the surprise.
Ok, so the first character is "Mei" (pronounce "May") and it means beautiful. The second character is "Guo" (pronounce "goo+aw", sort of) and it means country. Now when the Chinese assign a Chinese name to a non-Chinese country the do it one of two ways. The first is to take a character that sounds like one of the sounds in the country's name, like England becomes "Ying Guo", because "Ying" sounds like "Eng" and "Guo" means country. So, "Ying" country or England. The second is to take characters that sound like the syllables of the country's name. So Italy becomes "Yi Da Li" and Canada becomes "Jia Na Da". Sometimes this gets a little weird like when Australia becomes "Ao Da Li Ya"(sounds like "Ow Dah Lee Yeeah") and Wales becomes "Wei Er Shi" (sounds like "Way Are Shur"). So (you guessed it) "MeiGuo" is the name for the United States. I guess because "Mei" sounds like aMERica. not really. The last character "Ren" (pronounced "Run") means person or people. This gets used for all sorts of stuff, but in this case just means person. So (all together now) America + person = American!!
Now so far this has draw exactly the reaction I was hoping for. An American walking around with "American" written on his arm in Chinese is pretty funny (Or confusing) to the Chinese. I'm going to do a lot traveling this summer and this way I have one less question to answer ("Ni shi na li ren?" or where are you from?)
I've been looking for an excuse for weeks to give a Chinese lesson so there you have it. As for the rest of Nanjing there's nothing much to tell, after we got tattoos we had dinner and then went to bed so we could get up early, get on a train, and prepare for classes on Monday.
As for this week it's Mid-term review, and next week is Mid-terms, and next next week is May Holiday yeah!, which is the Chinese Spring break. So we get a week off and we're using it to go back to Changsha! So lots of pictures and good stories I hope. I guess I'll go now and finish labeling the pictures from Nanjing now. Peace out.
_Nathan
[11] comments
4.10.2006 : 22:06
Whew. Well Elizabeth and I had an awesome weekend, but I've been crazy busy trying to make up for it. It doesn't help that we're having a bout of horrible weather out here in Xiasha ( torrential rains and hurricane force winds! ). So instead of preparing for tonight's class I'm going to bring everybody up to speed instead.
So this whole thing got started when we heard Mary (Yu Yue) was coming home to visit and was going to swing through Hangzhou on here way to Changsha. The plan ended up being she would fly into ShangHai and stay with a friend, then meet us in Nanjing. So train option number one was to leave after my last class on Thursday, get downtown as quick as possible, buy tickets, get the train and show up in Nanjing at around 1 in the morning. This doesn't sound horrible, but the hotels we looked at were booked so looking for a hotel at 1am with my limited language skill did not look super appealing. So we opted for train option number 2 which was leave Thursday night, go downtown, get a hotel, and get the first train in the morning. So we got downtown and got a pretty nice hotel right across from the train station, went out to a sweet Argentinean restaurant did a little shopping and then got to bed early.
So we pulled into Nanjing around 3:30 and swam through a sea of tour-groups, commuters, snack carts and a massive crowd of eager family and friends waiting for countless passengers. After a couple of scratchy phones calls and a little confusion we found one very excited Mary. Mary also has some friends in Nanjing, and one of those friends is studying in a school pretty close to downtown so before we got there she scoped out the hotel and found it "reasonable". So we got on the subway and got checked in.
The other reason we decided to go to Nanjing was that one of our friends from Changsha who we hadn't seen since we were last in China was teaching there. So we called him up and met a pretty pretty good Mexican/Italian/General Western Food restaurant, that did in fact have a nice Quesadilla. So after a fantastic dinner and some good catching up, Mary had to catch the last subway back to where she was staying at 9:30. So Jason, Elizabeth and I went to a favorite hang out of some of the local LaWai called Rain Man. So we shot some pool, had some drinks, and met some really really cool people. About 1:30 we decided to ditch Rain Man and go dancing, so we got some taxis ( since there was about 12 of us ) and headed to a club called (Big)Scarlet. Apparently there are two clubs called "Scarlet" and this was the bigger one.
Scarlet was a pretty good club. I mean, clubs are usually dark, very very crowded, and very very loud, but this club was dark, super-crowded, and super-loud, with lockers, a decent bathrooms and a live DJ. So we worked months of pent up stress and frustration out on the dance floor. At around 3 we figured we should be getting home unless we wanted to be completely worthless on Saturday ( which I guess it already was ). So we headed out, stopped by a little barbecue stand, and then got a taxi back to our hotel.
Now like I said, our hotel was located in a school. Schools have walls and gates. Now before we left the hotel we had inquired about getting back in and were assured that there would be no problem. So when we pulled up to the school indeed the main gate was opened, but about a hundred yards past that there was another very closed gate. So we wandered around looking for a way around and a very sleepy guard came out and bellowed something in Chinese and waved to another gate further down the road. So we wandered around looking for some other gate and after 15 minutes we couldn't find it. So now it's getting to be almost 4 and I'm pretty tired. So we go back to first gate and it's very clear that nobody is around so we noisily hop the gate and quickly walk away. Thankfully the hotel guy made good on his promise and was there to open the door.
Saturday Elizabeth, Mary, and Mary's friend (Zhou) were going shopping at some downtown shopping center called Shinjiekou. And since Jason and I aren't the most avid shoppers we decided to do something else. So we got some tattoos.
Well, I've got to get some work done. I'll finish this story this weekend. Stay tuned.
_Nathan
Whew. Well Elizabeth and I had an awesome weekend, but I've been crazy busy trying to make up for it. It doesn't help that we're having a bout of horrible weather out here in Xiasha ( torrential rains and hurricane force winds! ). So instead of preparing for tonight's class I'm going to bring everybody up to speed instead.
So this whole thing got started when we heard Mary (Yu Yue) was coming home to visit and was going to swing through Hangzhou on here way to Changsha. The plan ended up being she would fly into ShangHai and stay with a friend, then meet us in Nanjing. So train option number one was to leave after my last class on Thursday, get downtown as quick as possible, buy tickets, get the train and show up in Nanjing at around 1 in the morning. This doesn't sound horrible, but the hotels we looked at were booked so looking for a hotel at 1am with my limited language skill did not look super appealing. So we opted for train option number 2 which was leave Thursday night, go downtown, get a hotel, and get the first train in the morning. So we got downtown and got a pretty nice hotel right across from the train station, went out to a sweet Argentinean restaurant did a little shopping and then got to bed early.
So we pulled into Nanjing around 3:30 and swam through a sea of tour-groups, commuters, snack carts and a massive crowd of eager family and friends waiting for countless passengers. After a couple of scratchy phones calls and a little confusion we found one very excited Mary. Mary also has some friends in Nanjing, and one of those friends is studying in a school pretty close to downtown so before we got there she scoped out the hotel and found it "reasonable". So we got on the subway and got checked in.
The other reason we decided to go to Nanjing was that one of our friends from Changsha who we hadn't seen since we were last in China was teaching there. So we called him up and met a pretty pretty good Mexican/Italian/General Western Food restaurant, that did in fact have a nice Quesadilla. So after a fantastic dinner and some good catching up, Mary had to catch the last subway back to where she was staying at 9:30. So Jason, Elizabeth and I went to a favorite hang out of some of the local LaWai called Rain Man. So we shot some pool, had some drinks, and met some really really cool people. About 1:30 we decided to ditch Rain Man and go dancing, so we got some taxis ( since there was about 12 of us ) and headed to a club called (Big)Scarlet. Apparently there are two clubs called "Scarlet" and this was the bigger one.
Scarlet was a pretty good club. I mean, clubs are usually dark, very very crowded, and very very loud, but this club was dark, super-crowded, and super-loud, with lockers, a decent bathrooms and a live DJ. So we worked months of pent up stress and frustration out on the dance floor. At around 3 we figured we should be getting home unless we wanted to be completely worthless on Saturday ( which I guess it already was ). So we headed out, stopped by a little barbecue stand, and then got a taxi back to our hotel.
Now like I said, our hotel was located in a school. Schools have walls and gates. Now before we left the hotel we had inquired about getting back in and were assured that there would be no problem. So when we pulled up to the school indeed the main gate was opened, but about a hundred yards past that there was another very closed gate. So we wandered around looking for a way around and a very sleepy guard came out and bellowed something in Chinese and waved to another gate further down the road. So we wandered around looking for some other gate and after 15 minutes we couldn't find it. So now it's getting to be almost 4 and I'm pretty tired. So we go back to first gate and it's very clear that nobody is around so we noisily hop the gate and quickly walk away. Thankfully the hotel guy made good on his promise and was there to open the door.
Saturday Elizabeth, Mary, and Mary's friend (Zhou) were going shopping at some downtown shopping center called Shinjiekou. And since Jason and I aren't the most avid shoppers we decided to do something else. So we got some tattoos.
Well, I've got to get some work done. I'll finish this story this weekend. Stay tuned.
_Nathan
Spring Outing
4.03.2006 : 19:58
Well, the spring outing was pretty much what we expected. A long bus ride starting very early in the morning leading us to a large lunch followed by a long weary hike up some beautiful scenery ending in another very long bus ride which gets us home late. We went to a place called LinAn, which has a lot of history actually. Now I won't bore you with the history since we didn't see much of that anyway. What we did see was an extravagant waterfall with lots and lots of big rocks that the ancient chinese though looked like stuff. Stuff such as oxen, frogs, monkeys and the like. I'll put tons of pictures of waterfalls and rocks up, but I can't say much more about it tonight seeing as I have precious few hours to sleep before I have to ride the bus at 6:45 tomorrow morning.
Oh, before I go, I found out something interesting. The Chinese government has given me a Chinese name ( on my Foreign experts certificate and other documents ). Well my name is NeiSen ShiDiWei. Well, "Nei Sen" means "among the trees". I thought that was cool.
_Nathan
Well, the spring outing was pretty much what we expected. A long bus ride starting very early in the morning leading us to a large lunch followed by a long weary hike up some beautiful scenery ending in another very long bus ride which gets us home late. We went to a place called LinAn, which has a lot of history actually. Now I won't bore you with the history since we didn't see much of that anyway. What we did see was an extravagant waterfall with lots and lots of big rocks that the ancient chinese though looked like stuff. Stuff such as oxen, frogs, monkeys and the like. I'll put tons of pictures of waterfalls and rocks up, but I can't say much more about it tonight seeing as I have precious few hours to sleep before I have to ride the bus at 6:45 tomorrow morning.
Oh, before I go, I found out something interesting. The Chinese government has given me a Chinese name ( on my Foreign experts certificate and other documents ). Well my name is NeiSen ShiDiWei. Well, "Nei Sen" means "among the trees". I thought that was cool.
_Nathan
I give up.
4.01.2006 : 11:15
Appearantly I don't know that much about Unicode. I've been trying for the last 2 days to display Chinese on this site and it's just not happening. If anybody knows anything about Chinese Language encoding and why it wouldn't work, give me a shout.
_Nathan
Appearantly I don't know that much about Unicode. I've been trying for the last 2 days to display Chinese on this site and it's just not happening. If anybody knows anything about Chinese Language encoding and why it wouldn't work, give me a shout.
_Nathan