Swine Flu – Only Hong Kong Supports It

I’m going back to those scraggy crags today! Now you can come too. Just click on China Tours and you’re there!

Did you know that “Good Friday” is called “Jesus experiences difficulties festival” (耶穌受難節）（ye sou sao laan jit) in Chinese? I bet you didn’t. But now you know, and by going on an Easter trip with →

Dear chaps. In our series “screams and muffled cries from the vault” we bring you another item from our archives. It explains why, when you speak to a HK person in Cantonese, he answers you →

Here’s a missive from 2008, just after the sacred Beijing Olympics when I finally could get a visa to China again: Not that I smoke joints anymore but I do get disillusioned sometimes about my →

(＊Not “the weather today” as it’s again: FOGGY AS HELL! 有好大霧呀！Yao hou dai mou ah!) In fact this morning it looked like this: No, I was thinking of the weather, some weather, a weather （天氣）(Tin →

You thought it would be something about fog again, didn’t you? No, it’s about clothes. Not sure what the above item is, so let’s just call it: 一件衫 （yat gin saam) A piece, or item, →

Yesterday, Gweipo agonised over her own and her son’s struggle with pesky Mandarin. She invited her readers to comment on who or what’s to blame for us foreigners not being able to learn Cantonese and/or →

Are you going into mainland China on a tour (with me for example), travelling for business or going there anyway? Even if you’re driven around by a personal guide, waited on hand and foot by →

Why fiddle around with airport security, hours in taxis to and from airports, being in a place with only other tourists and leaving gigantic carbon footprints every time you go even on a weekend trip →

嘩！今日好大霧呀。Wah! Gam yat hou daai mou ah. (“Wow! Today well big fog ah”)  –  My but it’s foggy today. Oh, and if you’re surprised that it’s foggy, you could say: 咦？咁大霧嘅？ Yi? Gam daai mou geh? →

Don’t Trust That Internet

Last year I went from Lanzhou to Xiahe, a Tibetan stronghold, by bus. I had read in a book about the Silk Road that this would involve an “eight hour hair-raising bus trip” and looked forward to it greatly, having never really been hovering between life and death since I was in Tibet in 2007.

That bus trip turned out to be a four hour visually incredible, completely smooth ride, since a new road had of course been built since that Englishman, the author of the book, had sat shaken and rattled on the three wheel contraption that brought him to wonderful Xiahe all those years ago (about five).

So I knew about that bus and where to find it – so why did I then idiotically go on the electronic internet to find more information about the bus journey? Something about last year’s total bore in trekking down the road near the bus station for hundreds of meters to have our passports copied for some insurance scam they run from the bus station for everybody going to Xiahe. After all, a town full of Tibetan Buddhist monks is bound to be so fraught with peril that everyone needs extra insurance issued by.. crooks.

So when I saw on the internet that we could go there by one two-hour bus ride and then another two-hour bus ride instead, changing buses half way, I was all for it. No little jumped up officials with clipboards shouting about “pa-si-poh” and “you pay money!”. What I failed to notice was that nobody had written about actually taking the two buses.

Well, now we have. We left the hotel at 6.30AM thinking it would get us into Xiahe at mid day at the very latest, a nice day in Tibet and back to Lanzhou in the evening.

Yeah right. The first bus did indeed take 2.5 hours, only 30 minutes later than the internet promised. But the second! People, if you want to go to the Labrang Monastery I urge you to pay for the scam. Have copies of your passport already on you, even. For instead of a leisurely four hour super scenic smooth ride, we got an eight hour ordeal where the bus drove down every back road and stopped at every petrol station, begging passengers to come onboard.

By the time we finally reached Xiahe at 3.20PM, we had exactly 25 minutes to see the town before getting on the last bus back to Lanzhou at 3.45. Excellent! Naturally we chose to take a taxi all the way back later in the day.

Amazingly, this is also not recommended! The driver might be great at negotiating the bends and yak-herds around Xiahe, but on the four-lane highway he was clearly lost, veering all over the road as if not sure what a lane was, and also at one point almost crashing into a bunch of traffic cones closing off one lane (I had to grab his arm and yank the steering wheel) because he was busy texting.

He completely missed the rather large sign saying “This way to LANZHOU” and ended up in a tollgate where he didn’t pay but doubled back, only to be caught and severely chastised by evil jumped-up official with clipboard at the next tollgate, where he was threatened with a 720 yuan fine. It all got rather ugly and more than a little boring.

Yes, there is a perfectly good bus from Lanzhou to Xiahe leaving at 7.30AM from Lanzhou South Bus terminal every day. Take it! It’s SO worth it. But if you’re looking for adventure and also feel your patience needs a little work-out: Go with Lonely Planet and the electronic internet. There you’ll get excellent advice from people who have never actually tried what they’re recommending …

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New Feature: Guerrilla Cantonese!!!!

Do you want to learn some survival or day-to-day Cantonese but can’t commit to  regular, weekly sessions because you’re just too damn busy or simply can’t be arsed? Guerrilla Cantonese may be the answer for you. Guerrilla means: →

Today’s Classifier: 個

                                                         四個四川人 – sei go sei chyun yan →

Learn Cantonese the Natural Way –

– from a Norwegian! A glimpse behind the scenes of Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau:

Joy to the world, my life is complete. For ages I’ve been writing Chinese characters in the worst way invented by man; by typing the words in pinyin, in other words Mandarin, imperialist communist speech-language. →

I just received this from one of my victims, Elise Lefebvre: “Yesterday night, I was invited for dinner at a Chinese friend’s place for what seemed to be the last of the Chinese/lunar new year →

一條路 (Yat tiu lou) (one stick of road.) Well, footpath really, but you get my little driftie. Yeah, I love 條。It’s the classifier for long and thin, bendable or bending things, like a river: 一條河 →

   一 張相 (yat jeung seung) （a sheet of photo.） Flat, rectangular things have the classifier 張。Also things that in the past have been flat and rectangular, like a sofa, (used to be a bench) →

                                                                       →

一間茶餐廳 “Yat Gan Cha Chanteng” – One Room of Tea Restaurant. “Gan” 間 is the classifier for buildings and rooms, as in 一間廁所 “Yat Gan Chi So” (One Room of Toilet) – A Toilet,  一間酒店 “Yat →

I just have to post this comment from one of my students, ah Laan, here. She, as well as I and everybody who’d ever attempted to take on the Canto, has fought through being answered →