It's another "free" day. I could be kicking my heels around town. I can't contact folk easily except from my hotel (my mobile being blocked), but they may well need to contact me. A bit awkward, that. Oh well.
Breakfast first, I think. Now before I came here all the old lags warned me against the breakfasts. If you throw away your ideas of what makes a good breakfast it's not so bad. In addition to the more obscure items there are little sausages and bacon-like slices, for example; and I like the pancakes and the sweet things such as the sesame-seed-covered date-filled balls, and the various cakes. Not that I have a sweet tooth really, but those are more familiar tastes. And I always try to have something Chinese as well - congee, for instance. That's what they think of as porridge, but it's basically a sort of very runny rice pudding with no taste whatsoever. I can't understand why they all eat it really. Maybe they lace it with soy. It's staple though, so I guess that's why. And, naturally, it's washed down with lashings of great tea.
Well, as I said - breakfast. This morning I tried the "Eight Treasures Porridge". It is very runny, pinkish-grey in colour and contains lots of different (presumably eight) bits. One of them is almost certainly black rice. I couldn't tell what the other things were. The taste? Well, now. How can I put it? Exactly like congee. That is, tasteless. Again. Why do they love these things so much?
I also had some of the scambled eggs. They're mixed in with some greens which I think the Chinese describe as "leeks". To me they seem more like a kind of cross between chives and the green parts of spring onions. That was OK though. Plus a pancake. Plus one of the disc-shaped orange-coloured sweets (again with a date in it) and a piece of what looks like modified Swiss roll. Nice enough.
While it's still in my mind, a few words about the language and the "English" names that the Chinese often give themselves. According to Jennifer and others I've spoken to, they usually look for a name that has a sound approximately like their actual name. This isn't too surprising. For example, Jennifer's real name is Yáng Yàn Fēi. Now to our eyes that may not look much like "Jennifer", but when she says it you can hear a similarity. Notice I've managed to put the accents on the words, as they would be in Pinyin. These correspond to the famous "tones" of Mandarin. They are more or less self-explanatory. The upward rising accent, for example, implies the pitch should start low and rise as you say the syllable. The flat horizontal line means a flat high tone. The sort of "v" shape (not present in Jennifer's name) means falling then rising. Anyway, it takes a bit of mucking about on the computer to add them, so generally I haven't bothered. But in actual communication they are quite important because there are very many words that are spelt the same (in Pinyin) but mean totally different things. You can wind up in a lot of trouble if you aren't careful! Fortunately, the Chinese are very forgiving of any mistakes you make. They are much more likely to praise you for your "excellent" Chinese than they are to criticise it!
Although many words are spelt exactly the same, as I said, they would generally have completely different characters. Even some words that are spelt and pronounced the same will have different symbols. A good example is the words used for "he", "she" and "it". In Pinyin they are all the same: "Tā
Thus: "he" is 他, "she" is 她 and "it" is 它 (Ain't Google wonderful!).
You might notice that there is one bit of each character that is present in all three, however. That is likely to be the key to how the word should be pronounced. The remainder of the character (known as the "radical") tells you the actual meaning.
Some interesting things occurred to me about all this. For example, the written form of the language is clearly much richer in its ability to convey subtlety and context than is the spoken form. It may partly explain why calligraphy has always been so highly valued in Chinese cultural history; quite apart from its obvious attraction as an art-form.
Another thing is that one could, in principle, learn written Mandarin without ever having heard or spoken a single word. The "symbols" are just that. They originated from pictograms - simple little diagrams of the objects they represented.
As the language progressed more abstract ideas were formed by combining them in different ways: the modern character representing the Sun in "Simplified Chinese" is 日. The Moon is 月. But putting them together as 日月 (sun-moon) conveys the notion "light-dark" which is basically a 24-hour period. So the modern meaning is "day" when it is used as part of a date, for example.
[Perhaps it isn't surprising that these two symbols are closely associated with "Yin" and "Yang": opposing concepts, such as light and dark, good and bad, happy and sad, or masculine and feminine. Every individual thing or concept in Chinese has to be one or the other. What is constantly sought - not only in art and culture, but also in daily life - is a harmonious balance between the two.]
The characters are invariably logical. Once you've learnt to recognise a few of them you can begin to translate small phrases straight into English. And you can put them together in a simple sequence to convey an idea or a message. I'm not even sure the "word" order is always that important, though I might be wrong. The characters are in a sense universal signs, just like traffic symbols. Everyone recognises the little green man at the pedestrian crossing (apart, ironically, from Chinese motorists! But that's another story). It's just that the Chinese characters are much more numerous and, in many cases, intricate. There are over 10,000 of them, although most people I talk to reckon that hardly anyone knows, or uses, more than about 2000. That's still a substantial number of course.
The power of the written language is exemplified by the fact that few Cantonese speakers can understand spoken Mandarin and vice versa; but they can converse with ease using the characters - so they can happily email one another!
OK. Lesson over. Hope you found that interesting. Of course it's only my understanding, so it's probably nonsense.
It's now
Hey, I've just had a flash of brilliance: I suddenly remembered I have a nifty piece of software on my laptop called VPN, which gives me a secure channel right through to the university of Manchester's servers. I just tried logging in through it and .. EUREKA! I can actually see my own blog site at last! Waheyy!! It doesn't look too bad, does it?
So does this mean I've effectively broken through the "blockade"? Looks like it.
Yes ..... it's actually true: I've just successfully accessed my website and found the weather forecast for Zhengzhou!!!
Thank you Tony S - I'm sure it was you who acquainted me with VPN, ages ago.(Hm. Maybe I should have kept very quiet about this - Shh!)
Still can't use my mobile though, but ne'er mind, eh?
Thought you might like to experience life in the street outside. Here's a couple of clips taken from the opposite side of the road junction. They both begin with the camera looking directly towards my hotel.
Hey, I'll tell you what - it was a darned good job I did remember about VPN. A moment ago I tried to check my Gmails without logging into VPN first, and guess what: yep. They've closed Gmail down on me as well now. (I typed all that in hushed tones, just in case.)
Had lunch here again. I'm still having considerable communication difficulties. There was some issue with the first dish I ordered, but no matter how hard we tried, the waitress and I couldn't understand one another. You wonder how bad it would be in a really remote place. Anyway, the dish I ended up with was very good. I think it was described as fragrant rice with meat and cabbage. Doesn't sound too exciting, but it came in one of those earthenware pots, sizzling hot. There was the yolk of an egg on the very top, rice beneath that, and the rest somewhere below. The waitress used two spoons to mix it all together. It was not spicey but tasty. The meat was mince of some description (maybe beef, maybe pork, maybe lamb, maybe dog, who knows). In a way, it reminded me a bit of meat-loaf, but less solid. A nice can of Tsingtao beer to go with.
Then I took a stroll round the area. Here is some of the some local colour.
Above: believe it or not, I think that's a bank. Just up the road and round the corner is a fair-sized market ...
Here's my hotel ...
And the little green man right outside it.
You see the illuminated green area above the man? That's a count-down. The area gets progressively smaller, after which he turns red. Then there is another count-down before he turns back to green again. The problem is the boulevards are so wide you hardly get enough time to cross. For elderly folk it must be a problem. Well it's a problem anyway, because while I suppose most of the traffic actually does respect the signal, a lot doesn't.
The green man speaks, as well. But he has a female voice, so maybe it isn't a man at all. Let's call "Ta" a Green Person!
That's odd: I just disconnected from VPN and tried Gmail again. It's working again. So now I'm confused. Maybe it was a genuine connection problem earlier. Perhaps the broadbad here is insufficiently obese!
Now this is an interesting road-cleaning vehicle. You may have read about it in one of my previous posts, but that was before I discovered how to upload videos!
And on that "tack" (appropriate choice of words perhaps), I've noticed recently that the piped wall-paper sax music in the dining room has begun concentrating on decking halls with bells & holly and requesting Big G to rest ye merry gentlemen. IT'S NOT FAIR - I came half-way around the world to avoid that kind of thing.
Tataa.
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