Free Wisdom Online: Beijing: Setting Idioma to Zhongwen

September 9, 2006

Setting Idioma to Zhongwen

A stories I recently remembered from our trip to China:

During one of our last days in Beijing we went to a large market where people were selling all sorts of stuff. As everywhere in such places, they often tried to warm us up for a sale by asking a whole bunch of friendly questions like "Where are you from?" I lazily replied that I was from Russia and my wife was from Brazil. The next question surprized me a bit more: "Do you speak Spanish?" Asking Brazilians and their spouses if they speak Spanish is one of those things that earns Americans a reputation for being just as dumb as their president, but in China it was more amusing than annoying. "A little bit," I replied, without bothering to lecture her on the fact that Brazilians do not speak Spanish. "Can you help us fix this mp3 player, then?" was the next question. It turned out that while playing with one of the mp3 players that they were selling, they changed the language to Spanish. As is often the case with bad UI, there was no way to change the interface back to Chinese without knowing the Spanish word "idioma." Luckily for her, she was selling her toys at one of the most popular markets in cosmopolitan Beijing, where one can hope to catch a Spanish-speaking Russian. I switched the idioma of the MP3 player back to 中文. They were quite thankful and didn't even try selling anything to us.

Filed under: Harbin , Beijing

Comments

Quoth George, on January 22, 2008 at 6:50 p.m.:

You know my dear rusian friend, if I were you , I would restrain from calling americans dumb. For one thing I don't where you live, but I assume you are in brasil, and if you are in Brasil, out of everybody you should be the last one to call americans dumb. The way I see, your Lula IS the representation of whole nation. You elected a thief, an ignorant and a demagog TWICE...now tell me who is dumb...and then there are your own Monicas and the senators..he he he
I lived in brasil for 20+ years and I do know the history very well. I know Rio, Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, Brasilia. I did work in ES and I know the misery of the north and Nordeste. And also, I was born in Harbin...
Being american, I enjoy your honesty and believe you have the right to express your thoughts...and this is what makes America the envy of the world.
Listen, my family has a LOT of photos from Harbin, Dairen ( close to ex Port Arthur ) and Tiensin. Who knows we may exchange some information and may be we'll find out we were neighbours in Harbin or even Brasil.
My e-mail is [removed] - in memory of my mother's godfather. Foi bom bater um papo contigo "tocaio".

Quoth Yuri, on January 24, 2008 at 1:17 a.m.:

yurindomnavolge,

I don't believe I ever called Americans dumb. I said Americans have a reputation abroad for being dumb (which they most certainly do in pretty much every country that I ever visited), and that this reputation is earned in part by people who assume all of Latin America speaks Spanish. I do realize, though, that this reputation also has much to do with the perceived mismatch between Americans' education and income. Americans earn more than Brazilians or Russians with the same level of education. To put this differently, an American who earns $N per year often has less education than a Brazilian who earns as much. So, under-educated (and pour) Brazilians stay at home, while under-educated (but rich) American get to travel around the world. But I think it also has much to do with a perceived mismatch between Americans' knowledge of the world and their ability to f**k it up. Whatever you think of Brazilians' choice of their president, their choice affects only themselves. In the worst case Lula will make _Brazil_ into a mess. It doesn't matter whether an average Brazilian knows the difference between Iran and Iraq - the president they elect won't get to decide which one to bomb next. Not so when Americans vote for their president. So, I do think American's knowledge of the world gets judged quite harshly. But perhaps for a good reason.

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Please leave your comments. The comments are moderated against link spam and may not appear on the site immediately. Comentários em português são bem-vindos. Puede escribir en castellano también, pero puedo responder solamente en Portuñol. Mozhno po-russki, no v nastoyaschii moment tol'ko v translite. You can also email me at yuri{at}freewisdom.org.

August 29, 2006

The Rest of our China Trip

After the trip to the Great Wall, our tour of China was essentially complete. Next morning we headed for Harbin, but before we took off I took an opportunity to take some photos of the hutong in which we were staying. The pictures only begin to capture its bicycleness!

[slideshow] [complete album]

After that we took a plane to Harbin, where we stayed for one night and the following day. Harbin was mildly interesting with sites like "Stalin Park," the largest Russian Orthodox church in Asia (or so they say), neon signs in Russian (usually wrong) and general desire to be a "Russian" city in China despite the absence of actual Russians. Actual Russians were a lot less numerous in Harbin than I expected, but apparently they are the main type of foreigners. As a result, we kept noticing strange looks (more so than in places like Nanjing), until we heard a woman on the sidewalk say to another after staring at us for a minute: "Are those Russians?" It then all made sense: places like Nanjing do not get as many foreign tourists but those who do come there look like us, so we did not look so strange relative to other foreigners. In Harbin we did.

[slideshow] [album 1] [album 2]

After a day in Harbin we took an overnight train to Suifenhe - a small border town on the border with Russia. Buying the ticket to Suifenhe at the Harbin railroad station was quite an adrenaline rush, but a combination of rudimentary Mandarin, gestures (two hands next to cheek to show "sleeping") and a number written on a piece of paper did the trick. We arrived in Suifenhe early in the morning, headed for the bus station and took the first bus accross the border. After 3 hours at the border we were in Russia - the first time that I crossed into Russia by land (not counting coming from semi-independent Latvia in 1991). About 5 hours later we were in Vladivostok.

We spent three weeks in Vladivostok (pictures coming next), then took a bus back to Harbin, from where we flew to Beijing. We spent another three days in Beijing on the way back, but I had lost the battery charger for my camera and thus didn't take any pictures.

Filed under: Vladivostok , Harbin , Beijing

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August 17, 2006

The Great Wall

On our fourth day we took advantage of a tour organized by our hostel to "do" the Great Wall in a more hard-core way than most tourists. There are several sites where one can go to see the wall near Beijing, all about 2 hours away. Badaling and Mitanyu are supposed to be the most restored site, both packed with tourists. Simatai and Jinshanling are two relatively unrestored segments, with connected by about 10 km of nearly uninterrupted wall. So, the deal was that a bus would take us to Jinshanling and then pick up from Simatai five hours later. The hike between the two took us a little over four hours and was quite exhausting since you end up going up and down all the time. Thanks god it was early June - I wouldn't recommend this hike in July.

The Great Wall doesn't change all that much from one kilometer to another, so we probably would have seen enough after an hour. Walking on it for four hours, however, is a good way to start appreciating the scale of the thing. For this reason, I present the reader with a somewhat repetitive collection of photos: as we saw it.

[slideshow] [complete album]

Filed under: Beijing

Comments

Quoth Ingrid Hayes, on December 12, 2007 at 3:20 p.m.:

I love these photographs! I've been here and tears almost come to my eyes as I remember everything I experienced in China when I lived there. Thank you for sharing them.

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August 17, 2006

Biking through Beijing

On our third day in Beijing we followed the advice of the Lonely Planet and rented bikes. It did turn out to be a good idea - Beijing is as flat as it gets (except for one hill in the middle built from the earth excavated during the construction of a moat for the Forbidden City) and generally bike-friendly. Some of the bigger streets may be a little intimidating, but many have dedicated bike lanes (in some cases up to 10 m wide) and there are plenty of small alleys that are perfect for bikes.

[slideshow] [complete album]

Filed under: Beijing

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August 8, 2006

Beijing Alleys and the Hutong

After nearly a day in the Forbidden City we headed to an area south of Tiananmen Square to get some dinner. On the way, I took pictures of one of Beijing's quiter streets running along the western wall of the Forbidden City.

[slideshow] [complete album]

After dinner (a Peking duck at Quanjude which re-defined Peking duck for us), we walked through a nearby hutong (narrow alleys filled with old buidings).

[slideshow] [complete album]

After wandering around the hutong for some time we finally hit a larger street, where we saw a fine example of popular education:

[slideshow] [complete album]

Filed under: Beijing

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June 28, 2006

The Forbidden City

The next morning we started the day with a trip to the Forbidden City. It's called the Forbidden City for a reason - we spent about five hours there, and left when we got tired, without a certainty that we've seen all of it.

[slideshow] [complete album]

Filed under: Beijing

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June 27, 2006

Arriving in Beijing

The next morning we took a plain from Shanghai to Beijing, where we reserved a place at a hostel (through hostelworld as usually). The hostel was located in a recently gentrified "hutong" (Beijing's "favelas") which featured featured narrow alleys filled with both the original hutong life and US-style coffee houses (selling coffee at 2-3 times SF price). We were arguably walking distance to the Forbidden City and we thus wasted about 40 minutes for this walk, much of which turned out to not be worth it. We eventually hit the Forbidden City walked around it and got to Tiananmen Square where several people wanted to take pictures with us. Later in the day we ended up walking along one of the busy shopping streets nearby eventually hitting on a street lined up with street vendors selling the scarriest stuff: fried silk warms, cicadas, scorpions, etc. We settled for a snake as a compromize - scarry enough, but still edible.