You know the whole “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”? Yeah….sorry about the silence.
Work has been sort of sucky lately, and it’s Christmas but it doesn’t feel like Christmas, and I’m getting sick (see, that’s how you know it is a holiday, even if it doesn’t feel like it).
I had a topic in mind to write about this morning, but it’s gone. Really. I just stared at the screen for 5 minutes trying to think of what I wanted to write about. Shoot. Sorry Lindsay. Is there anything you (you being anyone reading this) want to know about me/Seth/Taiwan/work/my bellybutton? Leave a comment and I can pontificate!
December 21, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Okay, I have a few unanswered questions:
1. Why do people ride scooters with their jackets on backwards?
2. If Mandarin is a tonal language, why is Chinese music so awful?
3. How do people train dogs to ride with their paws on the handle bars of scooters? How are they going to operate the accelerator or brakes? They don’t have opposable thumbs!
4. If Chinese culture is family-based, why do people work until 11pm and pawn their kids off to relatives or bushibans to raise?
5. Why do children pronounce the letter “l” as “elo” and the letter “n” as “uhn”?
6. Why do people who work in convenience stores say “good morning” even when it’s not the morning, and only when you leave the store, not when you enter?
7. Why do people wait for the elevator to come down fifteen floors so they can ride it up one? Likewise, why do people wait 30 minutes for a bus only to ride it one stop?
December 22, 2007 at 11:46 pm
I can answer a couple of those.
The backwards jackets are because zippers here, even with buttoned flaps covering them, leak rain. They leak directly onto your lap, but not until they’ve built up a good puddle while you are paying attention to the road instead of your lap. They leak the entire puddle suddenly.
Paws on handlebars I haven’t seen, but one must assume that’s because it’s cute. Like the old Nissan “Dogs *love* trucks” commercials.
The “good morning” is actually one of two Chinese phrases. One of them I can’t quite understand yet, but the other is something along the lines of “gwai `na li”. I don’t actually know what either of them means, but I presume it approximates “Thank you, come again.”