In LA

I just found this photo I shot back in 1995 of the long-gone band Skunk Anansie performing at Seattle’s long-gone venue Moe’s Cafe. Moe’s was a great place to take photos, and it was a good show. I still remember shooting this show, feeling instantly happy about this particular image as soon as I’d clicked the shutter, rushing back to The Daily to develop the film, and scanning it in that awful original-model Nikon Coolscan (the source of those horizontal gray bars of noise in the image). It’s likely that this was shot on Kodak 3200 pull-processed to ISO 1600 with no flash. The photo was printed in the November 30, 1995 issue of The Daily.

The Daily’s archives are fun to browse. Here’s a photo I shot of Kurt Vonnegut that I really like too.

The title of this post is an exaggeration, I did shower yesterday at a local gym. But at home, forget it. The problem is that the water pressure and the water temperature both dropped late last week. Bathing under a mild drip of cold water is no fun. So after a couple of days without a shower, and after fiddling with the dials on our water heater (neither of us can read the labels), I went down to the building’s office and asked for help.

I had planned to tell them the water was cold, but Lisa informed me that I had to tell them the water was “not hot” or they wouldn’t understand my issue. I guess in Chinese when you state that your shower is “cold” people must think you are crazy and just don’t know how to turn the knob to “hot”. So I told the nice lady at the desk that “shuĭ yŏu wèntí” (lit. “water has a problem”) followed by “shuĭ bù rè” (”water not hot”). The stakes were high, because if I put the wrong tones on the word for problem (wèntí), I’d probably be remembered as the crazy foreigner who wandered in babbling about how water has a “literary genre” (wéntĭ). I think I did ok at first, but then they peppered me with a bunch of rapid-fire questions I couldn’t understand, at which point I called Lisa on my cell phone and handed it to them.

The photo of a beautiful mountain spring is a dead giveaway that this is the card for water. I have to use the process of elimination to determine which of our many other cards is for electricity, which for gas, and which for yoga.

That did the trick. They sent their maintenance guy up to the apartment. He said the water heater had a literary genre. He left. Then later that day, the water stopped altogether. To fix this we had to go to that same office in the basement of the building armed with a plastic card. We paid some money and this “recharged” the card, which we then stuck in the slot in one of the water meters that lives in a kitchen cupboard. By “we” I mean “Lisa”, I didn’t think I’d learned enough Chinese since my meeting with the people in the basement to be of use.

me want plastic cards

Our running water was now back, but the shower still wasn’t working. So “we” called the landlord and then finally reached the water heater folk after another day of no shower.

Today I stuck around in the apartment so that I could be present when both the water heater repairman and the landlord’s wife arrived. The water heater guy verified that the water heater was working properly on its own, then verified that hot water did come out of a pipe before it got to the shower head, then realized that the shower fixture was restricting the flow of water to the point that the water heater didn’t recognize that the water was on and thus did not activate. It took a long time to figure this out. He then removed the shower fixture, found some clogged filters, cleaned them, reassembled the shower, and turned it on. The flow was better, just enough to trigger the heater, but it was still very low pressure.

the tankless water heater that could

He removed the shower fixture and squatted there poking at all its pipes with a screwdriver. He and the landlady sat there staring at the shower fixture mournfully for a while, occasionally poking it. He reinstalled the shower. The landlady stepped away and made a call, perhaps to her landhusband to tell him the bad news. Then she called Lisa and told her something. Then the repairman left. Then she left. I took a long shower under the barely flowing hot water.

Rumor has it we’ll be getting a new shower in a week.

The creator of the English language magazines That’s Shanghai and That’s Beijing, both very good sources of information and entertainment for expats living in those cities, has apparently had control of the magazines wrested from him and is now airing his gripes in a Prospect magazine article entitled That’s China. The tagline:

After seven years building up a magazine empire in China, I had it stolen by the state.

Ouch. That sucks. The article includes some great little stories about all the legal and procedural hurdles Mark and the magazine staff faced in order to put out their magazine. It is worth a read. a few more related links:

• Welsh Guardsman’s revenge: the return of Mark Kitto
• Cowardly Wiley? Mark Kitto in the news again
• That’s China!: Mark Kitto tells his tale
• Briton fights for rights to Chinese magazine titles

Just saving this link for the day that I decide to learn some basic Korean. Sogang Multinet Virtual University’s online Korean lessons.

I’ve upgraded this site’s blogging software and have installed a plugin that enables email subscriptions. Now if you are so inclined it is possible for you to subscribe and receive an automatic update via email whenever a post is added to the blog. Just click the ’subscribe’ link in the right column of this page (or just click here). It is easy to opt-in and to opt-out.

Of course, the RSS feeds haven’t gone anywhere. If you know what those are and want to access or subscribe to them, look for RSS at the bottom of the page or just click here for the atom rss feed.

Neato.

Gotta love that “Falling ObjectG”

“Chinglish” is the word often used to describe the strange mistakes that occur in English on signs and clothing made in China (see “FALLING OBJECTG” for an example). But what word can be used to describe mistakes in Chinese characters on signs and clothing made in English-speaking countries?

Hanzi Smatter highlights many examples of such misuse of Chinese characters outside of China, unfortunately including many tattoos containing mistaken Chinese characters, unintentionally humorous meanings, or that are just outright gibberish.

A long line of people wait at a restaurant in a Beijing houtong.

The other day Lisa and I were walking down a houtong (alleyway) in Beijing, and came across a very long line of people, next to a few tables of people eating some kind of noodle soup. Because bargaining for non-functional garments is a lot of work, we were tired and hungry, and got in line.

When Lisa asked another customer what the line was for exactly, the customer told us everyone was there because the houtong was going to be destroyed and this was the restaurant’s last day. When asked whether the food was any good the customer gave a non-superlative answer. The line grew and grew behind us.

What’s cookin?

Hey, those aren’t noodles!

After about a half-hour wait, we entered the restaurant. Inside were a few tables packed with diners, and two cooks tending a large cauldron of soup behind a counter. One cook stirred the soup while the other pulled sections of some sort of snake-like sea monster out of the pot onto an angled cutting board, rapidly chopped the section into pieces, and tossed the monster segments into a bowl of soup along with a ladle of broth as the rest of the monster slipped instantly back into the pot. Though it looked to me like he was serving bits of the garbage-eating dianoga monster from Star Wars, it turns out that he was actually chopping up the floating intestines of some dead animal, hopefully a cow that lived life to its fullest. In summary, the soup consisted of a sea of tripe, slices of some other organ (liver? kidney?), and chopped sections of a dense round bread. It cost 5 RMB for one bowl of soup and .5 RMB for each extra amount of bread or intestine (Divide RMB by 8 to get the amount in US dollars).

Sticker shock.

No complaints here.

Lisa splurged and bought me a bowl with an extra serving of bread. In keeping with my “keep some semblance of kashrut but try every food (within reason) before dying” approach to cuisine, I decided to start by just eating the broth-soaked bread. After a few minutes of that, I realized that the bread was almost passover-dense and that holiday is coming soon enough, and also that I would soon be out of bread and then would be faced only with floating segments of intestine to get through with no bread with which to wash away the flavor/texture. So I started to poke at the rest of the soup.

It took me a few bites to get used to the texture of the tripe. It was kind of like meat, only spongier, and with no flavor of its own. I ended up eating a bit of everything in the bowl, but found it a little underwhelming after all the buildup. The broth was very spicy and salty and not bad, but it masked the flavor of all the things floating in the broth. I’d have to give that tripe soup establishment an A+ for atmosphere but lower marks for flavor. Of course, I’m not too familiar with tripe soup, it could be that my palate is just not educated enough to tell how good this particular soup really was. On the plus side, my digestive tract still seems to be working, so I give the place an A for hygiene, but lower marks for apparent hygiene.

For what it’s worth, the restaurant and the long line were still there when we returned the next day to get the coat repaired.

Don’t you just hate it when “Falling ObjectG” happens?

It’s been cold here in Beijing, but often not cold enough to justify wearing my long wool coat. So I was very happy when Lisa and I were walking down a houtong (that’s a picturesque old Beijing alleyway) and happened upon a shop that sold some nice looking spring jackets. I bought one for 89RMB, which is about $11 US.

The next day, we were outside, and it was cold, so I zipped up the jacket. the zipper came apart below the zipper-head-thing, and then it was very difficult to unzip the jacket. I tried again and the same thing happened. So we went back to the houtong to the shop to see if we could exchange the jacket.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have any other instances of the jacket in that size and color, but they did say they could fix it, so I handed it over. The saleswoman grabbed a large padlock off a shelf, and proceeded to bang it on the zipper in the next room. She then brought the jacket back and carefully demonstrated that the zipper now worked. I put on the jacket, and as soon as I zipped it, the zipper separated below the zipper-head, and was very difficult to unzip (she helped). She said she knew just how to fix it, and took the jacket into the next room, saying something about it needing soap.

She came back, with the zipper showing signs of having been rubbed with a bar of soap. I put the jacket on, zipped, the zipper came apart, she took it into the back room again, said more soap was needed and it’d be “better than new” and “would never break”, and then brought back a jacket with an even soapier zipper. This time when I tried the zipper, the zipper-head came apart and a few little pieces of metal fell to the floor. While I worked to unzip the jacket using the remaining pieces of the zipper-head, the saleswoman asked Lisa how to tell foreigners that a pickpocket has followed them into the store, and Lisa spelled “pickpocket” for her on the back of a receipt.

After we rejected the suggestion of another round of soap-therapy, the saleswoman said it’d have to go to the tailor to get fixed, but that we’d have to pay for it, and that it might cost up to 5 RMB (around 60 US cents). She also said I shouldn’t go with her to the tailor, because he’d see the foreigner and raise the rate. So Lisa and I went and got some food.

When we returned, the jacket was ready, the zipper-head had been replaced, the zipper worked fine, the repair cost only 3 RMB, and all was well. It was a hassle, but an amusing one. I like the jacket, and planned to keep it even with a non-functional zipper, so am happy with the outcome.

I take it as a bad sign when inanimate objects turn on me, and that describes my weekend.

The first bad sign started off well enough, when I received my 5.1 speakers and amp from the states (thanks Henri). This was after a period of searching for a similar set here, and finding that within my budget I probably couldn’t get anything as good as the set I left behind in the states. It was also a chore to try to communicate with Chinese salespeople about the need for an amp with optical digital input and a dolby decoder.

Unfortunately, it turns out that my old amp is not dual voltage, and requires US-style current. I didn’t have a 220-110V converter powerful enough for it, but of course I didn’t notice that until a minute of attempting to get sound out of the system had gone by, with one of those puny travel power converters struggling to comply. Oops, hope that didn’t kill the set.

I went out and bought a larger, heavier, transformer based step-down converter of sufficient voltage (200W), but when I tried to plug in the amp its plug did not fit –the converter doesn’t have a polarized jack, and can’t accomodate a plug with one wide blade and one normal blade. I figured I could solve this by just finding a extension cord with a two-prong non-polarized plug and a polarized jack into which the amp can plug, but even though all such cords are manufactured here for export to the US, I guess that’s a silly thing to expect to find in China since all the cords sold in stores here end in those angled 3-prong things to fit in Chinese electrical sockets.

So now I’m on the lookout for a multimeter to test to see which of the sockets in the converter is neutral and then I’ll file that socket larger. After that, I’m sure some other complication will arise (such as the discovery that I really did kill the system the first time I plugged it in). At this pace, maybe I’ll have reasonable audio here in a couple of months.

I bought a new wok yesterday, part of my plan to be able to not have to eat every meal at a restaurant. I couldn’t help but buy this particular wok because of its name, “WHITE SUBTLE IRON WOK”. What’s not to like about a wok that is white and subtle?