Cantonese - its really hard! Our teacher is called BoBo (!) and we sit in a tiny room with a big oval dining table and a whiteboard in the Learning Centre. The first day (and now) we were all totally missing some of the noises she made - a lot of the verbs etc have an 'mmm' sound added in front of them to change from positive to negative, and we didn't notice her saying them at all. Everyone except me either grew up here or has lived here for over 7 years so have heard a bit more. I think its shocking they never learnt before(shows you can survive without it if you stick to the posher areas though)- everyone on the scary full-on crash course in the room next door is doing it ALL in a month for business reasons! Lots of things, when written in pinyin (western lettering - we don't have time to learn all the oriental symbols, takes a lifetime) bear no resemblance whatever to the pronounciation - it took 3 days for one lady to realise the CD they gave us with our book actually WAS repeating the book vocabulary, she was convinced it was the wrong one/ mandarin instead! Every 50 mins a wee guy chimes a bell & you can pile into the tiny corridor corner for drinks & snacks & chats - 30p a go. Huge range of teas which no-one can identify (apart from Liptons yellow label, powdered with sugar & milk added already, yik). It's annoying, I do OK answering/ reading etc but the minute she does vocabulary checks I go blank unless its something we learnt several days ago thats had time to sink in. So we struggle through managing a bit better on acually pronouncing the words but not even attempting the tones unless we parrot her. The tones are wierd and I don't quite get how they are marked in pinyin - there are 6 different tones, 3 high -ascending& descending (shown with a french-style grave/ accent), and high neutral which doesn't have anything to mark it. Same 3 in low tones - just marked with accent/grave and nothing..........Apparently if I sing/say it in the wrong tone, the word for 'computer' becomes 'crazy man', or more worryingly 'mother' is 'cow'! Still, we know how to ask & answer about first & surnames, countries we come from, jobs, hobbies and started on times of day. Sadly all the shopping/ size related stuff I really want (shopping!!!!!) comes at the end, four courses from the one I am on, and with all the time/ money this costs I don't know if I want to do 6 more weeks of this after I finish this course!
OK some vital terms - (written phonetically): neigh-ee hoe maaa? (How are you); answer is often Ho Ho (like Santa! = really good). Um. Countries mainly sound like they are in English with a horrible foreign accent - Italian = Yee-die-lay-yaan, Scotland is Scoo-gackt-lahn etc. Exceptions to the rule are Germany which sounds like Duck-walk-yahn (goose-step?), and Faaat-gwok-yahn for those foody French! Any non-western food is that country ending in -chaan, but any eastern country cuisine, its -choi (like pak choi veg). bye is either a really cheesey 'Bai-Baiee' or 'Joy-geen' which makes me think of some happy clappy science fiction futureistic film like Demolition Man. A nurse is a woozie! She can't identify what I now do ( I caused enough trouble pointing out that 'Ying-gwok' was english so what was scottish, AND that the drawing beside Britain was a wee guy in a kilt with bagpipes AND that the French guy was in clogs, a dutch hat and carrying a Gouda cheese) so I always have to be a teacher instead which is a 'louw-sey'. Oh dear. Then again our australian policeman is something like a 'gaaang-zstar' which is what he arrests, surely? The word for job none of us can get, its zik-tzyep or something random.
Bamboo again - talked to a guy who's in the building industry at my classes, and it turns out the whole lot upmteen storeys high has nothing except plastic strips holding it together. At least they recycle the poles - don't know about the strips. But he said every 'square' of bamboo can hold over 1000 pounds weight without buckling or breaking - impressive! And its seen as macho not to have any safety gear (calm yourself, Michelle) so lots of builders die every year.
Eating local is 'fun' according to Pete. As in we ignore the cleaner looking cafes and squeeze in the ones with NO english prices/ signs that are full of smokers & look really dodgy. Fair enough, but I swear thats what made me ill this weekend, as we tried one round the corner from my classes (Pete came to meet me to show me the Friday nightlife Wan Chai is famed for...after eyeing a few gaggles of skinny mini-skirted locals & cooing at petshops we went home to bed early!). He had cheesy sausages in noodles (and they WERE - really odd, tiny frankfurters that squirted a really cheesy flavour when bitten) and I had the famed salted fish with chicken & rice. Which was lovely - except it was really salty, made your eyes water. They serve it really quickly - almost before you have finished ordering - not like the Reef Hotel bar in Mombasa!
Some of the cafes have small tanks stuffed with live fish - i have done the choose-it-to-be-cooked-for-you thing elsewhere, but in such cramped quarters its disconcerting to have massive mouths or huge crabs rattling the glass as you walk by. Extra fresh is very important for 'live' stuff, so I wonder why they like the ancient dried stuff and the 1000 year old eggs. HAve you seen them? I think they are pickled, are all dark brown & cracked and usually bubbling away in a wierd smelly sauce.....maybe later! And there were some places specialising in crabs - not UK edible or any species I recognise - all neatly trussed up in a twist of grass, tied like a Christmas parcel so their legs were tucked in.
They have great stalls selling fresh juices in all sorts of wierd combinations. I went for dragon fruit - they look amazing all sort of pink & frilled green outside, with (I thought) a deep pink inside with random black seeds - but I'm not sure if thats what I saw cut open, as what I got given as it was white with black grit in it. (Seeds?). Tasted like milk (YAK) so I didn't eat it. Oranges are very popular, I forget why, something about the name/colour is lucky/ healthy too.
Bakeries I am just getting into. So far I have avoided the posh ones who display amazing cakes (sort of french looking) with bizarre spun sugar & sliced fruit decorations on them, all of the torte/ slimey looking variety. Instead we go to the 'common' bakers - you pick up a tray & tongs at the entrance and wander along the shelves, pushing back the plastic lids to get the stuff you want.
Vegetarian cafe cake assortment - they really are that colour! Aberdeen, HK.
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
Pete likes the half of a mini french stick open sandwich with bacon & cheese toasted on it (found a 3 week old 1 in the bottom of his bad.....looked like broccoli but that wasn't what was originally on it!). I quite like the soft roll in a danish shape with veg, bland sloppy white cheese (almost like French sweet custard under the toasted top layer) and a mini bockwurst. Only thing is, its like Mexico - nearly all the bread is sweet, even when its for savoury toppings, which gets a bit sickening. I did try a pudding thing - looked like a Snowball (those scottish cakey things we had as kids), sort of round & coconut sprinkled on the outside. Turned out to be red bean paste (sweetish) wrapped in a sort of glutinous almost opaque stuff that could stretch amazingly..... and sort of gathered back to itself when I pinched bits off, like an amoeba. If anyone saw the testicle eating bit in 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' it felt a bit like that. One tentacle of it sort of hung on in my mouth while half of it got swallowed. So much so that trying to finish it before getting on the bus, I nearly choked and had another journey spluttering & gasping for air while locals glared at me. (A girl in my class coughed due to dust on the tube and a local held her down and PUT a face mask on her!). Oh yeah, I mentioned the Moon Cakes (Friends of the Earth sponsoring less packaging of them) - they are for the Autumn Festival next month, given as gifts to friends/ business colleagues etc. They LOOK like small round pies full of whole egg yolks (so when you cut them open you get a slice of round moon - the more whole egg yolks the more expensive/ posh the moon cake is) surrounded by assorted fillings in some sort of intricately patterned crust that mimics a chrysanthamum or whatever - I saw the sort of butter moulds they are pressed into, very pretty. Anyway Peter was annoyed as he'd been allowed to taste a bit of one but they started shouting when he wanted to buy one to bring home for me. I twigged why when he told me as I'd been reading about the Moon Goddess the festival is for (lot of varying myths but basically she, a rabbit and a man who may or may not be old/ be her husband had a lot of adventures & ended up as immortals on the moon.) {Wierd - Mayan & Native Americans believed in a moon goddess & rabbit too.} It turns out they are a total pain to make, so you have to order them like a Christmas turkey, and collect your cakes nearer the festival. Pete was relieved, he thought he was being bullied by the baker! I have since seen adverts for 1 Moon Cake maker in English, with as well as the lotus/ red bean etc fillings.chinese ham and sugarbeans..maybe not!
Little old ladies (LOL) really wind Pete up & are starting to get on my nerves too. Here they really ARE little, mostly under chest height, in cotton patterned chinese suits (sort of like pyjamas) and usually with sticks. Thing is they always walk right in front of you on busy pavements (no non-busy streets here!) and I swear they have eyes in back of their heads. It doesn't matter which way you swerve to try & get around them, they ALWAYS GET THERE FIRST. It's uncanny - maybe its all their Tai-Chi, they can sense the life force of us moving or something. Still they are marginallly less likely to get bumped into than the rest of the population who have a habit of stopping dead, bang in the middle of the flow of people, to look at a shop or stare at nothing or answer their phone. Its not like we are hard to miss, I'm at least twice the width of most locals & Petes twice the height! One of the guys on the island reckons its still the locals agorophopia, they sort of gravitate towards big people/ anyone so they don't feel lonely.
I was feeling a bit lonely the days I had at home, especially as there seemed to be no house gecko. But as its been so hot we moved the mattress into the sitting room (better, quieter AC with remote control in there, and fewer windows to let in light/ rain noise) and I have at last found them. One scared the pants off me knocking things over in the kitchen - Pete gets through a fair few cans of cold coffee (yik), beer (San Miguels finest!) and coke, and theres a bag of empties on the sink. (BTW the cans all have ring pulls - when did you last see one of them??? - took me a while to remember how to use them!). I woke up, turned on the light in there and it was pretending to be a tile pattern on the wall .... but it twitched and hit ANOTHER can which made such a racket it panicked and zipped down the back of the fridge to hide. Smallish, about 3/4 the length of my hand. Not sure if its the same one as is leaving tiny poos along the spare bedroom windowsill, but the one that crept guiltily along the sitting room floor on Saturday a.m (I was ill so very quiet, reading) was a lot paler, I think. Whichever it was playing in the sitting room when we were trying to sleep last night drove me MAD. I think it had a penchant for free-fall base jumping or something - I would hear a really fast running patter-patter then silence as it presumably launched itself off a wall/ our tv/ the ceiling......then a SPLAT as it landed elsewhere. Hoping it was for fun rather than for massive-spider-hunting! All I can say is our geckos are quite kackhanded - I could bore you with gecko facts (is it all geckos that have just a membrane separating their ears so you can see through their heads, Kate J, or just leopard geckos??) but I recall the military etc were researching gecko feet as they are so 'sticky'. Its 1000's of tiny hair-like villi which create such a massive surface area they almost bond to surfaces, whether vertically or hanging from the ceiling. Kackhanded here as the geckos in Belize I don't remember waking me, and they were bright enough NOT to knock things over, fling themselves around (OK apart from the one that got hot feet hiding on the shower head and launched onto my head) or fall off & drown in saucepans like in Petes last flat here! Annoying that they are all so skittish, as I could do with them on bug patrol - all the rain/ lack of me sweeping every day now I'm out a lot has caused those tiny ants to turn up everywhere, yug. Oh and to REALLY cheer me up some idiot accidentally imported fire ants from South America, who love it here - warnings up all over the place - I do NOT need to meet them again.
Sunset - note the nice clouds of pollution from lamma Island Power Station
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
The local men (at least al the older uglier ones) cope with the heat by baring their bellys in a most unattractive fashion - they tuck their t-shirt hems into their armpits and walk proudly around as if they were 6 months pregnant. They don't seem to have fat beer bellies the same as Brits, its all tighter & higher up. Now if some of the pretty boys or the slightly scary gangster looking types did that I wouldn't mind as much! (Not seen any martial arts courses, gee, but the TV sports shows are terrifying, Jackie Chan has nothing on theses guys). Women have fans or odd little paddles to flap that are given away as promotional material by some of the bigger shops etc. Its supposed to be getting cooler (yay) and I must admit this Sunday I didn't have the AC on all day, when the sun wasn't out you didn't sweat if you didn't move.........
Hope you are surviving - Uk cold yet???
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