Ulan Bator, Ulaan Baatar, whatever

Just a quickie. I arrived this morning in Ulan Bator and found a crowd of 6 (including me) and we've been talking about doing a 2 week trip from here starting on friday. It would involve going to the Gobi desert to the south and to the central highlands to the west and north-west including the old trading post of Karakorum. It works out at $20 (about R150) a day all-included. Not bad.

There isn't much internet out in the Gobi, understandably, so I'll be completely and utterly out of touch until the 13th or 14th of October, give or take. Try not to cry.

Weird one for you though - Ulan Bator is miles west of Beijing, and yet it is 1 hour ahead!! Bizarre, something to do with summer time and China's insistence on having 1 time zone for the entire country.

Laters.

Time to move

After ages in Beijing, I'm off to Mongolia on Tuesday morning. I'm going to have to go and stay at a hostel that is right next to the train station because the train leaves at 7.40am. Ouch. Anyways, it's a long train (it's the first leg of the trans-Siberian express) and goes directly to Ulan Bator, with a long stop at the border I'm sure, arriving there on Wednesday at 1pm or so. The scenery should be great.

The plan is to stay out that way for 2 weeks, maybe 3. Then it's back to Beijing to collect my things and whatnot before catching a plane (yes, a plane) to Shanghai. I want to fly there since it is only a little more expensive than going by train (like R400 as opposed to R200, and 1.5 hours compared to 12ish) and apparently the train going from Shanghai airport into the city is some bizarre magnetic suspended high-speed thing. I'll spend some time there and the backpacking gets going properly. I've a vague route in mind, and I'll keep you posted as I go.

I had a bicycle here a few weeks back - my housemate Richard's girlfriend had a bike here before she went home, and so she kindly bequeathed it to us. Sadly the lock was rusted and didn't work, nor did we have the key, so we used to just prop it up to look locked, and this worked well, judging by the fact that the bike was not stolen. Might also be due to the bike being a complete piece of shit. One night, a dark, blustery, stormy night, we arose to find all the bikes downstairs (there are lots of them, almost Amsterdam-like) blown over by the wind, and lo and behold! Our bike was down, but the impact with the ground had pushed the propped up lock through and properly locked it... as I said, we have no key.

Anyways, must be on my bike.

Chinese Language Insanity

Let me teach you some Chinese - this won't take long. Bear with me... I'm only going to teach you 2 'words'.

The first word for today is 'Ji'.

激 Verb: surge, dash, Adjective: strong, fierce, violent
跻 Verb: ascend, mount
积 Verb: amass, store up, accumulate, Adjective: long-standing, age-old
击 Verb: beat, hit, strike
基 Noun: base, foundation, Adjective: basic, key, primary
奇 Noun: odd number
几 Noun: small table, Adverb: almost, nearly (for numbers), Question: How many?
讥 Verb: laugh at, ridicule
机 Noun: machine, engine
叽 Radical: to chirp, to make a soft sound
肌 Noun: muscle, flesh
饥 Adjective: hungry, starving, Noun: famine, crop failure
鸡 Noun: chicken

Okay, there are still another 5 or 6 pages left of my dictionary for 'Ji'.

The second and last 'word' for today is 'shi'.

湿 Adjective: wet, damp, humid
诗 Noun: poetry, verse, poem
师 Noun: teacher, master
狮 Noun: lion
失 Verb: lose, get lost, break a promise
施 Verb: put into practice, implement
尸 Noun: corpse
虱 Noun: louse
实 Adjective: solid, true, real, honest, Noun: reality, fact, fruit, seed
识 Verb: know, Noun: knowledge
十 The number 10
什 Adjective: assorted, varied, miscellaneous
石 Noun: stone, rock
拾 Verb: pick up (from ground), collect
时 Noun: time, times, days
市 Noun: market
式 Verb: try, test
是 'to be' when predicate is a noun, emphasis when predicate isn't a noun, indicates existence ('there is', 'there are'), indicates concession, before a noun indicates fitness and suitability, before a noun indicates each and every one of the kind, pronounced emphatically indicates certainty, affirmative response to certain questions ('Yes')

As with 'Ji', there are still several pages left for 'Shi'.

There's one thing I haven't mentioned yet and that is that each syllable has a tone attached to it. There are 4 tones: high, rising, falling-rising, and falling. To the untrained ear and when the Chinese speak it is almost impossible to distinguish between them - so all the words above that are pronounced 'Ji' sound the same, likewise for 'Shi'.

Notice how a given character has a certain pronunciation (usually one syllable thank god), but of course one character can have many pronunciations and many characters can have the same pronunciation as I've tried to illustrate.

The strange thing for me is that the Chinese language is not short of a variety of sounds - they have a fully fledged set of phonemes at their disposal (roughly the same number as English, which has a lot by general standards) yet they tend to reuse the same sounds over and over again. I could easily have produced more lists like the ones above for the words 'yuan', 'jian', 'qi' etc.

Crazy language.

Plastic...

Nothing to say, just bought some biscuits last night that highlighted my earlier point about the complete waste of plastic here... these ones are Korean of course, but the Chinese ones are the same idea.

Mao

We picked up a cat the other day, but still haven't decided on a name. Toying between three options at the moment - Mao / 猫 (Chinese for cat, nice pun too - the 'Mao' from 'Mao Tse Tung' or 'Mao Zedong' is 毛 which means 'hair' but is pronounced the same as the 'mao' for cat), Tueto (Spanish for 'blind in one eye') and Buyo (Inuyasha). Any suggestions?

Clearly his right eye is not in great shape - I'm still not certain whether there is a white thing over his eye or a white substance inside his eye. We took him to a vet the other day and he got well tanked up on medication... dewormer pills, anti-anaemia (due to the worms apparently) pills, and an injection every day for a week (which I have to give him myself) to combat the infection in his eye. All of that medication plus a good hour at the vet came to a whopping 80 Kuai (about R75).

I think he's about 4 to 5 weeks old - I read somewhere online that a cat starts growing teeth at 4 weeks and he's got 4 small ones, and they are bastardly sharp. When I leave here, which is getting fairly soon, then Gabi'll take him over.

We're now 3 days into his injections and his eye is already improving somewhat. The whiteness around the outsides is not so opaque, and according to the vet it might go away altogether (his words were 'it might fall off spontaneously' - hope he didn't mean the eye itself).