Tokyo Trip - Part 1

Last weekend, I had a day off due to Dragon Boat Festival.  I was at a loss of what to do so I started looking up places to go.  The end result was I ended up buying a ticket to Tokyo 24 hours before I got on the plane.

Before flying out, I spoke to some of my coworkers in the Tokyo office and let them know I was coming.  I also talked to Matt, one of my high school friends who lives in Tokyo:

Me: let's say i flew to japan this weekend
friday-monday
can i stay at your place?
^_______________^
Matt: lol really? sure

I mean, with this amount of charisma, I don't even know why I need to go to business school.

Day 1 - Friday

I landed in Narita at about 3 o'clock, changed some money, rented a cell phone, then got on the train heading to Tokyo.  I think everyone expected I spoke Japanese, which might have been disconcerting a year ago, but frankly after living in Beijing it was par for the course.  I first went to Roppongi, apparently a foreigner heavy district.  Here's a shot of Tokyo Midlands, one of the luxury compounds.

I don't want to know how much it costs to live here

After that, I went to Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills, which is where Google is (and where Matt works).  Matt showed me around Google, which boasted a pretty impressive view.  In fact, an art museum famous for its views is in the same building.

Matt at Google's break room.  Note to self: I owe this man ~$200

After that, I headed over to Shinjuku to meet up with the Japan team.  We ate at a restaurant which was decorated like a giant wooden boat.

But wait, what's with all the water surrounding this "boat"?  Well, it turns out there are live fish swimming in this area.  Not only are there fish, you can catch the fish and get it turned into sashimi.  Whoa!

They claimed it was dead - but it was still quivering

My murderous coworkers show no mercy

Our next stop was the bar at the Park Hyatt.  This place was on the 52nd floor of the hotel, and was apparently one place where Lost in Translation was filmed.  It was a classy place with live jazz, great views, and tasty drinks.  I snapped a picture of the group here.

Matt and I then went to Shibuya to meet up with a couple of his friends, where we had a few more drinks.  By this time, it was already pretty late, and we were faced with the decision of whether or not to try to make the last train.  Matt tells me this decision is a part of the Tokyo nightlife experience.  The last train leaves somewhere between 12:30 - 1 AM.  You can either make it and cut your night out early, or stay out all day and catch the first train back home at around ~5-6 AM.  Since there was a lot of tourist stuff I wanted to do the next day, we decided to call it an early night.  But we didn't make the decision until 10 minutes before the train left, so Matt and I had to make a mad dash (my backpack was with me the whole time) to the station.  Fortunately we made it, took the train to Matt's place, and crashed.

A story from Xiu Bar

Xiu bar is one of the nicest bars in Beijing.  On the roof of the Park Hyatt, Xiu's clientelle is a mix of rich foreigners travelling for business and people wanting to take advantage of rich foreigners travelling for business.  One of our friends is a boisterous foreigner who's been chatting with an attractive Chinese girl in a short skirt for the last few minutes.  On this particular night, there was a cover band playing live music, so people are speaking really loud just to be heard.  Then all of a sudden, there's one of these moments where the band is between songs, it gets suddenly quiet, and you can hear everyone again.  My friend hasn't adjusted to the new sound level, and at that moment, you can hear him shouting, "You don't understand, girls normally pay me to sleep with them."  

The 5 Strangest Photos my Dad Took

I take my fair share of bad pictures - overexposed, bad framing, blurry shots, or turning on video accidentally.  I think everyone does.  But for most people, when they take a bad picture, they were at least trying to take a picture of something worth capturing.  My Dad is different - he sometimes just takes pictures of things that leave me scratching my head.  Here's five pictures he took on our most recent trip to Yunnan province:

1.  A Wal-Mart

2.  A plant in our hotel

3.  A random couple taking wedding photos

4.  A part of a sign describing rules for a tourist attraction

5.  A dog eating left-over skewers

Learning Mandarin and Technology

I thought I would write down a few techniques I am using to help myself learn Mandarin in the hope that someone will let me know other useful techniques, or to perhaps help a fellow student. Today I’m just going to focus on a few of the programs I’ve been using recently.

I should say up front that no technique I’m using is a magic bullet. I think pouring time into learning Mandarin is the most important factor. As Mike Munie told me, “If I had to pick one thing that helped me learn Mandarin, it would be the five years I spent studying it.”

1.  Dianhua Dictionary

My favorite program. This online dictionary also allows you to search for words and quickly bookmark them for study later. Every week, I create a new folder of words and add new words as I learn them into the folder.  It syncs between my phone and the website. For example, I take my computer into lessons with my Chinese tutor so when I learn new words, I can enter them directly into the Dianhua website. Later I study these words on my phone whenever I have a minute.

2. Google Translate
An obvious important tool. Any Chinese I don’t understand can be thrown in here, especially with the iPhone app. Sometimes I get a text message and I wonder, “is this from a pretty girl?”

The answer: No

3.  Google Pinyin
Google Pinyin is how everyone in China types. If you’re not familiar with Mandarin, Pinyin Romanization perfectly describes Chinese sounds, but that doesn’t mean you know what character to write. A sound can be related to a variety of characters.

Disclaimer: I'm not a linguist

Instead of selecting each character individually, Google Pinyin predicts which character you want to type based on context. Most people in my company setup their companies so they can switch between English and Chinese by hitting a rarely used hotkey like alt-shift. When they are in Chinese mode, they use Google Pinyin.

It kind of looks like this

4.  Lingoes

This program automatically translates highlighted Chinese characters.  I use the CEDICT dictionary since it doesn’t need to access the internet to get its results (so it’s fast).  I’ve only discovered how to use this program to translate individual words or phrases, not entire sentences.   As a result, it's worse than Google Translate, but a lot easier to use since you just have to select some text.  At the low level I know Chinese characters, translating word-by-word is still pretty useful for me.



And a final note
It’s now been over a year since I’ve been in Beijing. I’ve learned a lot of Mandarin, but I am definitely not fluent. My mood varies from being proud of the concentrated effort I’ve put into the language to extreme frustration. Sometimes, I’ll have a real conversation with words I just learned and tell some jokes, and it feels great. Other times, I ask someone what they did for the weekend, and they respond with something I haven’t learned yet and I feel right back to where I started.

I also realized that almost no matter what someone says about my Chinese level there’s a chance I’ll be frustrated. It sucks to be berated for not knowing Chinese better when I might have spent the day before studying after a long day at work. But it can be as frustrating when people compliment me over knowing extremely basic Chinese (like how to say hello), which I feel just cheapens any effort I’ve put in. Maybe I shouldn't let this bother me.  But even though I know chocolate isn’t good for me, I eat it anyway since I’m human.

As much as I complain, though, learning Mandarin has been a fun challenge.  I try to ruthlessly track down only the the most critical words I need to know (much to my tutor's dismay), and to find out why words are they way they are so I can better remember them ("aha! the word for "Train" is made up of "Fire" and "Car").  Mandarin is a language some say takes 4x the time for an English speaker to learn compared to more similar languages like French.  I guess I couldn't have expected it to come easy.

Pingyao Celebrity

A few weeks ago, Jon, some friends, and I took a weekend trip to Pingyao, a well preserved city built apparently 900 years ago.

Is the city or the people better looking?

Pingyao was a 12 hour night train southwest from Beijing, so it is a bit out there.  A side effect of this is that Jon, being a tall white male, was a minor celebrity wherever he went.  This started right on the train when he walked into the dining compartment and random people started excitingly greeting him and trying out their English.

At Pingyao, his celebrity status only increased, so much so that random girls would go up to Jon and ask to take their picture with him.

Jon is a minor celebrity.  Meanwhile, I get charged 1 RMB less for bottled water.

In any event, the original reason we went to Pingyao was that it is the place the movie Raise the Red Lantern was shot.  In fact, before going on the trip, the six of us all watched the movie together.  (If you haven't seen the movie, it is kind of like a season of Survivor where the contestants are four concubines, the prize is sleeping with a 60 year old man, and the punishment for being voted off is you get hanged.)  So on Sunday we went over to Qiao's mansion, the site of the filming.

Sure enough, there was a ton of Raise the Red Lantern paraphernalia all around.  You could see the actual set, check out pictures of the actors, and even dress up as the people there.  This might be a good time to mention that Jon and I, in a situation I will call anti-Man Jose style, went with four girls to Pingyao.  Hm... four girls, four concubines in Raise the Red Lantern, costumes... can you see where this is going?

Bam!

Unfortunately, Jon and I got cajoled into dressing up also.  We looked ridiculous, but perhaps because of this, Jon would walk around and people would ask for his picture every there of four minutes.  This happened so often, he even told one girl that the picture would cost 3 bucks!  

That will be sān kuài

And I could not resist getting a picture as well:

Looking very gangster

All in all, good trip!

Wángfǔjǐng

I recently spent some time at Wángfǔjǐng which is a road where there are a long strip of Chinese merchants selling street food. Here's an (overexposed) picture of myself there.

The spot is famous for selling a lot of strange food, including caterpillars, silk worm cocoons, and various internal organs.  Merchants aggressively yelled at me as we weaved around tour groups.  With the pushy sales and questionable food, I basically got a lot of practice saying "bú yaò!", which roughly translates into...

After ordering some boring food, I did go ahead and try some new things.  I ate something called bee cocoon, a bit of snake meat, and a scorpion.  The scorpion tasted surprisingly similar to soft shell crab - I guess anything deep friend and crunchy has some similarities.  The bee cocoon was somewhat like the scorpion, but a little less crunchy.  Snake meat, which was cooked, tasted a lot like raw squid you would find in a sushi place (I find both relatively tasteless and a bit chewy).

(Yup, that's scorpion all right)

One merchant provided the most entertainment of the night, though I am not sure his pitch was sound business strategy (you'll see what I mean in a second).  We approached his stand and started asking what various things were, per usual.  In particular, there was one item that was not at any other stand, so we were very curious about it.  The man first started grabbing his chest and flapping it around, so we thought it might be breast. But it really did not look like breast, so we asked again.  He finally said it was "testicles." So naturally we asked, "Who's testicles?" By way of answering, he started jumping up and down, grabbed his own crotch, and yelled "Wǒ de! Wǒ de!" (It's mine! It's mine!).

Bú yaò!

Mandarin is Difficult

Let me outline just a few of the problems I've faced in trying to learn Mandarin:

1. Characters are totally non-phonetic
Chinese characters do not follow an alphabet, so you can't look at them and know how they sound like. The end result of this is it's possible that conversational Mandarin speakers have no idea how to read.

When I was getting set up here, Mo helped me purchase a wireless router at the electronics store.  He adamantly tried to get me an English router, explaining to the store clerk that I could not speak Chinese.  This led to a moment where the clerk asked Mo, "Well, can't you just read it for him?"  Mo had to respond, "I am illiterate."  

(Here's a picture I took of a man writing Chinese characters using a brush and water in Bei Hai park.)

2. Many non English Sounds

Since Mandarin is non-phonetic, it has been romanized with a system called Pinyin.  This means when someone says something like "mǎi," I can look up "ai" and realize that should sound like "eye" in English. But much of the romanized alphabet has no equivalent in English. I tried looking up how to say "jiān" for example (a component of asking "Where is the bathroom"), starting with the J.

J - No equivalent in English. Like q, but unaspirated.

So I looked up "Q"

Q - No equivalent in English

...

3.  Four tones for each syllable

Mandarin has four tones for each syllable, which changes the meaning of the word.  There is a high flat tone, a rising tone, a falling-then-rising tone, and a falling tone.  For example, the syllable "ma" is represented in Pinyin this way to get four words: Mā (mother), má (hemp), Mǎ (horse), Mà (scold). While in principle, I can tell the difference between these four sounds, remembering a word and its tone is super tough for me to do in real time.  

As you might expect, it is possible to construct ridiculous sentences with this system. The below apparently means, "A little girl who is herding a cow finds it stubborn and so she pinches it," but only involves three syllables and multiple tones.

4.  Looking (and indeed being) Chinese

There are 20 million people living in Beijing, and probably only a few hundred thousand foreigners.  Of those foreigners, many are not Chinese.  So no matter how you slice it, an Asian looking person who does not speak Mandarin is exceedingly rare in Beijing.

When I enter a restaurant, normally the waiters can quickly figure out that I don't speak much Mandarin.  But I've learned how to say some simple things, like asking for ice water (Bīng shuǐ).  Showing minimal competence tends to unleash a torrent of Mandarin, and waiters assault me with questions.  The first time I asked for ice water, the fu wo yuen apparently asked me whether or not I wanted bottled water or not.  I didn't know what she said, so I had to pass on getting water.  I tried again at another restaurant, and the waiter asked me whether or not I wanted carbonated water, and if so, whether or not it should come in the big or small bottle.  I didn't understand this at the time, but fortunately Mo was with me who could translate.  Only on my third attempt was I able to successfully order water by myself.

In short, in my limited experience, I do think it's tougher to not speak Mandarin in Beijing when you look Asian.

("Let's Burger," which despite its name and clientèle, had waiters who spoke only Mandarin.  The restaurant where I first successfully ordered ice water.)