Work, angry lady, and more food

Today was an okay day at work.

More food talk, and yes I did figure out how to say yes and no in Chinese. (mandarin). Dhuay is yes and bu is no. bu hao (no good). So therefore hao = good. Who doesn’t love the transitive property of equality. Oh another excellent dinner adventure. By the way today I wore pants that were ripped at the crotch. Of course nothing I could do except walk around with a book or a drink or whatever to cover up the freaking hole in my pants. I totally forgot those pants had a hole in them. Good times. Everyone was polite enough not to make fun of me. Of course then I just said yeah my pants ripped hahaha laugh at me at my expense. Yes saved everybody some embarrassment.

Work was cool today because I got to talk to Wang Xin today. The most experienced engineer who is not a supervisor, my level, I guess. He sat down and went through the whole project management process for the group. His English is pretty good, but not fluent, but I wish my Chinese was half as good as his English.

So today I saw a guy trying to sell fake Mont Blanc pens to these two foreign ladys (aka westerners). He said, “woman want pen” and I instinctively made fun of the guy Then realized holy cow, I wish I knew how to say “women want pen” in Chinese? He’s light years ahead of me.

So to dinner we went to Yan’s fried dumplings which apparently the most famous in Shanghai. The street is just full of all kinds of food vendors and restaurants for locals. The fried dumplings is like the traditional steamed bun (bao) but fried. Not deep fried, but just fried in a covered pan. The meat is pork, at least my best guess. The fuckers were freaking hot when we got them. We ordered 28 for 28RMB. I ate about 8 of them and had enough. To me they weren’t that good. I was also freaking pouring sweat from all the walking and didn’t have drink in hand. So that might have affected my tude. Okay I’ll punch myself in the face for saying tude, twice. Anyways I had 4 left over and there was this old man watching me to my left. I looked over and he pointed at my food and I gave it to him and he just walked away with it and my chopsticks. I don’t have any reaction to the incident. Just happened. There is a good amount of poverty here. Understatement probably. Oh and then there was a heated argument between a lady selling (my friend called her a hawker) and a few security guards. I don’t think they were police. She was awful pissed, I mean ridiculous, at this one guard. I have no idea what was going on, everything would be assumed. But she had to leave. There were no fisticuffs, but holy cow she probably would have beat the living day lights out of the guard just on pure rage. Then again I could imagine the guard just calmly using one hand to fend her away with some crazy kung fu. You know like Neo in the first matrix. I bet on the former.

The main roads are pretty clean, there are literally street sweepers sweeping the major city roads, the sidewalks and side streets, well you are at your own peril. They can get pretty grimey.

Oh I have to mention the random water drops that hit you if you walk close to buildings. These are from wall unit airconditioners. Aparantly there are no central heating and cooling. All wall units even for gigantic high rise apartment buildings. See picture. So you hope that it is just water from those units hitting you and nothing else. You don’t want to imagine or think about whatever else it could be. Never fun.

So that’s that. Tomorrow I go to a Chinese language lesson. Wish me luck. A shout (out) to all my boys from DubC.