Dia de estar muerto

After pushing through Friday at work, I was brave enough to try an outing with friends on Saturday. It helped that, for the first time, I was actually able to sleep through the night (though for only six hours or so all told). I felt pretty terrible, but banked on perking up once I got there. Which I did (though no thanks to the CTA and its interminable construction delays).

The Museo de Bellas Artes Mexicanas is now the Museo Nacional de Arte Mexicano [sic--don't you love words that can't figure out what gender they are?], but not much seems to have changed besides the name. The exhibition of ofrendas is still engrossing and affecting and the Mondragón family is still there personalising skulls, although this year they were joined by four other artisans: Two makers of catrinas (one working in clay, the other papier-mâché), a printmaker offering lovely sepiatones of dancing skeletons, and a charming woodcarver offering a stunning array of meticulously painted animal figures. (Pictures, lhn?)

Lunch was, of course, at Nuevo León, which made us feel right at home by offering some gratis pork tacos the minute we sat down. (Just as well--I was sorely tempted to stop for carnitas on my way to the Museum, but I was running late enough as it was.) My soup was so-so, but my guisado de puerco was fantastic and, at e.'s urging, I tried some flour tortillas in place of my usual corn and found them good if dense and filling. How did I manage to stuff down a tart from Bombon after that? SHEER WILLPOWER.

Unfortunately, I found that, even if jetlag is finished with me for now, my cold (whether acquired in China or just on the trip back) is only getting started as I began to fall asleep during apéritifs with Rubeus and ottr4bear. That night, I was out for no less than twelve hours and awoke with little more energy than that to sit in bed and read. [Note to mollpeartree: Now on page 30 of Vivir para contarla. Wow, languages are easy to read when they're not Chinese!] For the first time, I really know what it's like to live in monshu's world of nodding off in front of the telly.

This morning, I awoke earlier than I would've liked, but it gave me a chance to enjoy the rare spectacle of a sunrise over the Lake (viewable from my window for only a couple weeks every year) through the old gold leaves of the locusts. Be sure to check in about 4 p.m. (the time of day I've begun to dread) and help wake me up.

Have you had your Engrish today?

A couple of you asked if I brought back any egregious examples of Engrish from my travels. As we say in the vernacular: BOY HOWDY! English was ubiquitous in China--we saw it on street signs, menus, monuments, advertisements, museum displays, tickets, t-shirts, and even the asphalt. And where there is English in Asia, there is inevitably Engrish.

In general, we found more of it the farther we strayed from Beijing. Some of this (such as the elimination of the celebrated "Racist Park" sign) is no doubt due to Olympics preparation, but I'm sure it has as much to do with the drop off in foreign language skills as you leave the metropolis behind. Our worst tourist guide in terms of intelligibility was in the little (in Chinese terms, this means a population of less than 1,000,000) river town of Fengdu. It was also there that I netted this pearl of incompletely digested translation:

It was said if you can put u-
pstone to downstone in made of togethe-
r. It can recover heart sick.

(Punctuation as in the original; Chinese equivalent: 又传将上下两半衲合，可医治心病.)

Actually, the entire description of the 星辰礅 (sorry, can't remember the "English" name) in the "Ghost City" of Fengdu was like that, but this was all I could scrawl down in the time I had. (It was more than just his bad English that made him the worst guide we dealt with.)

Even venerable Xi'an was far enough from Beijing's Foreign Studies University to present us with some real gems, chief among them "No Lion-Pressing Drive". This was on the road to Xi'an Xianying International Airport; unfortunately, we went by too fast for me to grab the characters, but our surmise is that it has something to do with staying in your own lion, er, lane. At the airport itself, we were presented with a choice of "Recycling" (可回收) or "Unrecycling" (不可回收) on all the trashbins. And if we were hungry, we had in addition to the usual options that of "Restemdessert". (Still haven't figured out this one; the equivalent Chinese was 西点, which looks to me like an abbreviation of 西式点心 "Western style snacks", 点心 diǎnxīn being the etymological equivalent of our own "dim sum". How you get from that to "Restemdessert" is an exercise best left for the student.)

Of course, the real treasure troves were the menus, so I'll think I'll save those beauties for another entry.

Help me read the signs!

On the way to work today, noticed something very strange. At the corner there are a couple of Bradford pears (a variety native to China, btw, where it is known as the 豆梨 or "bean pear"). Before I left, one of these had shed all its leaves. A number of trees in the vicinity didn't survive this past summer and I thought this was simply another casualty. But when I passed it this morning, I noticed something on the branches after all: blossoms. It is in full bloom. Obviously, a portent of something, but can anyone tell me what?

On the way to meet my cousin in Beijing, monshu and I stopped into a coffee shop called "rbt" (in Chinese, 仙踪林 or "fairy footprint forest"). The marquee above the counter featured a montage of words for "tea" in various languages, such as English, Chinese/Japanese (茶), German (Tee), French (thé), Korean (차), and WTF ("ôóüé"). Clearly the firm which produced the design has a thing or two to learn about encoding foreign alphabets. Anyone have a guess as to what the intended word might have been? (I considered the possibility that it might be крокозябры, but AFAICT the characters would correspond to "фуьй" rather than the expected "чай".)