f o r e i g n w o r d s

2010-05-21T16:56:00.002+08:00

1. เพื่อน -friend. Word I kind of knew but needed to know the tone and how to spell...
2. ต่อ - next.... as in a sequence of things.

2010-05-20T23:14:00.001+08:00

1. ในวันข้างหน้า - Literally, like, in the coming days... "the future".
2. หมอ - doctor. I went to see one today. Know how to say rhinoscopy in Thai?

2010-05-19T18:19:00.001+08:00

1. โทรศัพท์ - telephone. I feel like there's probably an English-based borrowed word for this, but it might just be for mobile phone, or not at all.
2. ย้าย - to move (as in, to move away/move out).

2010-05-18T01:38:00.001+08:00

1. แทบ - almost
2. ไร้ - without

Yesterday's

2010-05-17T09:52:00.003+08:00

1. เข้า - to attend (as of a meeting). This word can also be paired with the words "come" ( เข้ามา ) and "go" ( เข้าไป ) and have the same meaning, but I suppose they connote "to come (or go) to an event"; there's also "เข้าประชุม" which is actually "to attend a meeting." Useful.
2. ปลงใจ - to make a decision, make up one's mind.

2010-05-15T18:53:00.001+08:00

1. อาจ - particle used with another verb to indicate possibility "may-" "might-"
2. แน่นอน - of course, certainly.

One month worth of words

2010-05-14T15:09:00.003+08:00

I started my two-words-a-day on 4/13/10. As of yesterday, I've completed a month's worth of words (except that in review, I discovered I used one word twice without realizing, but it's an important one). I'll go through the trouble of typing the Thai up later, but I want to print the vocab list out for myself to try to write them all in correctly as a review. In chronological order they are:
1. Important
2. Really
3. Question
4. Sleep
5. Again
6. Write
7. To help
8. Monday
9. To use
10. Of, belonging to
11. Every
12. Tuesday
13. Wednesday
14. Fast
15. Thursday
16. To read
17. Present participle, -ing
18. To come
19. He/she (3rd person singular pronoun)
20. Future tense participle; “will –“ (used this twice)
21. We (1st person plural pronoun)
22. (duplicate)
23. foreign
24. Friday
25. To go
26. “must-… “need to…”
27. weather
28. comparitive degree particle “more…”
29. to see, look
30. Saturday
31. Car
32. Because
33. Station
34. City/town
35. To practice
36. Maybe
37. Table
38. Student
39. Tired, sleepy
40. Spider
41. Market
42. Beautiful
43. Pineapple
44. Music
45. Explain
46. Mango
47. Magazine
48. Although
49. Hungry
50. To begin
51. Thirsty
52. To prepare
53. To change
54. Way, method
55. Problem
56. To wait
57. To enjoy
58. Month
59. To remember
60. Difficult
61. Easy
62. Week

2010-05-14T14:42:00.002+08:00

1. เช่น - example
2. จึง - therefore. Sometimes it's little connecting words like these that really polish up your speech. Instead of churning out choppy small sentences and letting the listener make the (hopefully) obvious connections on their own (which sounds like beginner's speech) having some conjunctions and connective words like this makes a train of thought much more fluid. They're often small to begin with, and (at least in Thai and Chinese) don't conjugate or change form; they just hold a place, and that's it. Good stuff to know.

Today's

2010-05-13T14:37:00.000+08:00

1. ง่าย - easy
2. อาทิตย์ - week

I was at the hot springs yesterday.

2010-05-13T14:30:00.000+08:00

1. จำ - to remember.
2. ยาก - difficult.

2010-05-11T23:55:00.001+08:00

1. เพลิน - to enjoy. This seems to be a more 1:1 translation than what we try to come up with in Chinese... 享有 is the dictionary translation, but it's used infrequently...
2. เดือน - month

2010-05-10T14:08:00.003+08:00

1. ปัญหา - problem. Glad this word exists in Thai. In Chinese, the word for 'question' and 'problem' are actually the same. It's 問題. So... although I suppose a native speaker gathers from context what the correct meaning is, asking a student if he has any 問題 regarding the information we just studied still seems vague to me. Asking if you have any questions is one thing, but asking if there's a problem is different. If talking specifically about a problem, as in hardship, you could use 難題, which is literally more like 'difficulty' and this serves to be more clear, but it's also more serious. Also, simply asking someone with a blank look on their face if they have a question is far more polite (and probably more well-received) than asking that same blanked out person if they have a problem; but again, I suppose this distinction just isn't... as paid attention to as in English. Glad it's different in Thai.
2. คอย - to wait. (this is also part of the word for 'watch tower' (or one of them, anyway). It's หอคอย, but for the one we use in service, it's หอสังเกตการณ์. Yeah. Longer. The former actually means 'waiting tower' whereas the latter one is a tower for watching, but they're both translated as watchtower. I can see why the latter is more appropriate.

Today's

2010-05-09T13:28:00.002+08:00

1. เปลี่ยน - to change, replace, convert, alter, swap... I'm not sure what exact shades of meaning some of these words convey. "Change" for example, in Chinese can have so many different synonyms, but they're not ACTUALLY synonyms. They're words like "become" "alter" "modify" "change (composition)" and so on. They'll use a series of characters interchangeably, so 變成，成為，變化，改變 use some similar characters in different combinations to create different meanings, but thankfully Thai seems to have those same monosyllabic tendencies.
2. วิธี - way, method.

Yesterday's

2010-05-09T08:35:00.001+08:00

Gah!

1. หิวน้ำ - thirsty. This shouldn't even really count, because it's 'hungry' with water tacked on at the end. Really just a more specific word. Same vocabulary.
2. เตรียม - to prepare, to ready.

2010-05-08T00:25:00.002+08:00

1. หิว hungry.
2. เริ่ม - to begin, start.

Just went for a pretty intense massage. Check out 刮痧... That's kind of what I have going on right now. Oof.

2010-05-06T17:52:00.002+08:00

1. แม้ว่า - although, despite, even though, etc.
2. วรสาร- magazine.
Nothing much to say about these at the moment. Trying to think of things that I'll actually USE in day to day speech. My Pimsleur Thai is all finished, so I've got to work on sentences and conversation and stringing words together on my own. I haven't any circumstances to be able to speak Thai with people (yet), and therefore no way to be corrected or get in some good linguistic trial and error time, so...
Hmmmph.

2010-05-05T23:33:00.001+08:00

1. อธิบาย - to explain, describe. There were a lot of entries for "explain" and I think this one is both transitive and intransitive, and seems to have the connotation I'm looking for.
2. มะม่วง - mango.... uh, yum!

2010-05-04T19:25:00.003+08:00

1. สับปะรด pineapple. Been loving really really fresh fruit as it's getting hotter outside here. Always nice to be able to know how to say what you're looking for when taking a foreign-language shopping expedition, especially in the beautiful markets like in Thailand.
2. ดนตรี - music. Thinking I'm going to watch a Thai movie tonight heavily based around music. Who doesn't love music? I've got some Thai music I found recently, too. Modern Dog, Slot Machine, Bodyslam... (interesting names, at least). I'd like to try to find the lyrics online, but I haven't looked yet. That would be nice.

2010-05-04T00:26:00.002+08:00

1. ตลาด - market. This is not only the word for a food market, as in one on the streets where you buy fruits and veggies and sundries but also the more abstract 'market' as in there being a good market for a certain service or product, the business 'market'.
2. สวย - beautiful! This sounds very similar to the Taiwanese (台語) word for beautiful, which I think is actually a bastardization of 帥, (and Cantonese is kind of similar too) which actually means handsome. That's what I think. They could all have a common root elsewhere. But I think I'm right.

The rest of yesterday's post

2010-05-03T11:15:00.001+08:00

1. ง่วง - sleepy, tired.
2. แมงมุม - spider. Just because...
Thailand has some fascinating spider species. There are none native to Taiwan, but Thailand (and SE Asia in general) boasts some beautiful, but very aggressive and very dangerous tarantula species.

Missed a day!!!

2010-05-02T21:23:00.003+08:00

Oops. The Hebrew Experiment got started and I neglected my Thai. So...... I'm loving Thai more and more now, cuz Hebrew is stinkin' HARD...
1. โต๊ะ - Table. This is marked as a loan word from Chinese, actually, and I can see how it might be so. The Chinese is 桌子, and Thai doesn't so much have that initial sound, so I can see how it'd become ต instead of kind of a hard 'zh', something like the J in John, but harder.
2. นักเรียน - student. This is cool: นัก is a particle that makes a thing a noun, that noun being "the person who does...." whatever, similar to the suffix -er, like with teach-er. รียน means to study or learn. Therefore, นักเรียน is a person who studies, a student. These little bits of knowledge are helpful, since that prefix can be used with other verbs, and that verb is useful on its own.
(tomorrow's post to come shortly)

Thai Dictation

2010-04-30T14:35:00.002+08:00

1. ฝึึกหัด - to practice.
2. บางที - maybe, perhaps. (This word, in some contexts, apparently also means 'sometimes')
I spent a few hours yesterday with Thai, writing charts and practice sentences and making little notes on grammar bits and such. The best thing I got to doing yesterday was to listen to example sentences and write them down as I listened, and then check my spelling afterward. Most were vocabulary words I've already 'learned' or at least know how to say and recognize, but spelling is kind of hard. So that was great practice.

Read Thai Signs!

2010-04-29T11:47:00.003+08:00

1. สถานี - useful noun
2. เมือง - city, land, town. This word is used in signs and such on the highway to indicate that you're heading into or out of town, but it apparently is also colloquially used to refer to a town, area, or even nation. Dunno.
Also, www.learnthaionline.com is a great resource for practice and materials. I especially like their Read Thai Signs portion. They've compiled and categorized signs and things in Thai, and progressively reveal what they say. First they will show the Thai as written on a computer (as the sign or script is sometimes stylized or handwritten; a good way to practice identifying all the characters this way), then the phonetics, and finally the English meaning. Great practice for those that can already read a bit of Thai, and enormously helpful with identifying and learning useful vocabulary, since it comes from everyday situations. Both of today's vocabulary words come from the Read Thai Signs exercise. Really great.

2010-04-28T23:34:00.002+08:00

1. รถ- car
2. เพราะว่า - because

I'm having some trouble thinking of nouns I want to learn. I feel like these are more an "in context" acquisition, so I'm trying to write a lot in Thai. Sentences, phrases, things describing my day. Problem is, there's stuff that I can SAY that I don't know how to write, but I'd rather learn brand new words on here than just how to write words I already know. I'm kind of making notes on those on my own in my notebook and confining the two words a day to brand new words, but I'm also seeing the need for a better solution to a dictionary than just my blackberry. I can neither read nor write in Thai (or Chinese) on it.

2010-04-27T23:48:00.002+08:00

1. แล - to see, look, watch
2. วันเสาร์ - Saturday

The difficulty now is keeping up with al the words... learning the new ones and not forgetting the old ones. Mostly the writing. I can remember how to say them (sometimes forget the correct tone) but don't always remember how to spell them correctly. Practice.......

2010-04-27T08:42:00.002+08:00

1. อากาศ- weather
2. กว่า - particle added at the end of adjectives to make them comparative i.e. good vs better or fast vs faster. Equates to "-er" or "more ....." Also used in comparisons when something is specifically more (adjective) than something else. Convenient, no?

Verbs in isolating languages... yum

2010-04-25T22:05:00.003+08:00

1. ไป- to go.
2. ต้อง - auxiliary verb "must..." "need to/has to...".

I'm including a lot of verb stuff, it seems, and less nouns or other parts of speech. I feel like in many regards, in the most survivalist aspect of communication, you can get by without nouns better than verbs. Pointing, acting or drawing can all convey what THING you need or want or are talking about. This in combination with the appropriate verb will go an excellently long way toward conveying your meaning to someone.
This is wonderfully, greatly, especially so with a language like Thai (or Chinese). Since they don't conjugate their verbs (or over-abuse them like test tube born lab rat experimental overworked sweat shop hamsters on wheels; really difficult stuff) like they do in Russian, we can get tons of mileage from one single Thai verb. Have we discussed this? I think maybe so. Whether you did it or I did or they did, no matter if it was last year or tomorrow or just recently or in what condition, the verb itself rarely changes. Most often what changes is the stuff around it: words like "today" or "yesterday" or "last year" will indicate exactly when something happened, and the pronouns will indicate the subject and object. This means that a few really useful verbs accompanied by two or three really useful auxiliary verbs already enables the speaker to convey an enormous amount of meaning that might be much more complicated in other languages. This is great; I'm gonna work that verb angle with Thai.

2010-04-24T15:12:00.002+08:00

1. นอก - foreign (not as in a foreigner, just the adjective itself).
2. วันศุกร์ - Friday

Kind of memorizing the days of the week. I suppose the months are next....

2010-04-24T00:26:00.001+08:00

1. เรา - first person plural pronoun.
2. ชอบ - to like, prefer, to be fond of.

Interested to see how fractured and complicated are the common/polite/familiar/rude (?) Thai pronouns are. Chinese is thankfully void of gratuitous honorifics. Thai seems to have a few, but I'm not sure how prolifically they're used.

2010-04-22T18:39:00.002+08:00

1. เขา- 3rd person singular pronoun (he/she)
2. จะ- auxiliary verb indicating future tense; "will/shall" This is obviously used in conjunction with other verbs, and, as with "will" in English, does come before the verb it modifies.

2010-04-21T18:54:00.002+08:00

1. กำลัง - auxiliary verb indicating the present participle. Comes before the verb it acts upon. Sounds similar to the Chinese “正在。。。” So to eat is กิน. "He eats" is เขากิน, but "he is eating" would be เขากำลังกิน.
2. มา- come. Chinese is very specific about when you can use "come" and "go." We are less so in English. Where we might call a friend and say "I might come over later" meaning "I might go to your house later," in Chinese this would not be correct. You only use "come" when you are already at the place being referred to; in like manner, you only "go" when you are not at that place. In English, it seems acceptable to use "come" if the person to whom you are speaking is already at the aforementioned location (as with "coming" to someone's house).
This strict distinction in Chinese makes sense, and we do have it in English; it makes things clearer. We don't stick to it as stringently as they do in Chinese though. Not sure how Thai goes with this, but I feel it might be similar.

2010-04-21T02:22:00.002+08:00

1. วันพฤหัสบดี - Thursday
2. อ่าน - to read

Going to try working on my list of 20-25 most important verbs. Pimsleur teaches a lot of them since they're basic and useful (eat, speak, understand, etc) but as circumstances and uses expand, so will need for other verbs, but the right 25 will still get you a long way, especially in a language like Thai.

2010-04-20T01:08:00.002+08:00

1. วันพุธ- Wednesday
2. เร็ว- fast, quick.

I am tired. Been looking at some Thai articles and making notes for words to look up.
(These are words for 4/19. Words for 4/20 will come later today, as it's currently 1 am here... GMT +8)

2010-04-18T20:21:00.002+08:00

1. ทุก - every. As in every day, every time, etc.

2. วันอังคาร - Tuesday (Mars day; monday was moon day)

That's it. I'm definitely seeing that fluency in Chinese is providing some great advantages to learning Thai: things like better sensitivity to tones and grammatical structure are the greatest two. There are certainly other similarities, as Thai shares far more similarities with Chinese than it would with English. They are constructed very similarly and have rubbed shoulders linguistically, geographically, politically and religiously throughout the centuries.

Warning: Grammar Content

2010-04-17T17:00:00.005+08:00

ใช้- to use. This is with regards to general use of anything, but I noticed in the dictionary that it's also the word to use regarding money and time, whereas we would use a different verb: spend. There are apparently other words for spend, but ใช้ can be used either by itself or with a few other words specifically to describe use of money or time.

French is kind of notorious for having specific verbs for specific things [I don’t speak French; an example I’ve heard is for ‘grow.’ While trees, kids, animals and love can all grow in English, a good friend and fluent French speaker says all these would be different verbs in French.] I’m interested to see how versatile Thai verbs are (or aren’t), but I get the impression it’s far more like Chinese, being able to get tons of mileage out of the uses for one single word.

2. ของ - of, belonging to, etc. It’s a possessive marker, like the 的 in Chinese. Does the exact same thing, except it comes before the possessor. So where in Chinese, the word for you, 你， would combine with the possessive 的 to make 你的, your or yours, ของ would come before the possessor. The second person pronoun in Thai, คุณ, would come after the possessive marker in Thai, making ของคุณ. This might make more sense when one looks at the other two definitions of ของ. One is “things, goods”, meaning we could look at ของคุณ literally as “things of you” or “thing(s) of John.” The third definition is “to belong, is the property of,” meaning we could look at it as saying “[thing] belonging to you.” I like this the most, because oftentimes there will be an object thrown in there as well, which will come even before our other two words, meaning the word order with such a phrase as “your car” will be exactly opposite from English. It would be, literally “car thing you,” or รถของคุณ.”

This breaks down to รถ (car) ของ (of; belong to) คุณ (you).

Again, we could look at this more clearly as “the car belonging to you.” A good little word that goes a long way in Thai.

(It’s also the first of the words of the day that I’ve already known, but not known how to write/spell. More of these will be showing up).

That turned into a full blown grammar lesson.

2010-04-16T18:16:00.003+08:00

1. ช่วย - to help- certainly a valuable request, and a worthwhile verb to know.

2. วันจันทร์ - Monday. Days of the week were something I forgot had names. In Chinese, they're numbered, and even in the Romance languages, they're relatively familiar to us. Thai days of the week are named after solar bodies, it seems (Monday is for the moon, Wednesday for Mercury), but they're obviously not cognates for us, so this is a concept I should learn.

2010-04-15T11:47:00.005+08:00

1. again- อีก I feel like we use certain adverbs more than we think. They're thankless little words that we don't pay much attention to, but when you need to ask someone to say something once more because you didn't understand or something, they go a long way and can bring your request from broken foreigner speech to proper, correct statement.

2. to write- เขียน Always a useful verb. When communicating in a foreign country, having something in writing is always a tremendous help. If you don't remember how to say it (whatever it happens t0 be) or can't say it correctly, have someone write it down. An address, something you're looking for at the grocery store, a person's name, a menu item; all of these things can be written by someone you might find that speaks your language enough to communicate with them in it. They can then help you to communicate with others. Knowing a few simple terms, you can as people to write something down in your target language. Very useful.

One nice thing about Thai: like Chinese, they don't conjugate their verbs, so the dictionary form for "to write" is just "write" whether I'm doing it or you are or they are or even if we were doing it yesterday or you will have done it tomorrow (although these other cases can sometimes add things to the verb, it's not necessarily conjugation in the true sense, and most of those time and tense clues are given by other words in the sentence like 'yesterday', 'before' 'tomorrow' 'later' and so on). This makes it very convenient to learn a word and know that you'll pretty much use it just like that across the board, or at least can and still be understood.

Thai words

2010-04-14T10:01:00.009+08:00

So yeah, I'm not going to be including the romanization for the words I don't think. Go check it out on Thai Language yourself. Great site. -

Words for today:

1. Question- คำถาม -

2. Sleep นอน - one of those I thought I needed to look up, only to look it up and remember

having looked it up before.

Others of interest along with this entry are:

ห้องนอน- bedroom , ห้อง-room นอน- sleep.

Bathroom is constructed the same way, but with the word for 'water'.

ง่วงนอนไหม - "are you sleepy?"

Thanks again to Thai Language for all their great material. I feel rather like I'm plagiarizing, but it's a dictionary, no? No worries. I'll put a link up in the sidebar for future reference. Those are my words.

Two new words

2010-04-13T16:18:00.007+08:00

Decided I'd start today....

I don't think there's really going to be any real... method or logic to how I decide which two words I pick each day, but I'll keep a running vocab list in a notebook I can refer back to. I'll describe this approach in a later post perhaps, but I already do have a basic knowledge of Thai words, so what you WON'T see here is things like "why", "who" "eat" "drink" and other words Pimsleur teaches you. Been there, done that. What you might see is other words that I know how to say and use, but don't know how to spell or write; there might also be other, relatively simple, basic words that Pimsleur just hasn't addressed and I haven't looked up. That is to say, part of the process of progressing in a language is filling in the gaping holes in your vocabulary as you discover them. There'll be some of that too. So, for today, two words I feel like knowing how to write/say/read are:

1. Important- สำคัญ samR khanM (this is the pronunciation of the word. The 'r' dictates a 'rising' tone, and the 'm' a middle tone. 'L' is for 'low,' 'f' is for falling and 'h' is for high. I might not include all this romanization before long.)

(probably worthy of mention here that most all of this information is going to be coming from either Google Translate, or even more likely from www.thai-language.com, an absolutely wonderful Thai language resource, and so much more than a dictionary.)

2. Really- จริง ๆ jingM jingM The ๆ after the first word (as there are normally no spaces in Thai) is a character that represents a repeat of the word preceding it, instead of writing จริงจริง but that's how it's read.

There they are, the two vocabulary words for today. Something else I love about Thai-Language is that, when looking up either of the above words for example, there's a whole slew of other entries containing either of these individual words, everything from idioms to example sentences to colloquialisms to quotes, thereby allowing you to learn not only that one word, but possibly some very useful things based on it, which does wonders for retention and usability. I might occasionally include some of these example sentences or maybe sentences I've come up with in circumstances or using past vocabulary words. There's not much structure behind the two words except that I feel I would use them in day-to-day life. There we have it.

ช้าๆได้พร้าเล่มงาม

2010-04-13T15:41:00.002+08:00

"Slowly makes the blade beautiful"...

Let's not be haphazard about this one. Hebex starts in only 18 days, but about a year and a half ago there was another linguistic interest that took over. I was really serious about it last year before going to Thailand, teaching myself to read, write (which I can barely do in Chinese) and speak the language of the people there. When I landed in Thailand, I was pleased and relieved to be able to tell people what I wanted, where I wanted to go, how much I was willing to pay for something and even chat a bit about life.

A year later (after two months of semi-uninspired, transient studying of Italian), I return to find I can speak with some people, but that even after a quick three day cram, I've forgotten some of what I knew (or it at least doesn't come to me as quickly); I just don't use it in Taipei.

But I have the basics down pat. I know many of the consonants and am still working on the chaos of the many vowels and the tones they represent. Long story short, I have developed a great foundation for the language, and if I could keep a solid pace, learning bit by bit and finding areas and ways to practice and maintain it, I could go back in six months or a year and truly be conversational. Not just tourist-speak either.

The goal? I've decided to learn two (2) Thai vocabulary words a day. Not sure when I'm going to start... probably today. Tomorrow. Two a day. That doesn't seem like much, and in my efforts to use it more, I'm sure I'll be looking up more words than just two a day, but I want to learn to read, write and say them correctly and entwine them into my vocabulary such that they'll be useful and at my disposal long-term.

"Slowly makes the blade beautiful." or, as my grandfather used to say (says my dad) "There's somehow never time to do it right the first time, but always time to do it over."

I think this is going to be my next serious language. I'll post the words on here for each day as much as I can.

Hyvää ruokaa

2009-12-22T17:39:00.005+08:00

Some friends invited me up to their house for the day yesterday. I'd been up there the week before, and the husband and wife couple each had their family visiting. Her family is from Finland, and his is from Canada, of Russian background. They both speak English, Finnish and Estonian. She speaks Swedish and some German; he speaks Russian and some French and Japanese. They've been here six years. We had a wonderful time last week, playing card games and eating chocolate and talking about a common obsession: food.
They asked me a few days afterward to come back up and cook with them on their day off. I was under the impression (due to the term with) that other people would be cooking other things and we'd all kind of contribute. She asked me what I'd like to cook and what I needed, and she'd buy the ingredients.
I was surprised but pleased to find out upon arriving yesterday that it would be all me. They'd cleared out two kitchens for me, both theirs and their neighbors' next door, as they're out of town for a month or so. There would be a few friends from the congregation, and three or four of their studies, along with the family. 11 total.
My first contribution was that fish soup I seem to be making a lot of for people. It's delicious, quick and easy. I was also excited to do a creme brulee, and I decided we'd do a lavender chocolate creme brulee, one I'd done before in America. Between two kitchens I had only a total of four burners, and the two ovens were more like large toaster ovens than real ovens, but they were convection and did the trick. They'd bought tons of red meat and a lot of great produce, and requested a beef stew.
When I started really cooking, I was vegetarian, so I cooked a lot of seafood and other stuff, but didn't do much with beef. I had a volunteer to start a rough chop on carrots, onions, celery and potatoes and a ton of garlic. I had probably.... 3 pounds of blade steak (flat iron steak before it's been cleaned of the tendony, fatty bits, so it's perfect for a slower cook) that I trimmed a bit and cubed up. Seasoned with salt and pepper and browned in a pan, just until it looked and smelled nice. Had we had some red wine and tomato paste, I'd have added it and cooked down before caramelizing the onions a bit. After the beef was all done, I divided it and the veggies between two nice ceramic pots and put them on to slow cook for about two hours.
At this point, there was a bit of absurdity. Dials were set wrong, one oven used Celsius, and one Fahrenheit, so I set one to about 180ºC or something, and i set the other one to 180 as well, but when I went to check on it after an hour, I could still touch the pot in the oven. It was 180ºF. No matter, we still had plenty of time. After blowing a circuit with the oven, dishwasher and exhaust fan all going and fixing a pipe in the kitchen, we'd gotten most of the slow cook out of the ovens (after trading one out for the creme brulee so it could cool and trimming a Halibut and making the fish soup). Put each of the pots on the broiler and got them going. All the stock and juices cooked down a bit, and the veggies were just right.
That being said, people started coming in around 7, and I'd made myself comfortable in the kitchen. The table had been set and all that was left was service. After some debate and awkward soup kitchen ladling, we started the first course. I was very confident about the fish soup. I've made it a ton before and the fish she'd bought was beautiful. After having trimmed it and done it all myself, I knew it was great. The beef stew, on the other hand, I kind of winged. It's a basic thing to make, but I was worried about the doneness of the meat, veggies, etc.
It was fabulous. It had all cooked together nicely and the meat had cooked through without drying out, and just fell apart so nicely. I was so pleased.
Creme brulee was a little bit of trouble. Pressed for time, and couldn't chill it as long as I wanted. For some reason it didn't set up as well as it should have, and the creme brulee torch was worthless for the sugar, and it wouldn't melt under the broiler either. Didn't look so great, but it still tasted wonderful. I love the combination of lavender and chocolate. Next I think I'll do an Earl Grey creme brulee, whenever I'm in a kitchen with an oven again...
That is to say, cooking is a lot of work, especially with multiple things going (in multiple kitchens), but there's something of the attention to detail, the production of something good and the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when everyone enjoys it.
After all the guests left, the Finns and I played lupaus, a card game similar to spades. We ate tons of chocolate and fruit and sipped on some whiskey and I learned how to count to 100 in Finnish and say some essential card-game related phrased. All in all, a very enjoyable evening.

Kinds of food

2009-12-17T16:40:00.003+08:00

Been reading some very cool books lately (and not posting, obviously). After watching tons of food-related movies and television, I've started cooking a lot more lately.
One book is "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry" by Kathleen Flynn.
Another is "Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter" by Phoebe Damrosch.
"Molecular Gastronomy" By Herve Thís.
It is just too bad that I don't have a real kitchen. Two burners, no storage or counter space, no dishwasher or oven (no one here has dishwashers or ovens), horrible pots and pans. But at least I bought a nice knife set. There's a market behind my house where I can go get pretty decent produce and some meats (which I've only recently started buying since the weather has cooled off; I wasn't keen on beef and pork sitting out all day in 100º weather), but when it comes down to it, I'm left having to make pretty simple things and find ways to make them taste good. I have no good heavy bottom pans, no cast iron skillet; I have about three paper-thin pans of varying sizes and shapes, and one thicker one that feigns as a decent frying pan. Despite this, I have found things I can still cook or assemble. Thai salads are easy: cucumbers or papaya are easy to slice or shred (I bought a mandolin) and toss with fish sauce and lime and chilis and the like; I keep chicken stock on hand for soups. I usually have celery, onions, carrots, garlic around and can get something going with those. Potatoes, cabbage and bacon always make for the beginnings of some really heavy Irish type slop that tastes delicious with lots of butter and a beer... Have a few Moroccan dishes planned for this weekend, but am going to have to hunt around a bit for things like coriander, paprika and golden raisins.
The more important kind of food, though, is the kind we're helping other people here get: the spiritual kind. I have more studies now than I've ever had, and to have a chance to get to know them beyond the confines of my one-hour-a-week session with them has proved wonderful. I have this little set of studies on Saturday afternoon, right behind my house. A sister in our hall is a teacher at the local middle school, and ran into one of her former students in service. She told me she wanted to bring me by to meet him and try to start a study. I was initially skeptical of her overwhelming enthusiasm, and recall having just laid down for a nap when she called and asked me to go with her. I did. He lives at the back of my block, and was home. He's about 15, and we started the study that day. I invited him to the meeting, and told him I could go to his house and walk with him, since it's only a short distance from where we live. I got to his house the following morning and he and his little cousin were waiting outside for us. The two of them have been to the meetings every week since then. One Saturday on the study (after the young cousin, 10 years old, whose English name, hilariously, is Oscar), his older brother was home, and sat down at the computer in the next room; I was nervous to see how he would respond, but after the study, he was cordial and we all exchanged email addresses. He began to sit in on the study every week. Long story short, he asked for his own study, and is now a few chapters ahead of his little brother. He studies on Tuesday afternoons, and then sits in with his little brother on Saturday, along with the big brother's girlfriend and the little cousin. All four are attentive at the study, and I'm in chapter 7 with big brother, and chapter 5 with the other three. All but the girlfriend are now attending the meetings every Sunday and commenting or reading a scripture at least once at the Watchtower. They prepare their Watchtowers, and asked me when they can start going in service. There's so much more to say, but in short, it's one of those experiences that, as much as we as the teachers are doing, makes it clear that we can take very little credit for the progress the student makes to learn about Jehovah. It's so enjoyable, and makes ever clearer the importance of the work we're doing.

Language Scents

2009-08-15T22:19:00.004+08:00

I had a thought recently.... follow me.
It's been established that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. Many of us have experienced this (I do constantly): walking through a mall or a park or a place with smells... and something or someone suddenly comes to mind, seemingly out of the blue. A split second later, I realize it was cued by whatever smell I just encountered. Memories flood back very clearly.
So I got to thinking.... one of the necessities of effective language learning is a good memory; the increased retention of information obviously provides a greater return on your investment of time you devote to studying.
I did a cursory google search to see if anyone else had considered this, and there was only a small glimmer of hope. More on that later. I give you: the limbic system.
Wikipedia tells us that "the limbic system (or Paleomammalian brain) is a set of brain structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, and limbic cortex, which support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, and olfaction."
In as little detail as possible, the other little tidbits of information that seemed relevant were the dentate gyrus, which "is thought to contribute to new memories" and "is notable as being one of a select few brain structures currently known to have high rates of neurogenesis in adult humans." The entorhinal cortex (EC) is an important memory center in the brain. [It] forms the main input to the hippocampus and is responsible for the pre-processing (familiarity) of the input signals." The hippocampus is also a big important chunk of the brain dealing with long term memory. All that is to say that it makes sense that the olfactory system (and it's relation to memory and emotion) easily prompts us to recall very clearly things that may not have crossed our minds in ages.
The wrench in the gears is finding/creating a synesthetic-enough correlation between emotional memories and cold hard linguistic knowledge, which usually doesn't carry any emotional weight. However, if there WERE any relation, think of the impact of having the near-total recall with language as we do when we (arguably involuntarily) recall a long-unthought thought.
But again, in a practical sense, how does one combine the general experience of those two senses in a linguistically relevant way? It didn't seem to make any sense until I found an article written by a doctor working in the field of deaf-blindness who is currently working to use the sense of smell to improve (what I suppose you would call) comprehension of objects and their surroundings.
Unrelated application? Yeah.
Possibly very strong means of communication with someone who has no other means of speaking (as are, to a certain degree, students of a new language)? Yes.

Crank

2009-08-09T18:48:00.002+08:00

Cars are rare here. That's not to say there's not tons of them and traffic and general chaos, but the majority of the general population does not own one. They drive the two wheeled variety.
I guess we are raised around/in/with cars in America, and are just used to that. I've noticed a number of people here have car problems and are entirely unaware of what to do. If the car won't even turn over (clearly because of a dead battery), sitting there for half an hour cranking and cranking and cranking isn't going to do any good. I've seen this phenomenon more than a few times here. Just this evening I went to grab a bite to eat, walking, and on the way there a poor guy was trying to start his car. It just didn't have enough juice to get started. I ate dinner, and on the way back, he was still sitting there grinding the alternator, but this time it was far more hopeless since he'd drained the battery down.
Just another one of those things we don't think about culturally, I guess. If I saw a guy in a Walmart parking lot (in America; goes without saying, no?) who was having car trouble, he'd probably fix it or know what was wrong before I made it in the store.
Cars are a part of our childhood(s[?]), I think. I remember when I was little and we'd all pack in Mom's Buick and I'd sit in the front seat with dad while mom was in the back with my brother and we'd be going to Savannah or Augusta or Florida and listening to Elton John or Fleetwood Mac or Bob Segar or something (but it did seem like any time we went to Savannah we ended up listening to Natalie Cole and Bonnie Raitt). I remember the words to all those songs and they're fond childhood memories.
That is to say, even in small ways it's interesting to see how backgrounds are different and what we remember fondly.
"Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane..."

Tonality, Language aptitude, learning patters and (microcephaly-related) genetics

2009-08-05T20:49:00.000+08:00

http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~s0340638/tonegenes/tonegenessummary.html

Pretty incredible stuff. I was doing some reading today on tonal languages. Google will tell you that it is estimated that between 50-70% of the world's languages are tonal. Tonal languages are found the world over, with the overwhelming exception of Europe, the Americas and the Middle East (although there are languages even in these places that exhibit at least some elements of tonality).
A largely foreign concept to English speakers (and those of the western world as a whole), it is interesting to consider where languages come from, what molds them and how the become what they are.
This got me to a question I've asked and discussed before.
Knowing that there is such correlation and transparency with a culture and its language (i.e. what the language reflects about the culture and vice versa), the chicken-or-egg question is: does culture influence language or does language influence culture? There is clearly a give-and-take relationship here, and opinions and viewpoints are biased. Those that know nothing of a language and only (possibly the stereotypes of) the culture obviously do not have the insight that those do who possess knowledge of the language and DEDUCE linguistic and cultural relations rather than superimpose them onto a people.
That being said, I find it interesting that not only is it just personality and character that make languages unique, such as things for which one language might have a plethora of words that another lacks entirely, but that even grammatical and phonological traits can (or might) be linked to fundamental genetics.
In our next issues: how languages (and learning them) are like cars, why you can thank Midlands English you're not conjugating, and what vikings, leprechauns and Zeus have to do with the dental fricative.

Personalized Language list

2009-06-01T09:35:00.002+08:00

Reading an article from a Lebanese linguistics professor and people had been asking him about what "essential" "key" or "must learn" languages they should study. Many people would put Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, French etc (aside from English) on this list, but his was not a static, hard-and-fast list of the most important languages. He stated that for someone with an interest and motivation to learn various languages, a solid half-dozen is an attainable goal, and they should be under the following guidelines:
1. Classical language related to your culture
2. Modern Culturally significant language
3. Language of International significance
4. Exotic language
There will be opportunity for more than one language for more than one of these listings, but for someone of American background or culture he suggested Classical Greek or Latin for the first Criteria (I took Latin for four years, but you'd be CRAZY to pore over it alone for no reason), something like German or Spanish or French for the second, English naturally as the predominant international language, but Chinese certainly qualifies. For the exotic languages, people were suggesting everything from Thai and Russian to Breton and Basque. They're obviously less useful, as are learning Classical languages, but I understand their significance. Arabic can certainly make it in there in one category or another, as well as Hindi or Japanese.
I found it interesting.
And I should be updating about my recent much-awaited trip to Thailand. I was only there for three days and intended to post three separate entries for each one. I probably still will, but I didn't bring my computer with me and have been swamped since I got back. Thoughts and impressions of Bangkok are forthcoming.

Hot

2009-05-20T13:38:00.002+08:00

Blogging....

Been busy here. Since I've moved we've had Memorial, English special assembly day, CO's visit, and I'm keeping up in service. It's hot and humid, and only getting worse.
The CO suggested that during the week of his visit we focus on starting studies on the initial call: the basic question, scripture, paragraph type thing. There are about 55 publishers in our hall, about 25 of whom are pioneers, and we had about 6 auxiliaries this month. In 5 days of the CO's visit, we tallied having started 43 studies. Granted, not all will continue, but it's still overwhelming the response we have in this territory.
I have one or two studies almost every day of the week now, and it's a lot to keep up with. Some aren't terribly regular, but others have started coming to the meetings and have their own publications. The ministry here is wonderful.
I told some friends the other day the three things I enjoy most about Taiwan are preaching, eating and sleeping, which is what most of my days consist of anyway... so it's a pretty good gig I suppose.
They sprayed for roaches or something a few nights ago and I had to fight them off on my way to dinner. One scurried into the house as soon as I opened the door to leave but there's a second door to get into the house, so I apprehended him before he got away. Aside from that, I haven't had any unwelcome visitors aside from the occasional fly (and this crazy really fast jumping spider I can never seem to catch. I've probably eaten him by now), so I'm pleased with that.
My first visa trip is coming up shortly. Everyone everywhere else makes brief daytrips over land borders, but that doesn't so much work on an island, so we all have to fly. I'm going to Bangkok, and very excited about it. The flight was only marginally more expensive than going back to HK for a day, and I've been to HK, so I'll be spending three days in BKK. Won't have much time to explore outside of the city itself, but I'm confident I'll be going back. My next trip will have to be sometime in July, and despite the monetary hit, it is rather nice to be obligated to make an international trip every two months (although July will probably be the last one, as I hope to have all my visa issues sorted out shortly thereafter). Suggestions?
I'm supposed to go back out in service in about an hour with a brother, but it's SO humid today. The temperature is lower than it has been (it's only about 86 or so today) but it's stiflingly humid.
It's also cool to run into other foreigners here and have to use Chinese as the common language. I was eating lunch at this little... place... today and there were a couple of old Chinese men walking around barefoot and we were chatting about whatever, and he said I was the first American ever to come there (it wasn't that scary). A Turkish guy (who spoke awesome Chinese) had just left and this female student walks by and the owner asks me "Hey, where do you think she's from?" pretty loudly, so she turned around and in perfect Chinese says "你沒有辦法猜對" (or something): you'll never guess. So he tried German, Italian and French. She was from Israel.
Go figure.

台灣

2009-04-13T00:18:00.004+08:00

Yeah, I live in Taiwan now.
I've been here about two weeks. Short version of the story is that I visited and very quickly knew it was where I needed to be. I love Hong Kong, but it's not the place I should be living right now.
That being said, I love it here. I'm collecting places: my dry cleaning place, my breakfast places, my lunch places, chicken curry lady, 炒飯 guy, 白香绿茶 place. I have a routine and I love it. I have a bike, and am starting to get to know my way around. I'll post some pictures. Went to Ikea and got a bunch of furniture for my room. I'm living with a Japanese brother who's in a nearby Chinese congregation.
There's a Costco here! And a really tall building. And pollution and awesome food and cheap things and people that want to learn the truth and traffic and mopeds and humidity and roaches and happy people and hot springs and cheap massages.
So I've been here two weeks. That's as much updating as I'm willing to do now. More later. I love it here.

Food again

2009-03-12T19:39:00.007+08:00

Beautiful weather today. Strong wind cut the slight heat in the air, and it was clear all day.
I've been dying to cook, and have gotten some ideas together for when I finally have a kitchen of my own (assuming it'll be functional), and running around HK training for work or meeting for service or whatever has kept me busy, but I've tried to find good food. And I have succeeded.
Last night's dinner was a success. There was a suggestion on Wikitravel HK about a place in Wan Chai that's always packed and has cheap delicious food. They said the beef brisket rice noodle dish was only HKD$13 (USD$1.68, but the price has since gone up to HKD$16. Travesty) and is the big crowd pleaser. After walking around the same block three times, I finally spotted it. It was physically and mentally satisfying. A success. No one spoke English, and I managed to find the dish I wanted on the all-Chinese menu. Wonderful.
That was shortly before the meeting. A few more stops over on the island line on the MTR, and I was at the meeting about 45 minutes early, so I decided to walk around a bit. Found a bakery, and grabbed one of these little guys. Sweet, rich, but crumbly. I don't know pastries, but it was delicious. After the meeting I went back and bought four more, a muffin, some soymilk, some chocolate soymilk, canned coffee, bottle of water, some chocolate and a coke and paid HKD$60 (USD$7.75) and it will be my breakfast for the rest of the week.

Today was busy. Simple errands became far more complicated and I had to sort a few things out at the bank, but all in all it ended up okay. I was down in HK and didn't have anything else to do. I live so far away that if I go into HK, I'm going to spend some time there, and if I'm going back in the afternoon, I won't be dropping in again for dinner. (That'll be changing soon since I'll be moving into my new congregation's territory). So I headed back home today around 4 and had such a late lunch that I wasn't hungry until a little later. Really wanted to cook, but ended up being too lazy. Didn't want to go get something and bring it back here and sit around some more, so I decided to find a place to eat nearby. There's a mall-ish type thing about a five minute bus ride away, but I opted for real Chinese food. Found myself walking into a very small, somewhat scary restaurant just down the road, like one of those places in America that's always got a few people hanging around at all hours of the day smoking cigarettes and stuff. Yeah. I wondered after I got my soup what I was doing. The tea tasted like the water here, which tastes like dirt, and the soup wasn't much better. I had ordered from a woman who spoke nothing but Cantonese and a patron who could barely speak Mandarin. I told him I wanted some genuine Chinese food: a dish with pork, and a dish with chicken. The soup made me nervous, but I heard all sorts of things going on in the kitchen: the roaring of a wok on a burner, smelled oil and scallions and onions and general deliciousness. When I saw a clay pot coming my way, I knew I had made a good decision. Pictures didn't turn out, but it was a large clay pot with huge chunks of chicken on the bone, slices of chicken breast, huge slices of ginger, scallions, roasted onions (the outer layers were carmelized and crunchy and they were sweet) in this smokey sweet sauce. It was amazing. The second one came on a plate and was a pork pancake that was some kind of cross between a flattened meatloaf and homemade sausage. It had a great texture to it and had scallions and veggies and all sorts of porkbits in it and it was very good despite it's malformed pinkish appearance. I asked the lady to write down what it was I had. That pic will come later perhaps... I did take a picture of it.
I think the visa process will finally start tomorrow or early next week. That's the biggest thing right now; after that's confirmed I can sign a lease on a flat, move my publisher card and really get settled in.
Oh, this is the place I ate tonight: besides my table, there's only one more (left of the frame) that's not visible, with some picnic tables outside. She was helping her son with his homework and he'd take a break every once in a while to clean up a bit or do something in the kitchen.

Huh?

2009-03-12T17:09:00.003+08:00

So... I just had my first entirely helpless foreigner moment. I'm sitting on the train on my way into HK, and my phone rings (my local mobile phone). It's an unknown number, but a few numbers here, as well as calls I receive from America, are unknown. So I answered it, and almost immediately a polite sounding man started speaking to me in Cantonese. Being the only westerner on the train, I was somewhat self conscious about speaking Cantonese (I'm usually not, but was feeling incompetent anyway) and after his little 30 second spiel I asked him to speak in Mandarin. So he started over and I still didn't catch a whole lot (it's hard to understand people over the phone to begin with, especially on a crowded train), but was almost positive I caught words and phrases like "our company" and "credit card" and "cheaper" and "convenient." I'm used to recognizing the de rigueur egregiously fake friendly quality in an American telemarketer's voice. However, a friendly voice in a foreign tongue (especially Cantonese) doesn't yet carry any ulterior motive.
I was almost positive he was a telemarketer and repeatedly said "no thank you no thank you" (不要，不要 and 沒有興趣） and he seemed genuinely sorry to bother me and said so. I couldn't bring myself to hang up on him, but felt terribly rude all the same. He didn't address me by name like any of the friends here would, not even any of the brothers or sisters who I need to speak to and as of yet have not met.
But I got to thinking: What if he's the brother at the British Council I've been wanting to talk to, or someone at the bank I need to speak with, although I was sure it was a solicitation. I was confused and worried, and pulled out my ipod in lieu of continuing to read my book.

PS: I got another one on the way home. It was also an unidentified caller, and I was more confident this time. I told him I didn't speak Cantonese and that he'd have to speak in Mandarin or English. He said 不好意思 and thankfully hung up.
I don't know...

Culinarialism

2009-03-10T21:16:00.004+08:00

Today I bought Ruth Reichl's book Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, and I'm about 60 pages into it. Really cool so far, about her taking the job as food critic of the NY Times and what goes along with being a food critic of that magnitude: not blowing your cover, disguising oneself, being objective, etc. Also reading Molecular Gastronomy, an informative but terribly bland and straightforward book of interest. Casual reading (the kind I can do anywhere for 30 seconds between trains or for 30 minutes on a train) has been keeping me occupied in down time, as our study material for the meetings is hard for me to do stop-and-go between trains or with babies screaming in the background.
Food has been exciting here, but I obviously don't have any idea of what's a great restaurant and what's not worth a half-hour train ride to. Obviously, restaurants like Amber (Two-star Michelin at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental HK) would be phenomenal (and cost a small fortune), and there are more and more high-end western-style (and owned) restaurants in the high rent districts. But I suppose for the most part, when it comes to noodle shops and HK BBQ, there's only so much one can do, and what I've had so far has been very good. Soups and noodles and rice and all sorts of animals (tripe even made an appearance in a noodle soup last night). I've been finding negligibly legitimate reasons to enter local businesses and upon departing will ask about food recommendations.
So today I ate at this place recommended to me by a lady at a teahouse that was supposed to be a really good true HK noodle place, their answer to a greasy spoon diner, I suppose. It was busy and tables were turning. I sat down and was immediately given a menu with about four options on it: a vegetable dumpling soup, a noodle soup, and a few dry noodle bowl type things, accompanied by a list of about 25 different items to add to the soup, from sliced pork to fish ball to cow stomach to slices of fat. I ordered the vegetable dumpling soup medium hot. The smell and color, accompanied by the reddish oil slick of chili paste on top when I got it was exciting, but it was so hot I couldn't finish it. Dumplings were great. Veggies were great. It was all good.
I've had some extremely hot food before, and love it, but this was a different kind of hot. It wasn't even a flavor-ish delicious hot as much as a caustic sinus-frying experience. I did my best, but couldn't finish it. It was more than my ravenously empty stomach (and my table void of quenching liquids) could take. I did a respectable job with it.
Needless to say, I'm terribly excited to try so much food here. We did 飲茶 (Cantonese: yam cha- literally "to drink tea"/Mandarin 暍茶) dim sum last week, which is more a ritual or experience rather than a meal. It was fabulous, and I love the reckless abandon with which people approach food, and from a Westerner's point of view, oftentimes at the expense of table manners, but it's wonderful.
If something here ever had a bone in it, it's almost assuredly still in it when you eat it. Pork, duck, chicken and (disappointingly) fish. People gnaw and chew on bones and dispose of them creatively, talk with their mouths full, grab for food, eat fast and messily. Food in Hong Kong is wonderful, and I hope to share regular food stories and pictures.

Internal Compass

2009-03-08T11:11:00.002+08:00

Traveling around last year we spent a number of months in different cities. For whatever reason, I became the navigator in Belfast, and got to know my way around. I paid attention to street names and how we got places, but Belfast was laid out in a horrible excuse for concentric circles and radiating streets from the town center, and wasn't exactly logical. I got to learn my way around from memory. London wasn't difficult, but I completely shut down in Barcelona and John navigated there.
In Hong Kong, I feel like I'll be training my internal compass much more. I was thinking about it last night on my way to meet some friends and although I got turned around a few times coming up from subway stations underground or whatever and had to get my bearings, there are landmarks and points of reference that are great for those of us that are a little more directionally challenged. The MTR is terribly easy to navigate and get around in, but just walking around hasn't proven difficult either, especially in the larger parts of HK. I find myself using the actual cardinal directions for things ("I'm in Central HK, and the ocean is that way, so this must be due west"). It's small, I know, but I'm wondering how much quicker I'll learn my way around here having to walk or take the subway most places. Things are pretty easily recognizeable, and it's all laid out pretty well.
It's funny to think that this city is my home.

Teaching

2009-03-07T08:36:00.000+08:00

I've been so tired after getting home the past few days that I haven't really posted anything. I've fully intended to, but have had other minor adventures, like drying laundry, buying more groceries and trying to find a new Thai restaurant yesterday in the Mid-levels, where I was instead greeted with scores of Spanish, Italian, French, Greek, Arabic, English and Indian restaurants. Stopped and had a pint at a little English pub called the Pickled Pelican (before it got packed) and sure enough when I walked by it after dinner at another Thai restaurant, it was noisy and crowded.
I started teaching. The company I'm (most likely going to end up) working for is basically a third party provider of Native English teachers (NETs) to schools in HK. So I observed an advanced class thursday that was preparing for the oral part of an English exam. They attend one of the more prestigious schools in HK, and the principal is very demanding. So I was supposed to meet the same teacher (an elder in an English congregation here) yesterday for one class in the afternoon, a phonics course that our insitute developed that we usually teach as part of our curriculum at schools. However, another teacher fell ill and couldn't make it, so we ended up having almost a full day. Four classes, and I taught half of them. Held an English examination for Kindergarten-ish aged kids, and earlier in the morning was a drama class for a behaviorally deficient group of 20 sixteen year olds. Conducting the exam on 5 and 6 year old chinese kids was far easier. There was a list of words they were to identify the individual sounds of (three or four letters each), and then another set I was supposed to ask them to read at random. One little girl, sonya, wouldn't even look at me. She was so shy, and had some problems with b vs p and the letter u. She was so cute though. I had to have them write their name and class on their exam paper and she took my pen and it was like she needed two hands. No joke, I cold have almost put her in my backpack. And closed it shut. She was tiny. And freezing outside. It got really cold outside, at least for HK.
Rainy season started this week, and on thursday at the first school it suddenly started raining and within minutes we'd gotten at least an inch of rain, and it continued for almost the entire afternoon. There were rivers inches deep of water pouring down stairs out of parks. I'm told this lasts until about September.
There were so many things I was going to mention, if only briefly, but I'll get around to it later. On my way to service and going to be a bit late. It's cold again today, down to like 50F here, going out in svc in 15 mph winds right on the harbor. I think I'm dressed warmly enough.

Food and Clothing

2009-03-03T22:58:00.002+08:00

I tried to make dinner yesterday.
I was too irritated about it to actually post it. I had frozen/packaged food from the store yesterday, but didn't have much else to do and kinda wanted to cook. So I decided I'd stroll into "the village" (which sounds like an African or Vietnamese cluster of thatched roof homes, when in reality, it's something like fifty 40-story buildings that make up the community, so it has its own mall and schools and playgrounds and parks and squares and a market.
This place is like a maze. I can get to it and into it fine, but I get so turned around so easily. I navigate my way through Hong Kong no problem, but this maze of identical looking buildings with sidewalks every which way and children running and playing and old Cantonese men smoking, and hacking and playing Mah Johng gets me every time. I asked one lady in Cantonese where the market was, and apparently said it wrong, because she pointed me off in some direction where I had to ask another guy who pointed me in an entirely different direction and gave me three or four commands, and after following the first two (all I could catch), I started heading in the direction from which the people with bags of produce were coming. I made it to the market.
I bought the following: some Thai chili paste, onions, ginger, garlic, carrots, (had something in mind with all of this) oranges, a few nice (looking) filets of freshly cleaned fish and a big one liter (or something) bottle of Tsingdao beer (for lack of white wine or chicken broth). The idea was this: sweat the veggies a bit, let them soften some. Add the beer, chili paste, ginger and orange zest and the fish, cover, let simmer for a bit and I'd have a decent thickish brothy substance with yummy veggies . I had some rice going too, to which I added some orange zest as the water was boiling. Gave it a nice... orangeyness.
It just didn't work. The fish was absolutely full of pinbones, and any attempts to remove them proved futile. I even found some needle nosed pliers and washed them clean and tried to pull 'em out like they do in restaurants... nope. The beer didn't work, the veggies were kinda icky from the start. I didn't have a lot of the extra stuff I really would have needed to make it work. it was an improv. But I ate it and it sufficed.
I did my first load of laundry tonight. It didn't take that long. There is a washing machine here, and it sings like one of those rice cookers when it starts and stops (cuz it's Asian). What I lack (and I knew I would) is a dryer... My clothes came out of the washing machine wrinked. I let them sit no more than five minutes and it looked like I'd braided them all together and bungee jumped from a bridge with them. They're hanging dry now, and we'll see how stiff and crunchy (and still wrinkled) they are tomorrow.
Oh, yeah, I hung them inside. It's not that I don't trust the neighbors, who have all hung their clothes outside, but I just don't feel comfortable leaving my clothes outside two stories up on the top floor of this building to dry. I don't know why we don't actually have a rack on our own balcony... anywho, I was told adding a cup or so of vinegar to the rinse water in the machine would soften them a bit, so I'll try that next time. Any other suggestions?

monday

2009-03-02T11:37:00.002+08:00

Woke up this morning rather early. I went to bed rather early last night. The brother I'm staying with left for France this morning, so I'll be here by myself for three weeks. I didn't know what I was going to do, but decided to go for a run. It was nice today. Only about 62 or so, and threatening to rain. I ran a few miles and went into the grocery store/market for breakfast, which was only going to be bottled water and some buns or something, but I ended up getting real groceries. Fruit, soymilk, cereal, Coke, bread, etc. I think I spent around HK$350, or about US$45. Came home and had a shower and now I'm having lunch and heading out to go do something or other. Might try to meet a few people about jobs, but I don't have any appointments. Service today isn't until 6:45 and I'm unclear as to exactly where they're meeting, but I'm going out tomorrow I believe. Service arrangements have been a little hit-or-miss, as I guess they are when you don't actually belong to a congregation yet. I'm visiting the other two Mandarin congregations this week, in Shau Kei Wan (a newly formed one) and Tai Po. The one I went to last weekend is in Aberdeen. Over.

Life

2009-02-28T21:25:00.001+08:00

Sitting on the train on my way back home. It's only 930 pm (at the time of beginning this), but it feels like midnight. I actually got up early and was going to head to the Kingdom Hall in Shau Kei Wan for service in Mandarin, but didn't know if I'd get there only to find they met somewhere else. Long story short, I made some calls, and those people made some calls, etc until I finally cought up with someone in Aberdeen Mandarin and decided to meet them around 130ish. I was out in English with the French brother in Tung Chung and we met a guy from Salt Lake whose great aunt was in the truth. He said his family was always very mean to her because of it, so he always makes a donation when he meets the witnesses. He did, and took a Bible Teach book and the Truth tract.
After that, we caught up with some folks in the English congregation for lunch. About 4 Filipino sisters, and then I had to meet in HK with Mandarin. Their preaching work is at a ferry station where many of the mainland Chinese come to when they arrive at HK. I spoke to a man and placed a number of brochures and mags. He was very very nice. Afterward, we closed up our little booth and took the bus to Aberdeen. Dropped our things off at the hall and went to grab a bowl of soup before the meeting at 5 pm. Public Talk, Watchtower, and had a chance to meet most everyone in the group. Wonderful congregation. I loved it, but it's almost as inconvenient to where I'm living as anywhere in HK, but I got the word out that I'm looking for work and a flat, and people talked ab things they've heard ab that are available. So we'll see. I thought a bunch of them were going to go to hospitality w me and a few others (including the brother I spoke with at Bethel yesterday. He attends that congregation). As it turns out, they had to leave, but I ended up meeting a lot of people, and at a few points I forgot what language we were speaking. I'm understanding a bit of Cantonese, and fool myself into thinking I inderstand other parts of it, but one sister today insisted on speaking in Cantonese. Dunno if she wasn't aware she was switching languages, but I did as best I could to keep up, and hardly spoke any English today. It made me very tired. I'm still like 30 mins or more from being home. I have quite a walk from the MTR and am really hoping this job works out next week. It'd be awesome.
Some awesome shirts I've seen:
-"somnambulate"
-"naughty a flavor it is lovely"
- "one... Five... Two... GO!!!"
-"I am despicable"

Wish I could remember more.

I live in Hong Kong

2009-02-26T18:50:00.002+08:00

... my first legitimate post, seeing as I live in Hong Kong now... I am actually here. More to come later. There are language barriers everywhere, even with the brother I'm staying with, who is French. From what I gather (from speaking in person a number of times about it) we're having people over for dinner, so I won't be able to discuss a ton at length, but I certainly will tonight. We went to the market near the house and bought all kinds of fish and fruit and vegetables and I got to barter in Cantonese with the people. It was nice.
Maybe I will... my flight got in this morning at 7:30 am HK time (thursday) and it's now going on 1900 thursday evening. Upon arriving in HK, I had just finished about 25 hours worth of travel after being up and packing frantically all day Tuesday (my blood still runs cold at the panic that ensued despite my preparation).
However, after schlepping probably 180 pounds of luggage thru the airport, to the bus stop, onto and off of the bus and then a twenty minute walk to his apartment, then up three flights of stairs. After that, I washed my hair and face and was given a one-hour run down of basically everything, but in about five minutes: "Here's your key. Here are the air conditioners; these doors stay open to keep the wine cool, these stay closed; you head down this way and then left for a while, pass the whatever and that gets you to the bus station to get to the Subway, where you'll get off here and take..." and so on thru everything from banking to cell phones to wifi to unpacking. And then roommate was gone for work. I unpacked a bit, arranged things and decided to head into HK and do stuff. Got everything together into a small backpack I brought (satchel, perhaps), filled with Cantonese phrasebook, pad of paper, my address, American and HK cell phone, etc etc and headed to the bank. I had walked probably ten minutes before realizing I forgot my passport, which I obviously needed at the bank. Long story short, I eventually got into town with the help of a few very nice people with whom I was able to speak about directions in Cantonese (!), and when I decided to get off the subway a few stops early to walk the rest of the way, one of them said "No! No! This isn't your stop." I almost wanted to sit back down, but told her I wanted to stop here. Checked out a market I would later return to and finally found HSBC. Took a half hour; filled out some forms, they made copies of my passport and got some other info and I made a deposit and got a debit card! Sha-zam. Oh, and roomie got me a prepaid SIM card, so I put it in the spare phone I got today and was ready to go. I also have a subway card. I covered A LOT of ground today and just walked around and took the metro places.
Company has arrived and I'm sipping on an aperitif. The advantages of a French roommate.... more later.

It's almost time

2009-02-23T12:44:00.003+08:00

I've been so ridiculously busy the past... two or three weeks. Almost every single night for like... the past month I've been doing things with people before I leave. I'd been in the same congregation for almost 18 years and in my current one for about two, and making plans to catch up and say goodbye in the same evening, not to mention visiting family out of town and making preparations and arrangements for leaving has left me with an elusive cough (that rears its ugly head in the middle of certain paragraphs at the WT reading) and an almost nonexistent voice.
I've got congestion issues and some here-and-there coughing and stuff that's only really bad in the mornings after I've been horizontal for hours. It'd be nice to say I'm taking it easy these next few days before I leave, but tomorrow's going to be another busy day. Service with the family and then errands before I finally come home to chill. Not much of anything constructive (as far as errands, per se) will be happening Tuesday before my departure, but I NEED TO REST. I suppose the 21 hours I'll be spending on a plane could be used for that....

Four days

2009-02-21T02:08:00.002+08:00

I'm leaving in four days. I have two bags to check, one to carry-on, and then my backpack (for my computer, HDD, etc). The next four days are going to blow by because I've already got almost every minute of all of them planned out. Leaving to go see extended family tomorrow a few hours outside Atlanta, spend the night there, drive home Sunday just in time for my (last) meeting where I'm reading the WT, then to a couple's house for dinner with my family. Monday Dad wants to do service with us as a family and stuff with them all day. Tuesday I finish everything up and leave for the airport sometime mid afternoon. That's it.
That being said, I pretty much know what I will and will not be wearing over the next four days, and am hence able to start packing. Of the two large backs (to be checked) one is quite a bit smaller than the other, but neither can exceed 50 lbs. SOO I started packing up the heavier things in the small one today: books, shoes, extra toiletries, jackets, etc. I weighed it once (it felt SO heavy), but I still had around 13 more pounds free in it, so I stuffed some more in there. That bag can take more (heavier) stuff since the bag itself weighs less. The larger bag can't take as much weight because it weighs more, so I saved all the T-shirts, sweaters, socks, and lighter wear for it. We'll see what I can pack in there, and everything else (changes of clothes, reading material, COMPUTER, will go in my carry on and backpack.
It's really coming down to it. Four days. I'm starting to realize this is the last of everything (at least for a long time): last time to see this person, last time I'll go here or drive by there or do this... even things like going to the gas station and filling up... probably won't do that again. Going to the bank, walmart, it's all winding down and finishing up...

I can't pack yet!!!

2009-02-14T00:09:00.002+08:00

I want to pack. I want to have everything squared away and done.
However, as close as my departure is, I still have eleven days. That's eleven days of service clothes, suits for the meeting, casual clothes, bum-around-the-house clothes, sleep clothes, jackets, etc etc.
I'm cleaning at this point, I suppose. I've got a lot more books that I want to bring than I thought (old notebooks, notes, Chinese books, etc) and I've decided to bring a larger carry-on in addition to my backpack (which will then be masquerading as only my "computer bag"), so I'll be able to distribute the weight a lot easier.
I have a lot of errands to run lately, and I feel like for every one or two items I mark off of my to-do list, I add two or three more. And some of them are just stupidly small things I need to do. I need to go get my watchband fixed today. And get a haircut. But then I also need to clean my entire room from top to bottom, reorganize the office and clear out my car before I sell it.
We accumulate a lot of stuff... and, in a similar vein with a conversation I was having with someone last night, it just gets moved around. Even thrown away, it's just moved from one place to another. I've moved many of my things out of my room to another part of the house, given them to my brother (clothes) or to someone else, and the rest of my stuff I'm just setting aside neatly in my closet. Much of it I have thrown away, but that really was just crap, stuff I'd held onto for ages, and it was the right time to get rid of it, but I have ~hundreds~ of books in stacks and shelves and cases in my room, and I'm bringing precious few with me, and with some small exception, they aren't things I'll give away (or even lend) and certainly not throw away. So they're staying. It's nice that up till this point I've still lived with my parents and everything I'm not taking with me can still live here.
That being said, my laundry is almost dry, which means it's time to leave the house and go run errands. I think. There's a few books I've been wanting to read, and if I were a terrible person I'd check them out at the library and abscond with them, but I suppose I will go get pillaged at B&N or somesuch... we'll see.

My luggage needs to go on a diet

2009-02-07T03:46:00.002+08:00

In the interest of preserving my own dignity, I shall not disclose the extent to which I prepared to pack today. Suffice it to say I wrote down every item of clothing I own and now know such things as the weight of my entire wardrobe (divided by category), the average weights of bundles of specific garments, and that it takes about twenty wire hangers to weigh a pound.
I shan't blather on about details, but without toiletries, books and other knick-knacky-non-clothing items accounted for yet, my luggage needs to lose about ten pounds...

Trial Pack 2009

2009-02-05T20:56:00.002+08:00

It has begun.

A friend of mine told me that I always call her during my trial pack ritual, and the three phone calls go something like this
1. I'm going somewhere and am very excited and can bring all sorts of everything I own
2. HOOOOLLLLYY COOOWWWW I can fit NOTHING!!!
3. I made it fit.

Trial pack has been an annual event, as I've taken significant trips for the past two years. This is my third.

TP'09: For each of the trips I've taken, I've wanted to get an idea of how much I can bring with me. I'm not a great packer, and if i pack in a hurry, even just for a three or four day trip, I find myself having arrived with nothing more than a t shirt and a pair of socks OR six pairs of pants, 8 pairs of shoes, a jacket, three ties, 80 shirts and no socks or wallet. It's one or the other.
SO, especially seeing as I won't be coming BACK within a few weeks' time, I want to get an idea of what I can feasibly bring. The clothes are going into stacks next to my suitcase on the floor (who am I kidding, they're folded up in the suitcase like i'm not leaving for three more weeks), and rather like an episode of American Idol, I decide whether or not they qualify to make it in. After the first round of eliminations, only some clothes I didn't realize were in line got the cut... this process will go on until my departure, at which point I will weigh the bags and hope they're not fifty pounds over my fifty pound limit. So, my wardrobe (and everything else I own) is now campaigning to be taken with me to the new land, to have a shot at the big time...
and ugly huge red long sleeve shirt that has holes in it cuz it was really thin to begin with... I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to turn you down...

I need a new name

2009-02-01T22:47:00.003+08:00

My blog needs a new name... I don't know.

I also made pizza (three pizzas) last night for seven people. It was a last minute thing at my house and I got to cooking around 6. I roasted some garlic until it was all soft and buttery and spread it on ciabbata bread. Then I made a typical margherita pizza (ricotta, basil and tomatoes), a pepperoni (for the carnivores) and a third with roasted onions and peppers, feta and spinach. I had roasted the veggies ahead of time and was worried it would all be a little soggy on the dough, but it came out really well. I took some cool pictures of the pre-pizza work, but completely forgot to snap the finished products... A friend brought a Hefeweizen and some Guinness, and we watched Psycho.
Dinner/Movie nights are awesome.

on with it already!

2009-01-29T22:00:00.002+08:00

Today I feel mentally and emotionally prepared, stable and ready to move. However, I have 26 more days left and there is no "biting the bullet," as it were. I have yet almost four more weeks. I also as of yet do NOT have any luggage. I am going to leave service early today to check out any kinda luggage they have at Costco and maybe Marshall's. I need to try a few trial packs to see what I can feasibly take with me. I think I'm allowed two bags at something like 70 lbs each! Huzzah. That's in addition to a carry on item, etc. so my computer will definitely be with me. 'Tis a long flight. Hopefully I can check my luggage through to HK since I'm only on a codeshare with Singapore airlines on the way to San Francisco... I'm not sure how that'll work, but it'd be great not to have to schlep my life through there at midnight...

2009-01-27T22:49:00.002+08:00

on 5.10.06 i posted a list of my language bottom ten: the ten languages I have no interest in learning, for whatever reason. In the post, i talked about the languages I was currently interested in and that I was (proudly) able to hold tiny (very negligibly) meaningful conversations in a smattering of different languages (might I add now that I cannot recall most of what it was i was using then). The list is as follows:

Laotian
Yiddish
Cambodian
Thai
Esperanto
Turkish
Anything Creole/Pidgin
Welsh
Basque
Myanmar (Burmese)

Of those, five are languages I now feel are awesomely cool, and would really like to be able to speak more of at least that many (I have since started learning some Thai, and studied Turkish for a little while and can remember none of it at present). Yiddish, Esperanto and Creoles/Pidgins (aside from cool linguistic studies-ness) do not interest me still.
It's just funny to look back and see how our opinions of things change. At the time, I had no interest in learning Chinese (or any Asian language) and now I'm moving there....
Funny ol' world, isn't it?

I steal...

2009-01-27T22:05:00.003+08:00

(but not really cuz I've done this before)

My Visited Countries

Get your own Visited Countries Map from Travel Blog

So I leave in four weeks... four weeks from today. About 680 hours from right now. That scares me. Many of the things I feared and stressed about (I feel) have been taken care of, at least to the extent that I can take care of them here. Chinese New Year has inhibited my most recent job inquiries from getting responses, but I leave in four weeks (did i say that already?) and feel pretty settled about all those things, really.
What it's mostly come down to is the last few things I'm going to do for the four weeks I'm here. I tend to overcomplicate, analyze, overthink and overplan, BUT I feel that with only 28 days left in America, I need to make wise use of my weekends and free evenings and enjoy every single little thing that's left to enjoy here before I go. I was very glad to go see my family in Charleston over New Year's, as it turned out that most of the cousins on that side of the family showed up and we had a few days together. I can mark that off the list (that I've decided not to make in efforts not to be dramatic and draw finality to my departure).
All that being said, I am very excited to go, but the most difficult part of leaving (as much as I am so excited and thrilled to go and want to move abroad) will be... well, leaving. I do not (as of yet) know anyone in HK (like I do here). I've met people and spoken with them on occasion, but my friends and family and the past 22 years of my life are here. I am looking forward to establishing myself there and know there will be friends and family there that I simply haven't met yet. That's great.
But it plays more like one of those situations where you really want to get to sleep and try to get to sleep so hard that you can't sleep... I'm going to enjoy my last four weeks in America.

Writing about Thinking about Leaving

2009-01-25T23:45:00.002+08:00

I'm leaving soon. 30 days from today.

I'll keep this blog, I suppose, as I'd rather not create a new one (mostly it was that I couldn't come up with a creative name, and this is the same as my email, blah blah). I'm not much for the mass emails and sending things to mailing lists, so this is where my travels and such will be documented. That's all for now. I have a 守望台 to prepare.
Pictures will be on my Flickr unless they're so mind-blowing they deserve a double post here. I'll have to be vigilant about getting the two to work in conjunction with one another.

To the best of my memory...

2008-11-03T22:23:00.001+08:00

The VGT Omnivore's Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile- most recently, at least at The Blue Elephant in London. Ostensibly one of the best Thai restaurants in the world, and easily some of the best food I've ever eaten.
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush- shout out to Hal!
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns- great place off Buford Hwy called Chef Liu.
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas- Trader Joe's…
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar- does a half count?
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail- I remember being jipped on this. It was some kind of like, $7 buffet, except the oxtail, which was an additional $13. I was not amused.
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal- sounds delicious
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu- would like to try
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel YUM
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine- this sounds delicious
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads- would love to try
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian- Tried, but the smell made me throw up a little before I could get it within mouthreach. I'm counting it as "A for effort."
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake- most recently in Belfast, of all places. Some international food exhibition had wonderful churros and crepés. Delicioius!
68. Haggis- are you KIDDING ME?
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill- I think… there are a few very likely family members responsible for this. I'm counting it.
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum－ I also make this very well, I might add...
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant¬- I almost cried…. Il Ristorante Pinocchio in Borgomanero, IT and La Capuccina in Cureggio, IT, both about an hour outside Milan.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish not impressed AT ALL
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox- just about the only breakfast item I can have at J Christopher's if I avoid the cream cheese…
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Total: 64
I love these kinds of things.

This paragraph absolutely thrills me!

2008-01-13T01:39:00.001+08:00

I've been studying Inuktitut. I love it, and it's awesome. I'll never learn to speak it, or probably ever meet anyone else that does, but I've been taking notes like a madman. It thrills me to understand/comprehend the following (from Wikipedia):
Ergativity in Inuktitut
Inuktitut marks the subject of a non-specific verb and the object of a specific verb in the same way - the absence of a specific morphological marker - and marks the subject of a specific verb and the object of a non-specific verb with particular morphological elements. This kind of morphosyntactic structure is often called an ergative structure. However, ergativity in its most clearly defined instances is primarily about transitive and intransitive verbs, This dichotomy is not identical to the specific/non-specific verb distinction in Inuktitut, since Inuktitut usage is also concerned with the definiteness of the objects of verb.
Consequently, the application of the notion of ergativty to Inuktitut, and to many other languages, is somewhat controversial. Regardless, by analogy with more conventionally ergative languages, the -up, -k, -it endings described above are often called ergative suffixes which are taken to be indicative of the ergative case, while the -mik, -rnik, -nik endings (see Non-specific verbs - Objects) are called accusative. This usage is often seen in linguistics literature describing Inuktitut, and sometimes in pedagogic literature and dictionaries, but remains a quite foreign vocabulary to most Inuit.
Sweet.

Tagaq!!!

2008-01-10T01:46:00.000+08:00

This whole throat-singing thing is fascinating to me. It first started with some feature stuff that Tagaq did for Björk's album Medulla, but she's got her own stuff (an album called Sinaa, for one), and this thing with the Cello is awesome. Look into katajjaq for more info. Really cool stuff.

«Футболисты тоже люди»

2007-12-13T02:24:00.000+08:00

Footballers are People, too! Or so says Oleg Luzhny (I don't know who he is, or if that's how you spell his name in English). Anywho, I've been trying to brush up on Russian lately, and I came across this today. Yeah, it's in Russian, but it's basically Oleg bellyaching about people having expectations of him, and how his team's having a really bad losing streak is just 'bad coincidence,' неприятная случайность. 'Footballers are people too! We all make mistakes, blah blah.' I don't know what those guys are making, but it seems most people with cleats that play for a league that's televised in Europe are considered veritable gods. I don't think he needs to grovel too much. So, just win your games, Oleg. это не слишком трудно...

5 Months, 2 Days, 16 Hours, 3 Mins

2007-12-10T01:35:00.000+08:00

... at least when I started writing this. We'll see how many subscribers (a.k.a. none) I had, since they'll be the only ones prompted to check and see if this thing is still being updated. Because it hasn't.
Chinese is the best. I love it. Great people, love the language, busy as I've ever been, but that really won't ever change, will it?
I've been um, nostalgaic (?) lately, with stuff. Stuff I haven't done in a long time: I'm listening to super old music (like, recently super old, e.g. from Junior High) and reading old books and stuff. It's funny to look back and read your blog (maybe not so much funny as embarassing, not unlike old photo albums).
I spent tons of time with languages I haven't touched since. At one point, I could introduce myself and chat casually in Swahili. Gone. Almost in Romanian. Gone. Hungarian. Never could. German. Was going well. I am now embarrased. Russian? Here's the best news: A good friend of mine is learning Russian, and wants to practice and use it and stuff. That's AWESOME! I never really used Russian with anyone when I was seriously studying it. Shame. But anyway, I've been working on my Pimsleur again, and am 6-8 lessons into the second 'course' or whatever. It's fun.
So, for old times' sake, let's share some exciting linguistic facts:
Lithuanian is, ostensibly, the closet [living] language to Indo-European. Lithuanian. Not Persian, not Albanian or Armenian or Greek or any of that. Weird.
While we're in the Baltics, Latvian is Tonal.
The Zulu word (I feel like I've shared this already) for 'tomorrow' is mañana (not necessarily spelled that way). Strange, no? Well, not as much as you may think. The Spanish settled in [what is now South Africa] in (some year I don't know, but it seemed before the Dutch did. At any rate, they were there a long time ago), and at the time, Zulu speaking people were farmers or whatever, and didn't run businesses and weren't trying to take over the world, i.e. they had no word for 'tomorrow,' because the concept was unnecessary. The Spanish came and introduced the concept because they were so stuff-driven, and needed that structure. Whatever.
Nothing else exciting for the moment, and there's no guarantee I'll ever be back here.

我恨夏天。

2007-07-07T08:25:00.000+08:00

我说过了。
Or something like that.

What Have I Been Working on?

2007-06-15T20:55:00.001+08:00

So yes, this is what I did last night. Did it take an hour? No! 当然不!!! It took two and a half. But I've got it down on paper in Chinese and pinyin, but I think I can pretty much recall the whole thing without having to cheat, except for when I choke. Very exciting. It's coming along well, and I'm really enjoying it, although I was in a conversation the other day with a friend, and all the words he couldn't remember in Chinese came to me in Russian. I need to transfer mentally. When you start playing around like this with different languages (some semi-seriously), you begin to see the glaring advantages of studying multiple languages, and how that different outlook helps you tremendously to understand concepts that may seem foreign at first. Love this book. Anyone that has even a mild interest in linguistics or international communication should cough up the $14 and go get this. Especially if you want to acqure an unbridled lust for languages and a very efficient way to pick them up during commercial breaks. Tres intelligent.

ReacTable

2007-06-04T22:34:00.001+08:00

List: Things I Could Do If I Slept Polyphasically

2007-06-02T01:39:00.001+08:00

So I’ve been all psyched up about polyphasic sleeping (Oh, and don’t be mistaken: this is not an invitation to tell me how awful or dangerous or stupid an idea it is. Thanks in advance). I may try the biphasic thing first, but in either case I would be awake for a significant period at night. Biphasic I would sleep probably 5:30-7:00 am and pm. This seems to be easiest. Polyphasic would be a half hour nap at 6:30 and 12:30 am and pm, and that’s a little more difficult to deal with, but would probably be better. Again, either way, I’d be up a great deal of the night, and the idea of basically creating free time between 1 and 6 am is so appealing I can hardly stand it. Therefore:

List: Things I Could Do If I Slept Polyphasically (that is, things I could accomplish at night and take out of my daily routine, thus freeing up time during the daylight hours):

Study Chinese like a maniac
Laundry
Run/Work out
Study for meetings, etc. (English and Chinese)
Clean
Write
(I’d even mow the lawn if I didn’t think the neighbors would set my house afire)
Catch up on emails (and other necessary correspondences)
Wii
Finishing my Italian and Turkish language programs (now moving into non-necessary items, those “hey I’d do this if I had more time” type things)
Start sketching again (blah)
Read more recreational books
Brush up on Russian
Find more stuff to do with my time

So, what it boils down to is this: since I’ll probably become biphasic if anything, since it’s a little hard to ask my peers to let me sleep for a half hour in the middle of the day or right when evening service starts. So say I sleep like I said above: two 90 min naps every 12 hours. That means I’m sleeping 21 hours a week. People, that means (Depending on your current sleep habits) you’re gaining at least 21 hours a week (assuming you only sleep six hours a night; I’m closer to seven, so in my case it’d be 28 hours). Think of what you could do with an extra 28 hours a week, or an extra four hours each day.

Also, the simple idea is this (for those of you that won’t read the above link. Check out the other links at the bottom of that article. Steve Pavlina’s blog is excellent): if you use a cell phone for a three hour phone call, you’re bordering on the entire life of the battery, meaning you’ll have to charge it longer before it’s fully ready to go. OR, you can charge it every 45 mins or something, meaning it’s ready to go much quicker. Same is true with us: the longer we’re awake, the longer the brain takes to repair, reboot, defrag, organize and rest. If we sleep at more frequent intervals, we don’t need to hibernate before reaching REM sleep and getting the same healthy benefits of slumber. (Again, this is not a request for calling up the relative insanity of this idea. I know… I’m gonna do it.) Also check out Randy Gardner… wiki him or something.

Useless?

2007-05-29T21:02:00.001+08:00

I’m feeling more and more like this blog does not have a raison d’etre. That could be partially my fault. It has no focus, no theme, no defined audience (save the two people that read it because I read theirs), and I’m getting awfully low traffic here. Solutions? (Well, for one, how ‘bout a few more comments, people? Not that I haven’t overanalyzed everything and left nothing to be said, or posted about something completely inane, but recognition is nice)

A theme. Yes, it was supposed to be this language stuff I guess, but I seem to have lost that now that I’m focused on Chinese. I’m also going to be taking a Japanese class occasionally (read: as often as I want or have time), but none too intensely. So that means there’s very little Hungarian, Romanian, Swahili, Farsi, Aramaic, Punjabi, or Xhosa experiences anymore, which is fine, because they were a diversion from my focus languages at the time: Russian and German (the former being my favorite, the latter being far easier), but since I’ve moved to Chinese, that’s it (and Japanese because it sounds prettier).
(almost like #1) updates on a hobby: do I have a hobby? The clear answer here is: no. Unless it’s wikipedia-ing (we need a noun like ‘to google’ for wikipedia; is it to wiki? And what’s the past tense?) arbitrary grammatical constructions of anamorphic languages… yeah, that’s a real creative outlet. So I’ve decided I need a creative outlet of some kind. I have few of those talents. I’d like to spend more time with photography, and I think I got some good captures from this weekend. They’re on Flickr. I would also like to spend more time on the piano. I’m familiar with very little, but that takes time time time (and it’s time...) So I dunno about that. If I had enough time, I’d really like to get back into writing stuff and posting it in installments here, but I haven’t written in a while. I’ve got some good stuff on hold and all, but haven’t felt right about progressing with it, since I don’t feel in the correct frame of mind to keep it true to what it should be.
Something having to do with the ‘there needs to be a word for that,’ project. A collaborative effort seems nice, but it also seems at the expense of quality and usefulness, no? We’ll see how Eric feels, but I’m leaning toward an online equivalent to my Moleskine where a few of us can work on or edit current entries and stuff, as opposed to everyone and their brother submitting words that already exist or are based on their own names and mean “supercoolawesomeness,” as there’s a lot of that on Addictionary.

In short (not), I need to come up with something to do with this thing, salvage it somehow, so without anything definitive to write about regularly (it’s okay to write about unremarkable things knowing that someone’s reading them. This is the html version of talking to a brick wall, and if I’m gonna do that, I’ll talk to a REAL brick wall so I can at least hear myself), it's been difficult, and has become somewhat of a vestige. It seems, however, that the blog has become a necessary part of an individual’s identity, non? Well, let’s see what happens here, as the future of ForeignWords ever hangs in the balance.

Adieu.

Imperial

2007-05-17T20:40:00.000+08:00

I know it's already on My Flickr, but it was a nice introduction to this post, I thought.
Yesterday was a very long day. Very long. Tiring. Stressful. I sat in traffic for nearly two hours to go about 16 miles. Chinese group meeting at 6, and I got there about twenty minutes early, so did I work on a presentation? Did I clean out my car or go get something to eat (since I hadn't had anything but a smoothie in the past 6 hours)? NO! I went to the piano dealer I called earlier in traffic to go play the Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. Check out the notes on my Flickr pix about it. It's nothing shy of the best in the world, and it was 15 seconds off the tuning fork when I came in to play, and had been pitched and all. Yay.
I had very little time to do what I needed to do there, and sat down to play a few things, and tinker w/ chords and whatever, and it just feels so good. I wish I could actually play a few things and be expressive with them, but it's amazing.
I also listened to great music. I had tons of new tracks queued up on my fauxPod (the photo of which makes it look far cheaper and less sturdy than it really is), and I set it to shuffle. Boy, did she pick out some great tunes, and it came out being a great playlist, so I've got a smattering of about twenty tracks I'm going to put together that work for yesterday's happenings. It soundtracked my day.

Chick rock

2007-05-10T21:41:00.000+08:00

So apparently I listen to way too many female artists (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Rachael Yamagata, Sarah McLachlan, Emily Haines, Joanna Newsom, Regina Spektor, Charlotte Martin [jibblies], and somebody told me to listen to Kate Bush yesterday, [some of these are new forays for me, too]). That's what I'm told anyway. The music library (aside from Amos) probably isn't overwhelmingly female, but whatever. I've really been getting into more PJ Harvey lately, and got two or three more of her albums and they're excellent. I've also been influenced into listening to Bjork, and she's growing on me, although she's less straightforward musically than what I'm used to. Anyway, I found this interesting [read: incredible] and thought I'd share.

PJ plays guitar in her typical grunge/bluesy style, but I've never heard Bjork sing like this before, and it's awesome.

In her defense...

2007-05-03T20:54:00.001+08:00

Interesting. Where’s The Beekeeper when you need her? I still like it, but this new one is awesome!!!

Seems everyone is harping (not like Joanna Newsom though) on how awful the last album was, and I saw the above story on my iGoogle today, and snickered…

Unstuck in Time

2007-05-01T06:17:00.000+08:00

What's new, you ask? Well, just who do you think you are?

The New Album comes out tomorrow, and my copy is being two-day'ed to my house, so it should get here either Wednesday or Thursday, because it's apparently already shipped. So that's exciting. Been very busy, very busy.
I was also doing some research on vowel harmony and consonant mutation. That's exciting.
I had a smoothie for breakfast yesterday.
I need to make some more rice.
Played Nintendo Wii (waay awesome) for hours yesterday.
I hope to get a cool new pen this weekend.
(just hitting the high points.... more later, maybehaps.)

Flash(y)cards

2007-04-18T00:59:00.000+08:00

I have an awful headache. Neither the large cup of coffee, nor a good lunch, nor the seventeen and a half glasses of water I've had as of yet have done diddly squat, so I took something.

I love Chinese. I went with gameyy to the Chinese meeting on Sunday and it was so awesome. Loved it. I had convinced myself it was going to be impossible to read Chinese because enough squigglies in a very small shape all look similar after a while, right? WRONG. That made me happy, and I started to notice more characters throughout the rest of the meeting. I spent a few hours last night and a few nights previous making flashchards. Instead of having a 3x5 with one word written horizontally and it's translated equivalent on the opposite side, flipped horizontally to view, I have a diferent method. I USUALLY divide the 3x5 into five sections vertically, so I can write five words. Then, flipping ~end over end~ (vertically) the translated equivalents go on the opposite side, so the word at the top in English is still at the top in Chinese. However, these flashcards are not a one-to-one translation. I have the English, Chinese, and pinyin, all of which I need to learn, but don't want to be dependent on the pinyin, so I had to make them work in all directions. So here's what I did. Instead of having five sections on the front and back, I divided the front five vertically so that there were ten boxes: the five on the left are for English, the five on the right are for the pinyin. The backside still has only five boxes, with the Chinese characters listed. So what I can do is fold the card vertically so that it's English-to-pinyin (or vice versa) or can leave it opened so that it's English/pinyin-Chinese (or vice versa). I think it's smart.

...when pianos try to be guitars

2007-04-13T05:19:00.000+08:00

It's been two years now, and she's at it again. May 1 is just around the corner, and I preordered my copy today. I love a good concept album.

I left my heart in Hong Kong

2007-04-05T06:08:00.000+08:00

...too bad Hong Kong doesn't have as many syllables as San Fran/cis/co. Oh well
I'm looking over the pictures I still have yet to upload, and I'm deciding which to put up, etc., and it's (depressing is too strong a word)(so is disheartening)(and sad) strange, to see a place like Guilin in pictures, where you see so far beyond what is actually there, since you remeber not only the sights, but the smells, sounds, etc., and miss it so much. I know some people on our tour weren't terribly pleased with Guilin, but I loved it. I'm working on backfilling stories from Guilin into the pictures I've uploaded, and it'll take a little while, so even if there isn't any new content, please peruse them occasionally, as I think linking to them here is too redundant unless they're outstandingly interesting.
That having been said, I posted the pictures from Guangzhou, some of which I was very happy with, and I don't even remember taking a lot of them. Cool city; it didn't make a huge impression on me, though, as we saw two places and had lunch. I hear a lot about it, and it was too bad we couldn't have explored. Oh well. Next is Hong Kong, and even being there was bittersweet, because I had expected it to be the crown jewel of the trip even before I left, but getting closer to arriving there, it was also my cue that the trip was coming to a quick end. It's been a week since our last full day in Hong Kong, and depressing is not too strong a word to use here to describe my feelings for having left Hong Kong (not that I had any choice to stay), and realizing that a week ago (local time) we were doing this thing, or that thing, and what an excellent time I had. So, this leads us to two things:
1. I'm not going to post the pictures of Hong Kong all willy-nilly like I did of the other cities. This is not only because I want them to be good, but also because it's going to take some preparation to look at them and reminisce on what's at least a week old and look back on it all (as corny as it sounds), and
2. I am suddenly moved to write nostalgic emails to some of the people on the trip that I grew close to, just to commemorate the trip, and finish up some stuff that was too corny or cliche to do face to face. Also, this is an effort to ensure that everyone understands we ARE NOT simply going our separate ways and never speaking to one another again.
I did not mean for this post to be some sob story about coming home; it was more 'hey I put up more pictures,' ostensibly. It's been a long day.

So, How 'bout this weather we're having...

2007-04-04T04:57:00.000+08:00

Wow... The sky just got dark and started rumbling, and for some reason I am so looking forward to this thunderstorm. It hasn't started yet, but I hope it pulls through.
The weather in Guilin was very similar to Hawaii (from what I remember and from what my TC says), and also to what I imagine any more southeast Asian country would be like: lush, warm, a little humid, wet, but lush is the keyword. I'm so sick of 'vegetation,' like pine trees and pollen and grass, although the dogwoods are awesome, and look like some of the blossoms we saw in Asia. Very cool, but as much as I despise, abhor, resent and loathe hot summer weather, the Guilin, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong (the 'lush' was lost after Guilin) climates were not that bad. Guilin was somewhat muggy, yes, but I loved it. The Li river ran through it, and I don't know if that made it better or worse, but I could've gotten used to it. Guangzhou was more citified and a little too muggy (with nothing to show for it) for my taste (albeit a cool city), and Hong Kong is on the coast, which makes it totally awesome. Guilin reminded me a little (and it's NOT just because I enjoy it way too much) Goa, India, in the Bourne Supremacy, where people were laid back, and it had a cool lively yet rural feel, with the markets and huts and booths, etc. Excellent. I don't know how all of this came about because of some thunder. Sorry.
Looking through the Xi'an pictures, and I hope H'n'B has some incredible ones with her zoom lense, because mine are blurry or grainy or far away or generic, and I'm trying to find some 'artistic' ones to post. They'll be up by Thursday, hopefully. That's all.

Progress

2007-04-03T11:23:00.000+08:00

Posted pictures all the way thru to Beijing, which I just finished. Very few are titled or commented about as to where taken, and when, etc., but I'm going to backfill all of that before starting the upload of the Xi'an pictures. Enjoy what's up there now, and comment, because a few of you were there and don't need to be informed. Anyway, I'm working on it, and it'll come along in the next few days, along with the Xi'an and Guilin pictures... see you soon.

En Route to Asia

2007-04-01T04:00:00.000+08:00

So, I realized in uploading some of my photos to My Flickr that it may be a bit redundant when I upload them here, so what I’m going to do is link to the photos, and then elaborate on some of the stuff that I said more briefly (or not at all) on Flickr. Sound good? Okay. (Also, please let this be your warning that there are tangents aplenty related to these photos, so you’ll get all the scoop on those HERE, not on Flickr.)
We’ll start with THIS ONE and THAT ONE. The one of the cards is a game of rummy about to begin. On the plane on the way out there, since it was supposed to be night time (in the time zone we were coming FROM, as I recall, but not in the air at the moment) they closed all the shades and cut the lights, making it all dark and sleepy. It was also ‘movie time’ as one of the flight attendants said, and was it ever… boring. So we played cards for a long time. Rummy, it was, and it was pretty even I think. We had a running game going, and had all intentions of keeping up with it at later times on other planes and in other terminals, but somewhere along the way the tally was lost, so we kept a mental note. As I said on Flickr, that was before LF caught the death and was completely and entirely miserable. He looked to me to be sleeping, but later said he didn’t for even a second, which made me feel even horrible-r for him… Anyway, the flight out there was miserably long (I speak of it only mildly since I wasn’t dying), but I DID spill water all over myself and was thankful for a change of clothes. It seemed so much longer going out than coming back, but I didn’t know that on the way there, so it was surprisingly less dreadful on the return, which was nice, because I was in no mood for anything else to be unhappy.
The second photo is one of a foreign exchange student sitting at the window a seat over from me. The girl between us was the one I got to talking to that explained that she and 21 others were foreign exchange students coming back from some college in Illinois. It was super cool because she wrote down her name in Japanese, and we talked about where she lived and what it was like to be in Japan, what they did for fun, where they went on vacation, etc. They (all of them) were so timid and peaceful, and it was really enjoyable to talk with them about things. I felt like the world’s biggest goofball for not speaking any Japanese, because they struggled with English, but did the best they could and we communicated fine. At one point, when I said we were visiting China as well, she asked me if we were going to see “in China, they… they have a big… a big… um, a long castle….” And I guessed the Great Wall. She was so thrilled to get that across, and it made me laugh, not at her, but because it was awesome. More to come later.

Back Home

2007-04-01T00:19:00.000+08:00

Hello from the same place I always post. There was very little online contact in Asia, so I didn't post. I am however, currently conquering the mass of media I brought home with me, and am trying to find a reasonable way to share a moderate amount of it without getting out of control. For those of you that want out of control, LF and I will catch up with you in person and relate everthing down to the finest detail (as is my nature). That having been said, I cannot currently relate to you (especially in this environment [my dreary office looking over my dreary street where everything is the same], one so different from mine the past three weeks of kind, gentle, compassionate, helpful people and beautiful scenery) the absolute elation, joy, and deep sense of internal change and paradigm shift the past three weeks has brought me. There is no worthy attempt to begin any semblance of telling stories about every little five minutes of awesomeness that I spent with specific people here or there (and to you people I owe deep gratitude for sharing all of this experience and to continue to be willing to do so, Thank You), so I have decided on something. It's going to take efforts on more than one front to accomplish this, so I'll be using this blog (considering devoting an entirely brand new one to the trip, but since it's all post-travel, i don't know) as well as my Flickr to relate it piece by piece. Each (probably not) day (but more like semi-weekly) I hope to share (on the blog) a single photo (or maybe two) of something in particular and the story that goes with it. These will be in chronological order, and will begin in Atlanta, thru Detroit, etc... I will also be uploading pictures onto Flickr, and these will be only the neat looking ones, with cool stuff or scenery, or whatever. For those of you that want the whole gamut, email me, because i'm not posting all 2,000 pictures, especially of people, and group photos, etc. There is some sense of anonymity that i still cherish. I will also NOT be sharing the most intimate, deeply felt changes that Asia has effected in me and all that I am. I know it sounds corny, but it's more than true. For those details, drag me to Starbucks and buy me a coffee. That should get you a few hours of deep, heartwarming, soul-searching conversation that may, in fact, change your life as well. I'm signing off now to finish organizing pictures, and you may get the first installment of these by Monday. We'll see. Thank you all for reading.

A very good song

2007-03-09T06:33:00.000+08:00

Youtube can quickly become the bane of anyone's existence, but I found this, and it's worth watching, because it's a really good song. I know H'n'B won't like this, but it's too bad. I actually favor another performance she did of this better, but it's still an awesome song, and it's dedicated to someone in both versions.

Smooth(ie)!

2007-03-08T22:28:00.000+08:00

I made a smoothie today for breakfast, and although the components may not sound appealing all together, they worked out really well. Started with a banana (I hate bananas), a handful of frozen blueberries, some strawberries, a cup of strawberry/banana yogurt, a little honey, and orange juice to mix. I added a few ice cubes, but those contribute neither any flavor nor nutritional value. It was delicious. Only problem is, I’m freezing my tookus off (how does one spell tookus? Tuckus doesn’t cut it, but tookus is too Dutch).
I have almost finished packing, but will completely un- and re-pack before Sunday. I have decided to remove a few things and add some others, etc. and this will aid me in being more aware of how everything fits anyway. So, as a shoutout to H’n’B, whom I called in a sedated nervous breakdown:
1. Everything now fits in the security pouch when I take out the $50.
2. Weight limit was bogus. LF assured me its closer to 40 lbs.
3. I’ll be buying a suitcase of some sort in Hong Kong and will be checking luggage on the way home. Good thing I won’t be getting a suit made until the last city on our trip so I’m not schlepping that along.
Pleased with how everything fits. Extra pair of shoes was going to be a worry, but I managed them. All seems to be going well, and I think I’m finally coming to the realization that I’m going to Asia. Last minute to-dos:
1. razor blades (for shaving)
2. deodorant (trying to hunt down something in particular)
3. a few more spandex/non-cotton items
4. (Not an errand) camera battery charger should be arriving today.
5. One last load of laundry
6. deciding on what actual book(s) I’m going to read
I’ve got a short-list, but realized that although the list is based on that top-100 thing I love to read by, most of them are early 20th century soap opera womanhood love stories… We’ll see… I’ve gotta come up with something….

Beautiful Day

2007-03-07T00:07:00.000+08:00

I had some time between errands on Saturday that I put to good use; I had to pick my brother up at the local library, and there were almost two hours of down time until that happened. What did I do? Well, of course, I parked my car behind a chiropractor’s office and my camera and I strolled around another old town here in the area (more industrial than mine). (My town is unique in that it is one of the only old town/village things anywhere near here that has been in existence for almost 100 years, (therefore still existing) and has never had a railroad.) Anyway, check out my Canton Street photoset. I got some I’m pretty happy with, and there are some that I rushed through that I could have done a better job with. I don’t understand how H’n”B (and others, I’m sure) make it taking pictures of stuff, because I’m not tall tall, but even I feel like I should carry a step ladder with me to get good shots on occasion. Anyway, the weather was beautiful and I was able to get some photos that I’m very pleased with. As the sun started to go down, I got some silhouette photos I really liked, and it was a great day. It’s amazing how atmosphere can be created. I usually don’t think of this street as being highly sensory, or stimulating, but I got there and there were people coming and going (not enough to make too much noise that would ruin the ambience), there were incredible smells from these quaint French and Italian restaurants, and one of them was playing Norah Jones in the background. It was bright and sunny, and the scenery was beautiful; everything was awesome. I planned my walk so I would double back very little, and it was very enjoyable. So what this amounts to is little more than shameless plugging… Not really, it was just so incredible.

The Best of...

2007-03-02T02:39:00.000+08:00

...me!

In my efforts to get a messenger bag that 'works,' I spent some time at Old Navy and Target, more to look at stuff I WON'T want to buy so I'll have an idea of what I DO want to buy. Well, the first stop was Old Navy, and I bought a bag there. I liked it, but was a little skeptical. I felt like I was wasting time, so I decided to get it. The size is great, and the material is rugged, but I didn't know if it had enough pockets, etc. I broke down and went to the cashier expecting to fork over the $25 it was going to cost. Turns out, my total was just barely over $6. Six!!! That thriled me. It wasn't until this morning that I realized the little journal I bought for the trip fits swimmingly into the little interior pouch. It wasn't until this morning as well that I noticed some extra pockets and pouches that fit my mp3 player, pens, etc. and that thirlled me.
That having been said, I was happy with my purchase, but strolled into Target to finish up some other odds'n'ends. I saw a lady shelving women's shoes, and her nametag read 'Lana.' I asked her a question I already knew the answer to, and she responded with rolled r's and non-English vowel qualities. I asked her where 'Lana' came from, and she said 'It's Russian.' Need I relate my ecstasy? We talked for probably fifteen minutes, and (maybe it was just the coffee, but) I was as comfortable and conversational as I've ever been. We discussed our families and backgrounds, and she wanted to know where I grew up in Russia. She laughed when I told her I was American, and then apologized profusely when she realized I was serious. She speaks German as well, but not very much, so we continued in Russian, but I was on top of my game and kept my cool. I have her contact information and will be ~following up~. I didn't discuss the reasons for our foreign language interest, but she lives in our territory, so we'll see. It was amazing.
Things are almost completely finished coming together for Asia. Holy crap: it's just over a week away.

Hello, Tokyo

2007-02-27T22:00:00.002+08:00

So I’ve come to the realization (as have two of my travel partners here and there) that this time two weeks from now, I will be on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. As already mentioned in one of the links, when I got my visa, welcome letter, passport, etc., it hit me: I’m actually going to be walking around and rubbing shoulders IN CHINA! Not the little part of NYC, but the REAL CHINA. Not the little part of San Francisco, but the REAL JAPAN. Wow.
Chores as of late? I finally got the spare camera battery and a 2GB SD card for DIRT cheep. I also need to get the wall charger for my camera so I don’t have to schlep the cradle and cable that go with it for to synchronize it on the… how you say… computer I won’t have with me?
I spent some extra cash on some non-cotton stuff that’ll dry quicker and be easier to handle while there: some t-shirts and socks and stuff, but I’m still a little nervous about how heavy and bulky my jeans, etc. are going to be, despite that you can wear jeans more than once, drying them once seems to take days… so I’m not sure about that. I already have the world’s coolest khaki jacket with all sorts of zippers and pockets and stuff. That makes me happy.
Concerns: are H’n’B and I going to want to spend a half hour on every reddish leaf that has fallen to the concrete and a pool of water, thus making ourselves the object of hatred by every other member of our travel group? Certainly not. I guess I don’t have many concerns… or ones that can be discussed at any constructive critical length, but that phrase just solved another one…
What books will I be bringing? Hmmm. That last phrase was a quote from J.D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.” His books are always a joy to me, and I don’t think I’ll be reading anything like what I’m currently working on, since it’s somewhat depressing and also bulky. Seems appropriate, and somewhat cliché, I know, to bring this book along, but I always carry Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” with me when I am. I read it in California, and Savannah, and other places, and it’s enjoyable. We’ll see. Any suggestions? I was thinking “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” or something very character driven.
I’ve also decided I’m learning Persian at the expense of Turkish and some of my German. Someone asked me yesterday if I had considered giving up the other three I was learning to focus on just one. “No.”

Looking back, I wish this post was somewhat more organized and thoughtful. At least as succinct as H’n’B (I’ve never been succinct) or as literary as LF’s, but I’m in a hurry and haven’t had so much as a smell of coffee yet. I’ll get back to this and write some literary monologue about my thoughts and concerns on some deep level of consciousness, with a literary style matching that of James Joyce (in his early days, of course, before ‘Portrait’ or ‘Ulysses’).

Tootles.

2007-02-27T22:00:00.001+08:00

The Posse...

2007-02-21T06:32:00.000+08:00

Check this out. Huge news for all of you, I’m sure. May 1 cannot come quickly enough. Bring it on

Fun Filled Day

2007-02-20T21:30:00.000+08:00

I spoke to people in five languages yesterday (yes, one of them was English). I wouldn’t call them conversations necessarily, because some of them only consisted of “Hello. How are you? I don’t speak [language]. Thank you. Goodbye,” but they were what they were. They were as follows:
1. English
2. Russian- talked to a Ukrainian waitress at a swanky bar-type Mexican restaurant in Russian, as well as another character below.
3. Turkish- cashier at Marshall’s. Name was Sima; asked if it was Persian. She said yes, but that her parents were Turkish. Started talking; she said she didn’t really speak it, but she still had an accent. Maybe she couldn’t understand me at all, so I said ‘My Turkish is bad.’ (Turkcem kötüdür.)
4. Romanian- Employee at Target speaks Romanian. Said the very little I could say, but amounted to a small teeny tiny conversation. Asked her if she spoke any other languages. She said Russian, so I all but attacked her with Russian, and then she told me that despite her having studied it for 12 years, she doesn’t like it, so she hasn’t learned it. However, she did say she speaks…
5. French, and asked me if I spoke it, and I said coolly: ‘pourquois pas?’ and finished off with the other somewhat incoherent things I could say in French, and I’m sure she saw right through it, but she smiled and that was it.
All in all, those escapades made my day. What ISN’T making my day is the STUPID issues I’m having with my media player screwing up my fauxPod. For some reason it thinks I told it to remove tons and tons of my media at random, and it isn’t getting put back into the list of ABSENT media files to sync NEXT TIME, and now my library has gaping holes in it. It ALSO saw fit to create doubles (and sometimes triples) of highly unnecessary photos I never intended to carry around with me, like one of mom’s friends wedding showers. (Good thing I had triples of 100 pictures of a bunch of women standing around candles and cake, right? Cuz that doesn’t take up 2GB of storage unnecessarily.) So now I’m (hopefully) rebuilding the stuff and filling in the holes without adding quads of stuff I’ve already got on there. Sorry, WMP 11, although you’re cool with some new awesome features, you’re also a forerunner of Vista: I just think you’re unnecessary, and it’s too bad you lost some of your totally awesome features, like the ‘jump to artist/album’ from the search function, etc. You’ve lost some awesome features, WMP 11, and some new ones that you have are about as useful as a RadioShack in an Amish village, (or redundant/useless item of choice in compromising situation of choice).
For the love o’ Pete…

Addiction in kind

2007-02-16T03:41:00.000+08:00

For those of you that haven’t been in close company with me lately, I have a new addiction as well. (This seemed an appropriate answer to H’n’B’s post about her football addiction) Mine is more substance related, though… substance sounds so shady and illegal when paired with the words ‘addiction,’ ‘abuse,’ ‘dependence,’ … you get the idea…
COFFEE!!! I’ve had coffee experiences lately, and there are too many to relate, but they involve baristas and stuff… need to know basis.
It all started a few hours before the Superbowl. Picture it: a nice cool afternoon before going to (what can arguably be called) an old friend’s house for the party. I’ve made plans to meet some friends at Starbucks before heading over there. I get there early and peruse the shopping center where I find a Persian restaurant. I went in to get a menu and their hours of operation, and to my pleasant surprise, they had a Persian newspaper!!! Having gotten the desired information from the (not unattractive hostess) I strolled out with my newspaper and to go menu. Seeing fit to order my coffee before they arrived, I decided to get a size that would last me long enough that I wouldn’t be finished when Affie and her friend got there late. I strolled in to order my coffee and asked what they had. My past experience with Starbucks coffee has been not so pleasant, and I never did have a taste for it, but I thought for some reason I’d give it another try (my subconscious was so right). I can’t remember how it happened, but instead of ordering a plain medium coffee or doppio, (I think it involved the mind-numbing headache I had) I decided to pull out the big guns and order the ‘bold’ brew they had. Was I ever pleased…
Incredible. It’s an Indonesian thing, and dark, heavy, and almost thick. It’s got a bite to it, and is really delightful. Funny thing is, I would have never been able to drink something like this before. I suddenly love it.
You see, black coffee has been one of those things I’ve wanted to like for a long time. (We all have things we want to like, be it social reasons, chic factor, but there are things we do not like that we try to, and for me it was coffee.) I could drink black coffee, but only with some trepidation and slow going, or a handful of sweets by my side. That’s over. I was also never able to taste the ‘aromas,’ or ‘flavors,’ or ‘hints,’ of flavor that people describe in anything, be it coffee, wine, sand… but I’m noticing them now. So, as corny as it sounds to describe the coffee above as earthy, bold, spicy, (even nutty), and almost entirely non-acidic, it’s what I get from it. Delightful.
This has started a kick for me. Like a kid in a candy store (or a linguist in an international airport), I’ve been jumping around to get my hands on all the Starbucks brews and coffees. I welcomed home my first pound of coffee last week, ground for a drip brew. It was a pound of the Komodo, mentioned above. But since then, my other favorites have been Gold Coast (awesome, but not nearly as earthy and pungent as Komodo, since it’s got more Latin and Italian blended in with it; still super bold, but a little sweeter) and especially the Sulawesi (very similar to Komodo, but more elegant, less in-your-face, and smoother; not as big, but with even less acidity; it’s amazing). The Ethiopian Sidamo tastes like a blender full o’ flowers and perfume (yuck), and I’m not impressed with the Café Verona because it’s too acidic for my taste, despite that it’s supposed to be their most popular… Estima, Guatemala Antiqua, Yukon are some others I’ve tried. I’m still waiting to try Sumatra and Kenya, as well as the Espresso and French Roasts. Obsessive? Maybe. Expensive? Sort of. Delicious? Absolutely. I realized when I dig through my pockets for change enough to buy a $1.60 coffee, it can be considered a dependency. I have been getting these afternoon headaches, though, between 2:30 and 4, and the caffeine does the trick. I don’t drink sodas or anything, and the coffee is much better, so that’s been making me happy. That is all.
(~What’s that haunting aroma?~ a la Will Ferrel in ‘Kicking and Screaming.’)
تحيات حارة

O The Things You Can Think

2007-02-06T22:27:00.000+08:00

My Goodness:

Italian is coming along slowly [read: it's not]
I've been assigned my Romanian again.
Hungarian is also inactive
Someone told me they wanted to learn Persian with me, but I'm not holding my breath
Showed off at Turkish again this weekend
Russian is arguably taking a backburner
German is as lively as ever
Still don't' like Cambodian or Esperanto…
Starting the cramming with Chinese and Japanese

Language stuff has been busy lately, and it's just too bad I can't devote my time and energy into ONE (or a few) things. Hungarian is NOT a serious endeavor (yet), and my Asian languages are only temporary (unless I fall in love with them there). Sunday before the Superbowl, I drank a golly good coffee and read a Persian newspaper at Starbucks. It was enjoyable. I was also across the street from a Steinway showroom, and the only thing keeping me from heading over there was the Superbowl (and my not so vibrant interest in Steinway).

Does anybody else think she looks like the pianess herself?

Speaking of which, there are like nine or ten some odd people that I've talked to that now want tickets to see her when she comes to town. I'm hoping she plays at some sweet venue and not at Bob's Big Carnival Saloon. Symphony Hall would be nice again. We'll see.

I don't have that much to say right now. I was going to do that concert analysis that Affie did, but I'm just not feeling it at the moment. However, I close with a combination of a few things discussed above, for those of you that watched the Superbowl and followed a few of the links above… or want to see her live. Enjoy. (I'm actually surprised at how good this is.)

(also check out my new email signature that I decided to leave on this email, just for those of you that don't get it all the time anyway)

With best regards

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

С наилучшими пожеланиями

Saygılarımla

Cordialement

تحيات حارة

Brilliant

2007-01-26T07:06:00.001+08:00

Rosetta Stone is no Pimsleur, but this ad is awesome. Next to it is a picture of the quintessential farmboy w/ a Rosetta Stone box. Awesome!

2007-01-18T04:11:00.001+08:00

Help me out here....