Shane Travels

Zoe is my other girlfriend here in the apartment. The noisy, stinky poop, one. Her favorites things to do are meow, eat, poop (stinky poop) and find warm places to sleep; usually my lap or in between me and my girlfriend. Zoe has been living with my girlfriend since another expat pulled up stakes and had to find someone kind enough to take her in. I suspect that, from time to time, my girlfriend has regretted this decision.

Zoe is like most cats in that she likes to eat, sleep and claw furniture. She is unlike other cats in the degree to which she expresses herself vocally and makes herself a nuisance. In the morning once she has dragged herself out of bed (she doesn’t wake us up to feed her… this is a good thing) meows incessantly and seemingly with no express purpose. In fact she does this anytime she gets up from sleep. If we are in the kitchen, she must be in the kitchen, and she will actually come running if she hears the fridge open. This is strange, since we don’t feed her people food and her food is not kept in the fridge. She likes to jump up on to the counter and from there to the top of the fridge, where she surveys the scene from above, behind the microwave. As a rule we don’t let her on the counters; however this move is pretty quick and difficult to intercept.

When not meowing or sleep on/next to us she can be found hiding out amongst my girlfriends clothes in the armoir in the bedroom. This is her favorite hiding spot. The doors of the armoir are usually closed and she likes being shut in there with a just a crack, so that she can sleep undisturbed. Her other favorite thing to do is to use her litter box. For a small cat she produces a lot of poop. A lot of very stinky poop. We keep the litter box in the bathroom under the sink and while this location makes clean up easy, it’s not so hot when you need to make use of it just after she’s made a deposit. Also annoying is how vigorous Zoe is in covering up her latest production. She uses far too much force resulting in litter being scattered all about the bathroom floor. The upshot is that we can hear when she’s just done her business so that we know to avoid the area.

Ok… enough about the cat….

I’m continuing to make progress on my mandarin studies. I have around 225 flashcards of which I have around 150-170 memorized. My pronunciation is still pretty rough around the edges, but it is improving. My biggest issue is when I have to think about the tone that I’m supposed to be producing. I’m fine with 1 (high, flat tone) and 3rd (rising/falling), but i often get 2nd (rising) and 4th (falling) mixed up when I have to think about it. That is when I know in my head that I need to use 2nd tone, I often produce a 4th and vice-versa.

Rather than being dependent on my girlfriend to write me the flashcards, by hand I found flashcard software for the Mac (iFlash), that allows me to use the built in language support on the mac to type the characters. This process is kind of neat. You enable fast switching between languages using (alt,command, space [switch to next]) / (command space [return to last]) and then type the pinyin word onto the card. Hitting the space bar drops down a list box allowing you to select the correct character. There can be many characters associated with the sound that the pinyin represents and the characters are quite small on the computer screen… so it takes me a few seconds to identify the correct character.

Using the flashcards in conjunction with the software is helping my recall quite a bit and I’m actually doing pretty well at recognizing the characters in the real world, where they are often represented using different fonts/writing styles. Of course recognizing individual characters doesn’t help much in the real world, where words are often made up of two or more characters.

牛肉 (Cow Meat - Important to identify food related characters when eating out)

It looks like I’ll be signing up with a tutor at some point this week. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

In the next post I’ll bring you up to speed on the local DVD stores and my thoughts on product placement in tv and advertising in general here in China.

hope this finds you happy and healthy

shane

Hello to all. I’ve been in Shanghai now for a little over a week, so I thought I’d best get around to writing a blog post for any/all interested parties out there. There are lots of things I could blog about, but I thought I’d start by giving you a window into our life here in Shanghai. My girlfriend (who shall remain nameless) arranged a two bedroom apartment for us in the Jing’an district of Shanghai, just north of Jing’an Temple and the metro station of the same name.

For those who are curious check out the following google map (Zoom in around flag A… and you’ll be in the right area… approx):

View Larger Map

The apartment was furnished with and in what landlords felt was a typical western style. Which meant loads of western “kitsch“. My girlfriend spent quite a bit of time gathering up the mountains of such stuff and piling it into the front hall closet. It’s an impressive collection, of which the only thing likely to get a second showing is the fake Christmas tree. Unfortunately there is so much of the stuff that we’ve lost the use of the closet.

Our kitchen is quite small, but is functional. The fridge/freezer works, but is a bit rough round the edges; our two gas burners are great. I finally understand and appreciate the expression “now we’re cooking with gas”. Having never used a gas stove regularly… I now have difficulty imagining returning to electric burners.

We have a washing machine, but no dryer, which means like all of the other residents of our apartment our laundry gets hung out to dry on a metal clothing rack just below the window in our living room. As long as you don’t mind your neighbors being able to look over your unmentionables and losing the odd piece of clothing to the wind, this approach seems to make sense. We’re on the 15th floor, so if you’re afraid of heights leaning out the window to hang laundry isn’t going to be for you.

There are a number of local grocery stores and restaurants, so it seems I won’t starve. Actually the food here is great and since my girlfriend taught me how to make Edamame it has replaced my normal snack food… popcorn. Plus microwave popcorn here is most likely to be of the sweet variety… yuck.

My mandarin studies are coming along better than I anticipated. I’ve memorized around 50 characters so far and have been exposed to, via the learning software I’m using, to around 100-150. My pronunciation needs quite a bit of work, but I’m beginning to be able to pick out common words and expressions used around me while out and about in the world. This is gratifying. I’m looking forward to being able to ask a native mandarin speaker something and get back a look of complete mystification. I understand that the key thing is to be confident, speak loudly and if in doubt of the tones… just speed it up… those who know me… know that speeding up the delivery of the way I talk has never been a problem for me.

For those curious what I’ve reading / read since arriving:

Made to Stick - Chip and Dan Heath: Found this book fascinating. They explore what makes an idea stick. Helpful to me in terms of understanding marketing as well as how to make communication in general more engaging. I’m afraid I didn’t apply any of it’s teachings to the above blog post

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why - Richard E. Nisbett.: I’m about half-way through this book and think it’s worth a read if you’re working with Global teams.

I’ll finish off this post with a couple pictures of me and my camera shy girlfriend in the new apartment. Hope this finds you happy and healthy.

shane

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