Groanin' Jock's Chinglish Adventures Volume IV: Let Me Care You

It's been a while since I wowed both of my regular readers with an example of Chinglish, the exciting language that bolts English words together in ways no-one from an English-speaking country (or Scotland) would ever have thought possible.

Today's example is from the giant panda enclosure at Shanghai Zoo. It's nice that the panda in question wants to care me, just like he cares himself, as we're the same age. And he gets to spend all day eating bamboo and picking his arse. I can only aspire to that kind of career.

For further examples of Groanin Jock's Chinglish Adventures, take a look here. And here. Oh, and here as well.

Evil

I've seen a lot of pretty disgusting things in my time - a 15-year-old Thai girl, heavily pregnant with her second child, butchering a dog for that night's dinner.

A restuarant described by a tour guide as "the best in Vietnam" crawling with cockroaches.

The carcass of a dead and trampled mouse found underneath a rug after several months lying undiscovered.

A Chinese woman skinning a basket of live frogs.

But today, as I walked from the train station to my office, I was met by the sight of something that I wasn't really prepared for at that time of the morning...

...a massive seagull tucking into a hearty breakfast of dead pigeon.

I'm presuming that the pigeon had been hit by a car, and not that the seagull had hunted its fellow bird down.

However it came upon its meal, the seagull seemed to be making the most of its good fortune, sqwuaking merrily as it ripped into the chest cavity, feathers flying everywhere.

I've said before that I have a phobia of birds, and one less pigeon is a victory for the forces of good in this world.

But being confronted by a seagull dismembering a pigeon on the pavement at 7.45am?

It's almost enough to put me off my Sugarpuffs.

Mr Henderson

Of all the funny things that I saw, heard, read and ate in China (yes, ate: tofu, good God....) the funniest of them all involved no Chinese people, no Chinglish and no chopstick-related mayhem.

It is a curious fact that that funniest thing that happened to me in China involved Mrs Wife and an orang-utang.

Ever since our lives became entwined, it has been a strange custom of ours to visit, when possible, the zoo for her birthday.

As Mrs Wife turned 28 during our Shanghai sojourn, we decided to take a trip out the city's zoo. Truthfully, we weren't sure what to expect - we'd heard rumours that the quality of the enclosures might be someway short of that found in the west, and that we should prepare for the worst.

But in truth, the standards weren't too bad - perhaps not as high as would be expected in Edinburgh or London, but certainly of sufficient size that the animals could move around freely and explore the confines of their cages.

By far the worst aspect of the zoo was the Chinese customers, who ignored the rules forbidding the feeding of animals and merrily threw sweeties in wrappers to bears and attempted to attract the attentions of a red panda with a sandwich.

The zoo is massive, and walking around in the scorching sun was tiring. But, as the end of the day approached, it began to seem as though we had the park to ourselves, most of the Chinese having departed.

And it was near closing time that we found the primates. As ever, the gorillas and chimpanzees were highly entertaining, given how closely related they are to ourselves.

Having spent a good few minutes watching our near cousins, Mrs Wife and I arrived in the deserted orang-utang building, where two of the apes were separated by a wall that split the enclosure.

As Mrs Wife watched the comic antics of a young orang-utang, I wandered to the other side of the enclosure, where I found myself face-to-face with a six-foot plus male.

I don't think I've ever been that close to a fully-grown male orang-utang before, and I expressed my surprise by shouting to Mrs Wife: "Come and see, it's a yeti."

Mrs Wife duly obliged, and spent several minutes in silent awe as the creature checked us out, swung around on a tyre and then climbed a rope.

Finally, the silence was broken when Mrs Wife said: "I don't think I've ever seen a yeti before."

Groanin' Jock's Chinglish Adventures Volume III: Buried With The Died Wifeless Man

The third installment of the series that may never end takes us to the Chinese Sex Museum.

Yep, that's right, the Chinese Sex Museum. A collection of art, artefacts and hideous devices detailing the history of sex and sex culture in the world's oldest culture.

Included in the exhibition were countless phallic pieces of pottery, statues of men naked and erect and even an awful punishment device for cheating women that took the form of a saddle that you attached to a donkey that had a massive wooden penis attached to it - it's pretty much indescribable.....

Anyway, the image above is from a caption referring to a jade statue. And obviously it was used for buried with the died wifeless man.

Because every died wifeless man needs a jade statue of a woman to remind him that, not only did he not get any when he was alive, he's sure as hell not getting any now he's dead.

Croaked It

I've spent most of my life in Scotland, and as a result, I'm always keen to see a new part of the planet - broadening the mind, I think it's called.

Mrs Wife and I have trekked through the jungles of northern Thailand; stood halfway up what, at that time, was the world's tallest building and looked out onto the minarets of Kuala Lumpur and onwards to the haze-shrouded hills on the horizon; snorkelled at the Great Barrier Reef; swum in the warm Pacific waters around Fiji; and drunk cheap Mexican beer in a Hollywood garden until the early hours of the morning.

But despite all our previous globe-trotting, there were some things we encountered in Shanghai that we've never seen anywhere else.

For example, on a day trip to Qibao, we spent an hour or so wandering the tightly-packed streets, where we were told we were experiencing "real China".

Many of the shops on these streets were traditional Chinese eateries, where passers-by can grab a quick snack as they head onwards towards their next engagement.

And the food on offer was a tad different to that found in your average greasy spoon cafe.

We saw whole birds impaled on skewers and deep fried, beak, eyes and all. Meats of in an arresting array of unusual colours that we didn't even want to know what animal had met its maker during the butchering process.

Most alarmingly of all (and something that still gives Mrs Wife a severe case of the heebie-jeebies) was a woman sitting on a doorstep skinning a bucket of live frogs and transferring them to a second bucket. The second bucket was a writhing mass of slithering, blood-soaked limbs.

Eating habits aside, the Chinese have an attiutude to many things that, to western eyes, seems strange.

Public spitting and urination is taken for granted. Infants don't wear nappies, but instead have trousers with big holes at the rear. When the child shows signs of needing to relieve itself, it is dangled over the nearest bush/gutter/river and left to get on with things.

Personal space doesn't exist. In a country of 1.3 billion people, perhaps that's understandable. But in the street, people in cars, on motorbikes or on bicycles will cut across your path without warning. On the pavements, pedestrians will do the same, walking diagonally in front of you so that you need to check your pace or stop suddenly to avoid banging into them.

In short, China can, for the first few days, be an infuriating place to visit. But, once you've adjusted to the pace of life in one of the world's most crowded and chaotic cities, it's easier to adapt to the rhythm - knowing that cars don't always stop at red lights, that Chinese people have no interest in anything that is happening directly behind them and that if you really want to buy something in the "fakes" markets, pick a price you'd be willing to pay and stick to it.

Just watch out for the woman with the bucket of skinned frogs.

Smokin'

I should really be posting more about Shanghai (or at the very least about the European Championships), but instead I feel the need to mention that in the space of five minutes today, I saw two men smoking pipes.

It seems a curious addition to the wardrobe, but there's no accessory quite like a pipe. The first gentleman I saw was honking on his in a determined fashion, puffing great clouds of soot and smoke into the faces of half of Union Street's shoppers. That he was wearing an arresting red tartan jacket, green cords and blue shoes simply added to his style.

The second piper (pipee?) seemed to be using his huge black smoking apparatus as a smoke-powered engine for climbing the steep brae at Market Street - sooking in a big lungful of burning bush before each step.

Both of these men looked to be at least in their seventies, which got me pondering - do young folk smoke pipes?

I don't think I've ever seen a pipe smoked by someone who doesn't also carry a bus pass while wearing a bunnet.

Maybe I should invest in one - it would go perfectly with my wardrobe of cheap Tesco suits and fake clothes from China.

Groanin' Jock's Chinglish Adventures Volume II: Yellow Old Man Of May

Continuing the series that no-one's waiting for, here's my second Chinglish discovery.

This headline appeared in a magazine in which the headlines were thoughtfully translated into English, but the remainder of the text appeared in Chinese script.

Perhaps this is a way of teaching Chinese readers English; if so, I think it probably falls someway short of the mark.

Can anyone shed some light on what "Yellow Old Man of May Daughter Scissors Hand" might mean?

Art Of Noise

The first thing that struck me when I stepped on Chinese soil for the first time was how quiet it was.

Given that the population of Shanghai is estimated at between 16 million and 25 million people, this may seem a strange admission, but there's a reason for it.

In a piece of bureaucratic genius, all Chinese people take their holidays at exactly the same time.

Which means that, when the holidays arrive, 1.3 billion people take to the roads, rails and skies and trample merrily across their vast country in seek of a break from their day-to-day lives.

It also means, as our host Paul pointed out, that all Chinese transport hubs need to be 10 times the size they would be if the government-approved holidays didn't exist.

And so it was that Mrs Wife and I arrived at Shanghai's new(ish) Pudong airport, where it seemed that our flight was the only one that was arriving or departing.

The baggage reclaim hall was eerily quiet. The queues for immigration control were minimal and efficient in a "why are you coming to China?" way.

But, having cleared customs, we were given our first taste of real Shanghai.

Firstly, the heat blasted through the open doors of the terminal building. I've been in hotter places in the past, but not for a while. I shouldn't need to point out the climatic differences between Aberdeen and southern China.

But a much stronger force hit us as we walked out into the arrivals hall - the racket generated by any group of Chinese people.

From my observations, I think the Chinese may be the loudest nation on Earth. If something can be done, it seems that the Chinese ethos is that it should be done as noisily as possible. If a car has a horn, lean on it while you drive. If your scooter sounds louder if you rev the engine harder, make sure you rev it to its limits, preferably while blasting away on your horn as well.

And this mentality extends to all walks of life. If you're meeting someone at the airport, shout at them from the moment you see them. If everyone else is shouting as well, just shout louder - you'll win eventually.

I'd been to crowded cities before we visited Shanghai, amongst them Hanoi, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London. None of them are even in the same league as Shanghai.

As I've already said, China is a nation of 1.3 billion people. And wherever you go, it feels like half of them are there with you.

Get on the bus, and you'll be lucky to get a seat (even luckier if someone moves out of your way so that you can sit on the empty seat beside them). Attempt to take the subway and, if it's a busy period (ie between 6am and 9pm), you'll be squeezed against three Chinese guys, all of them fiddling with their PSPs, all with the volume turned up full, all playing different games.

Visit a restaurant, whether a traditional Chinese eatery or a KFC or McDonalds, and you'll fight through a scrum of hungry punters, then find yourself seated next to a party of eight playing drinking games at the top of their voices.

Frankly, Shanghai is bedlam. Practically everywhere you go in the city centre, someone is attempting to sell you something, whether a "long kite", a fake rolex or pirate DVDs.

But despite the madness, it's a place with its own charms - from the futuristic Pudong skyline to the relaxed charms of the French Concession and the good-humoured banter of the antiques market in the Old Town.

There are plenty more tales to come from our Shanghai experience - stop me if I'm boring you....

Groanin' Jock's Chinglish Adventures Volume I: You're Polite People

Well, we're home, and thoroughly exhausted by the combination of walking around one of the world's biggest, noisiest, dustiest, smoggiest cities, not to mention the jetlag and the fact that I was back in work at a time scandalously close to the arse crack of dawn yesterday.

Given that this is my "I'm home" post, I don't want to go into too much detail on what happened in China, but I'll come back to it in the fullness of time.

Instead, I'll firstly thank the wonderful guest posters who have filled the empty pages here at Dungroanin' during my absence - Misssy M, Erica, The Tomahawk Kid and Rachel - all of whom have done a far better job than me of being witty, entertaining and articulate.

And I'll also begin a brand new series right here, right now: Groanin' Jock's Chinglish Adventures.

Chinglish is a curious language that exists only in China. This peculiar written language tends to occur in places where Chinese directions or instructions have been translated into English in a less than coherent manner. And in Shanghai, they can be found everywhere - on street signs, in museums, in the printed media and on people's clothes.

This first one is from a street sign at a pedestrian crossing in central Shaghai.

Chee-ree-oh, We're Off To China

The next time you hear from me, I'll either be in China or back from China.

Be nice to the guest posters.

If anyone needs us, we'll be with Paul Langmead.

Getting Ready

I'm tired, thanks to getting home late last night after playing in the Aberdeen Oil League then watching the UEFA Cup Final.

I couldn't possibly pass on mentioning the Rangers match, disappointing though the result was.

But if anyone had told me at the start of the season that Rangers would play in a European final within the next year, I would have thought them insane.

The better team won last night, but Rangers played to their strengths, defending (fairly) solidly and looking to catch Zenit on the break.

And in the second half, just as it looked as though Rangers might take the lead through their continued pressure, Zenit scored, and the match was over.

So yes, I'm disappointed, but extremely proud of the club for having made it to Manchester in the first place. Now we can turn our attentions to the league....

The next few days are likely to be spent in a blur as I attempt to get all my shit together before flying off to China. But even before then, I'm going to be a busy boy. Tonight, Dungroanin' will be graced by Eric, my Blogfather and everyone's favourite Heterosexual Caucasian Male, and his wife Fiona, who are in these frozen northern climes for a holiday.

So we'll catch up, set the world to rights and share a drink or two, safe in the knowledge that neither of us has to work the next day.

Friday will be spent packing and preparing everything for departure to Shanghai, including delivering Mrs Wife's rabbits, Pepper and Dylan, to a rabbit boarding establishment. Yep, such a thing exists.

That will be followed by the Dirty Pretty Things concert in Dundee, which should be pretty darn good, what with DPT being a Libertines/Cooper Temple Clause indie supergroup. Which will, in turn, be followed by a night in a hotel at Glasgow airport before we jet off.

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to blog while I'm away, so I've arranged for a few kind souls to drop by and keep both my readers amused in the interim. And they're likely to be so good that my presence here will no longer be required.

Bedtime

It's 2am, and I should really be in bed.

No doubt Mrs Wife has a fun-filled day planned for me tomorrow, what with it being our last weekend at home until the end of May.

I expect that tomorrow's (today's) chores will include cutting the grass, which is a pain in the hole at the best of times but is an especially annoying pain of the whole when it clashes with watching Soccer AM or listening to Rangers v Dundee Utd on the wireless.

(As an aside, my Granny always called the radio the wireless, even though it was always plugged in. Even as a wee boy, that struck me as strange. She also referred to the black stuff on roads as Tarmacadam, which, while it is the correct term, hasn't been used by anyone else since the stuff was invented.)

It seems strange to think that in a week's time, Mrs Wife and I will be en route from Dundee to Glasgow, having just seen Dirty Pretty Things at Fat Sams, and that 24 hours later will be winging our way to Shanghai via Amsterdam.

The extent of my preparation so far has been to pile four new shirts on the spare bed, buy a travel pillow and the Lonely Planet China book and try to find out where in Shanghai I can buy cheap electrical goods and hooky DVDs.

I should really be preparing now, but I'm too busy flicking randomly and distractedly through the hundreds of channels on Sky.

And halfheartedly praying for rain so that I don't have to cut the grass.

RIP MTB

Every day, I'm accompanied almost wherever I go by the Magic Tune Box, an incredible device bearing within its dainty frame 15,000 songs.

At least I was until yesterday.

Whilst transferring new music onto the Magic Tune Box, its battery died. "Nobig deal," I thought, "I'll just plug it in."

Except, when I did, it started rebuilding its internal library. And when it had completed that task, it had miraculously lost 2,500 tracks. Not whole albums, not tracks in any logical order. Just 2,500 random tracks.

Despite this sudden removal of 20 per cent of its total of its contents, this incredible piece of technology had decided not to free up the disk space previously allocated to the tracks. So I'm left with a machine missing key tracks from most albums, its memory full and no way of resetting.

So, as a permanent solution, I'm going to sell my soul and jump on the IPod band wagon (10 years too late). I've decided to invest in a 160GB IPod Classic, which I'm hoping to pick up fairly cheap in China next week.

(Doesn't that last sentence make me sound like a real global traveller. Worse still, at one point in the past day, I uttered the phrase "Maybe Ican fit it in between Shanghai and Stavanger." Which probably just makes me sound like a wanker.)

Anyway, RIP Magic Tune Box. It's been a pleasure.

Of Hiccups, Monster Bobs and Visas

The dust is finally settling on a fairly hectic weekend and I'm almost able to keep my eyes open long enough to post, so I'll try to collect my thoughts.

Friday's working day culminated in a leaving night for a fellow employee, and the drink was flowing freely at the start of the evening. My recollections of events are hazy, but I'm told that my Elvis impersonation kept my colleagues amused.

Thankfully, I had the sense to bail out before things got too messy, and instead subjected the passengers on the Aberdeen to Montrose train to a spectacular bout of hiccups that lasted for the duration of the journey. These hiccups were more like sonic booms, and were so loud that I could hear them above Definitely Maybe cranked up full blast on the Magic Tune Box.

Having arrived in Montrose, I decided that food was required, and treated myself to a pizza. The first bite removed removed several layers off the interior lining of my mouth, and in shock I managed to spill molten cheese on both my hands. All in all, a fairly eventful post-pub meal.

After staggering from the pizza shop to Dungroanin', I managed to scare Pepper, Mrs Wife's rabbit, half to death, then retreated to bed.

Unfortunately, Saturday dawned for me at the early hour of 7.30am. Unable to get back to sleep, I settled on the couch, wrapped in a fake fur throw, and allowed my hangover to build up a head of steam.

What I found out later in the day was that a combination of hail, snow, horizontal rain and howling winds, mixed with the standard of football offered up in an end-of-season Angus derby, is enough to shift even the most stubborn of hangovers.

Though the match wasn't dire, the standard of refereeing, in a league renowned for atrocious officials, was honking, and the man in black's performance was enough in itself to deny Montrose a confirmed play-off spot. For a week at least.

And so Saturday night started with me shivering, attempting to restore my core body temperature to something above freezing and preparing for a second consecutive night on the lash.

I believe a good time was had by all, with most of the assembled crowd enjoying their first visit to Roo's Leap. This vast amount of food was washed down with a few civilised drinks....

....Which doesn't really explain how I ended up finally going to bed at 6am, having woken the whole house with an impromptu didgeridoo solo.

My body clock must still be on British Winter Time, because I awoke at 8.30am, unable to do anything but doze fitfully until my lift to Dundee arrived. Why Dundee? To take in the Dundee United v Rangers SPL match, one of the more entertaining games I've been to this season, albeit one in which the final result left a lot to be desired. But no team can expect to go behind three times and still win a match.

A long day at work on Monday was followed by a trip north to Ellon, where Mrs Wife acquired her second rabbit, a bouncing boy now known as Dylan (in tribute to Robert Zimmerman, not The Magic Roundabout).

Introducing Dylan and Pepper has been a high-tension affair. Pepper is no longer in possession of her womanly organs, but Dylan still has a full set of boy bits, and he's eager to use them. So far, as Pepper has investigated this newcomer, she's smacked him around the nose a few times and attempted to give him a warning nibble on the nose. But Dylan seems to take this as foreplay, so there may be testing times ahead.

Yesterday, the 28th anniversary of my arrival on this planet, saw Mrs Wife and I venture south to Edinburgh, with the intention of collecting our Chinese visas. Unfortunately, the Chinese Consulate is an awkward beast, and no amount of discussion or offers of cash would tempt them to process the application in a single day. Which means that I'll have to make a return journey next week.

So, a busy weekend means I'm pretty shattered and looking forward to a few evenings of realxing on the sofa to recuperate.

I must be getting old.

Perfect Guide

My Chinese guidebook arrived in the mail this morning, and I've been enthralled by it for the past hour.

I love guidebooks and everything about them. Looking at pictures of far-off lands I intend to visit very soon, reading about the history of a culture so alien to my own that it may as well be from another planet.

Everything about the Lonely Planet guidebooks is measured to perfection - from wide-ranging histories of the countries covered down to miniscule details of where to find a vegetarian restaurant or a laundrette in the smallest backwater town.

Although Mrs Wife and I will only be visiting Shanghai, the book I have covers the whole of China, and I can quite imagine that I'll read the whole thing before we head eastwards.

Opening the book at random places, I find ideas for entertainment in Hong Kong's Kowloon area, details on bike tours of Hangzhou and a recommendation to visit the West Street Bar in Suzhou, which is described as a "three storey bar crammed full of Chinese and European antiques. With its homey ambience, eclectic crowd and friendly management, it's a great place to relax with a beer".

Will I ever enjoy a bike ride around Hangzhou or a beer in Suzhou? Probably not. But just reading about them is almost enough to make me jack in my job and head off eastwards in search of adventure, becoming a perennial traveller.

Almost....

Heading For China

I've seen a fair bit of this wee planet in my near 28 years wandering about its surface, but at the end of this month I'll be able to add another entry to the list of countries I've visited.

Bouyed by a couple of recent bonuses at work, Mrs Wife and I will be heading off to China for the last two weeks in May, to spend time with an old friend in Shanghai.

Back in the days when Mrs Wife was known as Miss Girlfriend, we set off on a year-long jaunt around the globe, a trip that included visits to several of the countries in Southeast Asis. Unfortunately, financial and time constraints meant it wasn't possible to take in China or Japan, and I've been keen ever since to visit both.

It seems the planets have aligned in our favour this time, as never before have we had the financial wherewithal to visit China at a time when we've got a ready-made tour guide willing to offer accommodation into the deal.

In my western mind, it seems strange to contemplate visiting China without heading to the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army or Hong Kong, but the distances to be covered would make such trips unfeasible given that we have only two weeks in China. Therefore, we are effectively heading to China blind, with no idea of what we will see or do once we arrive.

Our friend, who we met on our round-the-world adventure almost five years ago, has already begun working on an itinerary, so we may soon have a fair idea of what awaits us in a city that I have heard is amongst the most fascinating in the world. That Mrs Wife celebrates her birthday and we celebrate our wedding anniversary whilst there will simply add to the festivities.

So, does anyone fancy a blogmeet in Shanghai sometime in late May?