Zhujiajiao water town

Last week I made a day trip to the “water town” of Zhujiajiao. I call it “the Venice of the Eastern Zhejiang region” – which, if you aren’t familiar with Mandarin, may be easier to say – and it’s not hard to see why. The canals and bridges are very scenic indeed. A friend drove me there through the fiendish traffic in lovely autumn weather.

Unfortunately, not much weird stuff happened to me there, which is kind of nice but doesn’t make for great anecdoting. Here’s the best I can do. Firstly, we caught a toad. Secondly, I ate snails on a boat (they weren’t good.) Thirdly, I visited a Qing-era post office, where a security rule that the original rider had to come with the message occasionally resulted in corpses being lashed to horses along with the mail. Other than that, here are a couple of photos.
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Absence makes the brain grow fonder

My lifestyle is not perfectly conducive to language learning. I have a busy job, several time-consuming extra-curricular activities, and a fair bit of travel. The study is still a priority for me, but occasionally life gets in the way and I fall behind. The last month and a bit I spent in Australia and England, and though I managed to do some Skype lessons with my teacher, I did virtually no review, listened to very few ChinesePod lessons, and did very little homework of any kind.

The result must inevitably be a decline in my facility with the language. The feeling I had, especially on returning to China was quite the opposite – I felt more relaxed and confident speaking Chinese than I did a month before when I had been studying every day. This happened to me once before after a long hiatus. What’s going on? Is the brain using the time to recover and reorganise, or, more likely, one forgets how much one doesn’t know and just gets on with the business of speaking?

I’d really like to know the answer, because it may prove valuable to take breaks from time to time and recover a bit. In the meantime, back to the vocabulary list.

China’s Education System

The following was written for me by Cherry, to explain a bit about the school system here. I’ve asked for some followup on the more interesting tidbits – such as the “manager students.” I don’t know who they are, but I bet they weren’t popular. (Edited to ad a paragraph on sudden death).

There are more people interested in China’s education with the increasing number of Chinese students studying overseas. Although China used to have famous educators like Confucius who still has a far-reaching influence in today’s world, China’s existing education system incurs (warrants) some criticism. (more…)

Back in Shanghai, and what are those bags?

Made it back to Shanghai after a fantastically busy week. Melbourne, to Oxford for a workshop, back to Melbourne, then on to Shanghai while trying to catch up with work and even go on a date. As a result, I ran out of time, leaving the house a complete disaster and forgetting lots of things including toothbrush and the all-important deodorant.

While I was being screened in quarantine for a runny nose (honesty is the best policy), I was checking out the passengers coming into the country, and it struck me how often Chinese bring in these bags of goods. Nothing wrong with bringing home stacks of stuff, but there’s a particular style of bag – like a heavy-duty plastic bag – that you always see in these situations. What are those things called? Do they have a name?