T-Shirts in China

May 31st, 2013, 4:22 am PDT by Greg

Poor English translations are nothing new to me, even as a Vancouverite. They kind of just roll off me without notice by now. “Fish is to eating”… I think “I guess they serve fish,” but nothing else.

But as a service my friends Kym and Mark at Herrohachi, I decided to watch for T-shirts with odd English. When I saw one, I jotted it down in my phone.

What follows is a two-week supply. Spelling and punctuation is as close as I could get it. I have made no real attempt to preserve design, formatting, or even line breaks. The slash indicates a line break where I recorded it.

Nonsense

These just don’t make sense…

Unusual

These are perfectly reasonable English, but not-quite-right on a T-shirt

  • I only sleep with the best
  • Bed and breakfast
  • I’m a real sketch fan! [below line-art sketches of random plants]
  • Nice tag line
  • FART (in 6 inch glittery letters)
  • Hurry up
  • It’s your turn / I like rugby it’s so fun [on a girl that I could have picked up and thrown with one hand]

Posted in China, General Life | 1 Comment »

The Starbucks Heuristic

May 18th, 2013, 5:07 am PDT by Greg

The algorithm I propose here starts with a city where you are unsure of the geography, and attempts to find the part of the city where there are things going on for a traveller to see and/or a neighbourhood where a western traveller will be safe and welcome. It is only a heuristic: I’m sure it can fail in some cases, but it’s pretty solid in my experience.

The method is this: (1) find the city you’re wondering about in Google Maps; (2) search for “Starbucks”; (3) look at the neighbourhoods with the greatest concentration of dots (not just the teardrop-shaped placemarks, but all of the little “here’s one” dots); (4) decide that those neighbourhoods are safe/interesting/happening.

I first applied the Starbucks Heuristic in Kota Kinabalu Malaysia. We went there knowing it wasn’t much on the beaten path for tourists. It guided us to a part of town where we found a nice hotel near the water, a food market, and some nice local shops.

Applying the heuristic in Shanghai finds the business area in Pudong, a strip along Nanjing Road, and somewhat smearing south into Xuhui. That’s probably right, based on my limited experience. I just checked this when advising a friend where to stay during an extended business trip to Shanghai. I think it verifies my initial advice.

Doing it with Manila finds Makati (the business district), another cluster around Ortigas (the other business district), and another around Fort Bonifacio. As I recall, those are pretty good bets for a foreign traveller in a city where not everywhere is particularly safe.

In Hangzhou you find the tourist/shopping area to the east of the Lake, moving north into a neighbourhood I should maybe explore more. In Vancouver, you find downtown and Kitsilano. In Portland you find downtown.

The algorithm fails for Barcelona where such things probably aren’t allowed in the old city, but it does find what I think is the business district to the north. In Rome, you find a very well-defined ring around the “tourist stuff”, which is probably what I’d expect.

My conclusion seems to be that the heuristic finds the business district in highly developed western cities. It finds westerner-friendly neighbourhoods elsewhere.

Please don’t confuse what I’m saying here with “I think you should go to Starbucks a lot on vacation.” Go to Starbucks however much you want: that’s none of my business. The Starbucks Heuristic simply finds the most foreigner-friendly part of a city. Whether or not you want to stay in that part of the city is also up to you.

Does anybody see any examples where this fails spectacularly, from the point of view of a slightly-ignorant traveller trying to find a neighbourhood for a hotel? Barcelona is the worst I could find.

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Things that happen in China

May 13th, 2013, 7:53 am PDT by Greg

On Mondays, I teach from 8:00–9:30 and 18:30–20:00. That makes for a weird day. After lecture, I decided to go to the western restaurant around the corner. I had calories left for a light dinner and a gin and tonic. The following was written as I was sitting there…

Things I can see from here: two groups of young hip Chinese having foreign food, and a group of mixed western guys.

I think that group is two French, one American, and one other (who isn’t talking so I can’t tell). They’re speaking mostly English. One of them just said “it’s like licking your own balls, man.” Sadly, I didn’t hear the setup: it was one of those moment where the brain takes so long to process what just happened, that it’s no longer possible to react appropriately.

They’re watching videos of guys falling off skateboards.

One of the tiny Chinese girls has a comically large mug of beer. It’s actually a regular pint, but it looks comical when she holds it. She has been nursing it for an hour, but I appreciate the effort.

Somehow, all of this makes me very happy. That might be the gin.

Posted in China, General Life | Comments Off on Things that happen in China