Kai Rui's Place

Here's some fun Chinglish I found today on a cup of lemon green tea.  The tea was good.  The English, not so good.

"Synthesizes the Hong Kong tea dining room and the world apex drinks technology for propagandizes the Chinese tea culture is new sharp Hong Kong-style drinks surmounted the former tea with milk the limit is Chinese drinks profession work mountain peak"

This is what happens when direct translations from dictionaries get together with Chinese grammar.  Not a pretty sight!

A friend of mine who has a little one year old said recently that China is a great place to bring little boys, because there are construction projects everywhere!  Plenty of opportunities to learn words like "crane," "truck," "dirt," and so on.  Yesterday I saw some guys building scaffolding on a construction project.  If you look closely, they do have small tethers, but still...  seems awfully precarious to me!

Did another concert at a local coffeehouse last night.  Lots of fun!

If you weren't aware, China is crazy about IV's, as in administering medication intravenously.  I'm not exactly sure why, but most people here believe that IV's are more effective than pills, so everything from pain medication to antibiotics to antihistamines are delivered via IV therapy (most often at your local neighborhood clinic). 

Now, at first I thought that whole concept was strange, mainly because that's not the way we do it at home, but after five years here I've gotten used to it (although I've never taken medicine that way myself here).  Recently, however, I saw something I was completely unprepared for:  an IV on a tree! Several trees, as a matter of fact!  I know I don't share the Chinese affinity for needles, but still, isn't this taking things a bit far?  I have heard it said that trees can be sick.  But treating them with IV therapy?  Hilarious.  I guess, though, if you think about it, it is kind of hard to get a tree to take a pill. 

The high today is 71, so I have this feeling that I should be happy about the weather.  Unfortunately, I don't even want to step outside!  Why?  The wind.  Right now, according to the internet, it's out of the west at 25 mph gusting to 43 mph!  The part about coming from the west is important, because if you look at a map, you'll see lots of deserts to our west.  I prefer the more northerly winds, personally.  Sure, wind straight from Siberia is a bit chillier, but at least you can keep your windows open! 

It's also 9% humidity, which means the wind has ample supply of dust and dirt to blow around.  Everything outside seems to be a dreary ashy-gray color.  I'm not sure whether to go ahead and consider it a sandstorm, or just go with the fact that the wind is picking up every lose particle from all of northern Asia and blowing it across our fair city. These are not happy days for contact wearers, let me tell you.