so i went to beijing to see my friend Brian a couple weeks ago. and i took like 4 pictures all together. and here they are. i was only there for a couple days and i really love that city. It is like a break from China to go there and actually see what could resemble a world city some day. I have yet to go to Shanghai but i hear that place is like many world famous cities. So here are some pictures of skate spots. But i put those up because of the photo i include of the dead mice and glass in the gutter.This skate spot was a huge area for recreation, had ping-pong tables and all that jazz. But on the other hand it had dead mice and broken glass everywhere. also there was some steps that went down to nothing (totally a chinese thing) and at the bottom there was just piles of human shit. it was gnarly as hell. This place had to have been a shitter for bums for a long time. And this is China, they are trying to change. But change in attitude come a lot slower than change in how tall your buildings are and how much money you make. Picture China as a giant Beverly Hillbillies. You can take the china man off the farm but you cant stop him from taking a shit in an empty hall way.
also the other photo is from Brians apartment. its about 26 stories up. Its a modest place, still nice. but they have an elevator girl that pushes the buttons for you. He lives in a nice place, but not nice enough to justify elevator assistance ( does anywhere justify that?). just goes to show that labor is damn cheap here. i dont want to make China to sound absolutely horrible so i will stop now.

behind the language

so now that i can speak a little bit of chinese i think that i can say some things about the language. i am only doing this because so many people back home have asked me if i am learning chinese. and I am, but i would like to share some general knowledge of the language.
So, we all know that chinese uses charecters. They do look scary i will tell you that. but each one is built off of parts from others. so there is a method to the madness. the worse part is that there is no real phonetic guide to them. they have some things that help like (jin)近 looks a lot like （xin) 新 they both have a similar right side. look at them in a big font to realize it. but others like (wang) 往 and (zhu) 住 look very similar and have nothing in common. some are pictures as well like (ren)人, its a fucked up looking person. and ren means person and people. from there you take 人 add another 人， and get （cong) 从, which means to follow. so the charecter has two people following each other. it also means from, that makes some sense. but that works out hardly ever.
the charecters are really not that hard. i can remember 40-60 new works in about a week or so. so its not impossible. the hard part is that there only about 500 sounds in chinese. That means that EVERY word falls into those sounds. for instance there are about 100 different meanings for the sound SHI. some are more used than others. but that can make for some interesting situations.
Probably one of the worse things is that the average Joe ( or really average Wang) has really bad chinese. If your poor you dont get a good education, plain and simple. So a lot of people have bad chinese and are hard as hell to understand. they also speak in ways that could have many meanings, but you have to know what it means for that situatuion. for instance a bus driver asking if there is anybody for the next stop will just yell XIA(下）! which has about 20 different meanings, it just so happens to sort of mean to get off the bus. its hard to explain and things like that dont really happen in english
the last thing is that there are four tones in chinese. that just means that any word can be said four different ways and mean four different things. so this was made to along with the fact that many words have the same phonetics. but its totall bullshit. no one uses them, it just does not make sense to change the pitch of your voice all the time. So something that was supposed to clarify the language has just muddeled it up. YEAH!
well that is the basics, then there is the fact that the charecters have gone through simplifications in the past ( some up words of 40 strokes). so they have lost a lot of the differences in them and the are no longer pictures of what they meant.
thanks for taking time to read this. it is a real basic explanation of what i have been doing for 7 months here.

they all look not a like

well i had a talk with my brother last night and he brought up some interesting questions that i would like to answer. manly being that i am bored and forgot to upload my pictuers of my Beijing trip last weekend.
But the first was asked after i mentioned that Qingdao has 30,000 koreans and maybe 20,000 japanese. he asked if i could tell the difference. now lets just take this as not an "all them asians look alike" joke and more of how do you tell the difference between a Frenchie and an American? (obvious, Americans dont talk like they have peanut butter stuck to the roof of their mouth). But it is actually really easy, especially with koreans.
they tend to take pride in standing out. All the Korean guys have long hair, and a lot wear hats. Not much of a disguise right? but because of this not chinese person here will have long hair or wear a hat, because they dont want to look like the Koreans. i dont think its because they hate them, i mean would you be happy if someone said you look Canadian?.
the Japanese are harder to spot, but they do stand out. they tend to keep to groups of only japanese people. the chinese and japs do not have a great history of getting along. but, i think the japanese make it worse by staying in only japanese areas. they also tend to hide their japanese-ness, maybe in fear of the chinese. who knows. they also carry themselves with this air of stoic confidence. They as well have different hair cuts then the Chinese.

so thats the way to stereo tpye and pigeon whole about 2.3 billion people. all in two paragraphs!!!! man i am good.

next post will be on languages, and learning them. well more on lack of learning them.