one litre cans
And I discovered yesterday that the Chaoshifa supermarket on the corner of Chengfu Lu and Xueyuan Lu is selling Bamberger Kaiserdom premium lager in one litre cans.
one
litre
cans
And they’re not expensive, either. And they’re selling even larger cans, those kind of mini-keg things, of a couple of other German beers. Those mini-kegs were a bit too daunting for the state of mind I was in yesterday, not to mention the state of our fridge, so I just filed away a mental note that there are even bigger cans of German beer for sale, and checked the price of the Kaiserdom. Not too bad for a foreign brew, imported, I might add, in such a large volume. I can’t remember the price, but I believe it was less than twenty kuai. So I dropped one in my basket with my dumplings, milk and Blue Diamond “Stout” and trundled off.
Oh, don’t worry, I did pay for it all on the way out.
I drank the Kaiserdom last night after dinner. There’s something special about drinking out of a one litre can. Not sure what it is. Anyway, it is something that should be experienced at least once. Either that or do the smart thing and pour it into a more appropriate vessel. But I chose to drink straight out of the can. Cool. A one litre can.
And the beer? Well, it was better than any Chinese brew I’ve ever had. Meaning: It actually had flavour. Otherwise, it was just another lager. All lager is by definition a second rate brew, and that’s only the good lager. Not even the best lager can match even a mediocre ale. Still, it was a decent brew as far as lagers go, and there was one whole litre of it in the can, and it did have a decent alcohol content, at 4.5%, or 4,5% as those bloody Europeans insist on having it- nothing spectacular, but still, better than any Chinese brew.
Don’t get me wrong: Stronger is not necessarily better. But beer does need a certain level of alcohol, and most Chinese brews don’t even come close to matching it. The best Chinese brews (Snow, Tsingtao, etc) are not too far off, their alcohol content is enough to make them drinkable, but that’s about as good as it gets.
And now I will let you all in on a little secret: Snow is not actually my favourite Chinese beer. It is my brew of choice, yes, but there’s a reason for that. My favourite Chinese beer is actually quite hard to find. My favourite is Tsingtao’s 海岛黑啤/Haidao Heipi. That is that rarest of all Chinese brews- it actually has flavour. Good flavour. Flavour you enjoy savouring. It’s the kind of beer that leaves you disappointed when you finish the bottle, because now the bottle is empty, dammit, and you have to get another one to continue savouring that beautiful, beautiful brew. One of the good things about Tianjin is that my local supermarket and a nearby restaurant stocked Haidao Heipi. I’ve only seen it once since I moved back to Beijing.
I guess I’ll have to add a new category to this blog- pijiu.
Note: Bottled beer is always better than canned beer. If beer was sold in one litre bottles, I would be very happy.
hohum
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on April 24, 2007
I suppose I should be out taking advantage of the beautiful weather, getting fresh air and exercise and all that. Nah, bugger it. I fell asleep this afternoon and stayed that way for about an hour. Then I woke up. Funny how that tends to happen sometime after you fall asleep. But I still don’t feel fully awake, and although I did think about going somewhere and doing something, I couldn’t really get up the motivation to wander further than the local xiaomaibu for a few beers.
A few very warm beers, which are now sitting in the fridge being cooled to an appropriate temperature. And given my current drinking habits, those few beers will probably last me that next few days, especially considering I have another trip out to Yizhuang to look forward to tomorrow evening (oh, joy).
The dreaded 拆 has struck in our neighbourhood. Well, it was only a matter of time. Most of the buildings around here are around fifty years old, and those that aren’t are mostly very dodgy and illegal-looking shanties. Directly opposite the gate of my school there were two groups of shanties and a shed my school used for storage. Not anymore. Now the school’s Santana and spare furniture are piled up rather haphazardly on the side of the road, and workmen are digging trenches where the shanties and shed once were. Judging by yesterday’s visit by a truck with a big tank, a hose, and a sucking machine on the back and the smell out front today, they must be fixing the sewer. About time, too.
I’m told our road was dirt, completely unpaved and unlit, when a friend and former colleague arrived here about four and a half years ago. Then not so long ago it was paved and lit. Well, the put street lights along the road and turn them on at night, that’s what I mean by lit. They seemed to get the lighting part right, but even though it was paved very recently, the road very quickly started showing signs of wear and tear. It wasn’t just that the paving stones started cracking and wearing down, parts of the road started sinking. There are potholes so impressive they’re starting to rival the mammoth, truck-swallowing series of potholes that made up the road I lived on in Taiyuan. Then I noticed there’s a sewer pipe running the length of our road. Well, the writing on the manhole covers certainly suggests that there’s a sewer pipe running the length of our road. Could it be that the sewer pipe is leaking and eroding the roadbed away from underneath us? This kind of thing has happened before.
Just up the road there are some buildings, about fifty years old, of course, with their cultural revolution slogans still visible for the edification of the revolutionary masses. Somebody tried to whitewash over the slogans, but, although some of the characters are still obscured, it seems the cultural revolution-era paint was of a better quality than the whitewash. The steps leading to one of these buildings were starting to look really dodgy- there were huge holes visible under them, and they were showing signs of sagging. Then one day some workers came and demolished the steps. The next day they put in a new set of steps. How and why I don’t know. The holes I saw under the steps were so huge I can’t see how this new set of steps could possibly be stable.
lzh has just finished work for the day. Her colleague told her how to make hamburgers, so that’s what’s on the menu tonight. I guess that means I should stop this rambling and go wash my lunch dishes.
hmmm……
English-teacher test puts accent on pronunciation, proclaims the headline. Oh dear. There are so many ways that could go disastrously wrong.
“Shanghai plans to weed out unqualified foreign English teachers with a language and teaching test.
Â
The test, organized by the Shanghai Personnel Bureau, will mainly target non-native-English speakers who apply for English-teaching positions in kindergartens, middle schools and language training schools, the bureau revealed at the city’s second job fair for English teachers on Saturday.“
Oh, that doesn’t seem too bad… Except: What the hell is Shanghai still doing hiring non-native speakers as foreign English teachers? If this were Taiyuan or Changsha or some other second- or third- or fourth-tier city, fine, but Shanghai?
“The bureau will invite an English-language expert panel from local universities to test applicants’ English speaking ability, especially pronunciation and accent.”
Well, fine, but still, why are they focussing on only two aspects of the language? Shouldn’t they be tested on their all-round English ability? And many questions about the expertise of the panel…
“Recent education graduates from English-speaking countries must also take a similar test on their teaching skills, bureau officials said.“
Sounds good, but forgive me for remaining sceptical. Who is setting the standards here? And how do we know this will be done reasonably? A foreign teacher’s job is really quite different from a Chinese teacher’s job.
Well, the article is the usual bullshit, meaning, it raises many more questions than it answers. For example, why the hell are the quoting somebody from Niger (or did the incompetent fool of a journalist mean Nigeria?) dismissing the test? Sure, experience is more important than certificates, but what the hell is somebody from a French-speaking country doing teaching English in Jiangsu?
Well, if this means they’re trying to improve the quality of English-language teaching, fine, but this seems rather clumsy. I just hope for Shanghai’s sake that they implement this properly. No, wait, I don’t care about Shanghai…. I hope that if Beijing decides to follow suit they do it properly.
Anyway, just another reminder that I need to get off my arse and get a real job. Either that or start freelancing.
ä¹°äº†å‡ æœ¬ä¹¦
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, life in Beijing on April 22, 2007
Yesterday afternoon lzh and I wandered over to Beiyu (English). I wanted to look at some HSK books. See, the way I see it, sooner or later, and preferably sooner, I’m going to have to sit the HSK (English). And I don’t want to fuck around sitting it several times until I get a good score: The highest the score with the least hassle strikes me as being far more efficient. And besides, I’m fast approaching 31. Not old, but still, the time of youthful fucking around should be long gone. I see the HSK as necessary because there’s only so long I can go around claiming on my CV to speak pretty decent Chinese with nothing to back up that claim. At least with an HSK certificate, I’d be able to offer potential employers some kind of more or less objective measure of my actual Chinese language abilities. Like I said, I’m fast approaching 31. Time that maybe I should actually do something with my life. Or at least get myself into a better position to be providing for my wife and any possible future children.
So, anyway, we wandered over to Beiyu. Actually, I don’t much like Beiyu, but it does have a very nice campus. Pretty convenient campus, too: Pretty much anything you could want or need is on campus, and what isn’t can probably be found a short walk away. Unless, of course, it’s China you’re looking for, but that’s a whole different rant. Having stopped to check out a poster for a Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language course (a future possibility for lzh- at the very least, having such a certificate won’t do her any harm, and in fact could open up future career possibilities) we made our way to the bookstore, which is both good for many kinds of language learning and within easy walking distance from our apartment. That walking distance part is important- it’s not quite as comprehensive a bookstore as I would like, but it’s close and focused on language learning. The ‘easy’ in ‘easy walking distance’ is also important- my definition of walking distance encompasses Beida, Qinghe, and other places most people, including lzh, would consider bus-taking distance.
Enough tangents: So we spent a couple of hundred kuai on books for me. This is perfectly normal: I go for very, very long stretches of time without seeing the inside of a bookstore, and then spend a few hundred on a half-dozen books. Anyway, it was HSK books we were looking for, and HSK books we found. The Beiyu bookstore, funnily enough, has a section devoted to HSK books of all kinds- preparation books and mock tests; preparation books focused on each specific section or aspect of the HSK; everything you could think of needing to prepare for HSK. And of course, most of the books were published by the Beiyu Press (English). So we sifted through books, lzh was asked for help by two separate customers (something about her screamed “Staff member! I will help you! apparently), we made a couple of selections, one of which was a bit on the expensive side, and then we went sifting around the rest of the shop seeing what other cool books we could find.
I found another rather expensive book- one so expensive it came with two free CDs (somewhere in the back of my brain something that claims to be Logic is causing a disturbance. Quiet in the cheap seats)- but an expensive book that looked really cool: How to Prepare for the Entrance Examination to the Best Universities in China- Guide and Practice for Foreign Students is the rather clunky English title, which comes with the word Chinese in big, white letters so you don’t mistake it for Law or Oenology. The Chinese title is a little better, and clearer: 《外国留å¦ç”Ÿå…¥å¦è€ƒè¯•æŒ‡å¯¼ä¸Žè®ç»ƒè¯æ–‡åˆ†å†Œã€‹(I hate trying to read Chinese characters in Italic, so I didn’t torture you with Chinese characters in Italic. You’re welcome). It’s also published by the Beiyu Press. And it’s so cool it comes with two free CDs (more noise from the cheap seats! Quiet!). Actually, what’s great about this book is that it seems to cover all the Chinese language stuff I’d need for HSK AND also covers all the extra bits, like literature and Classical Chinese I’d need if I were to apply to a Chinese university- which is something I may do should lzh and I ever get ourselves into a reasonably sound financial position. The contents page divides this book into six units:
- 第一�元：�力
- 第二å?•å…ƒï¼šæ±‰è¯åŸºç¡€çŸ¥è¯†
- 第三å?•å…ƒï¼šæ–‡å¦å¸¸è¯†
- 第四å?•å…ƒï¼šå?¤ä»£æ±‰è¯
- 第五�元：阅读
- 第å…å?•å…ƒï¼šå†™ä½œ
These are followed up with practice tests and similar such things. So I get the language points I need for HSK and a couple of added bonuses. Pretty cool, eh?
So we swapped the HSK book we’d chosen for some cheaper mock HSK tests and took the super-cool book. The two books were too expensive for us to buy both.
I wanted a decent Chinese grammar though. Actually, I wanted a more academic grammar, a kind of reference-y type one, not a textbook. No luck though. We found something close, but it was in those horrible counter revolutionary capitalist roader characters they still insist on using in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Bugger that. Had to settle for an intermediate textbook that the guy recommended for grammar. It looks alright, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
And lzh looked at the books for that Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language course, but they were far too expensive.
So, bookshopping done, we wandered around to the xiaomaibu just up the alley from the Muslim Restaurant, she got an ice cream and a bottle of water, I got a nice cold can of Guinness, we found a bench under a tree, and watched the world go by for a bit. Like I said, it’s a nice campus.
But after yesterday’s book shopping, I really have to get my lazy arse into some serious language study.
Don’t worry, I’m going to stick with wading my way through 《活ç?€ã€‹, but I’ll now alternate between that and these textbooks and practice tests.
In completely unrelated news: One of the people who found this site via a Google search apparently aimed at finding me might actually be my uncle.
Red-crowned cranes?
So it seems the red-crowned crane is the only bird suitable for China’s national bird. Holy shit, that’s a clunky sentence. Anyway: I would’ve thought the construction crane would be more appropriate, personally. And all this might change, the State Council still has to issue its stamp of approval.
huh?
East Timorese learning Finnish? The article says Finnish is a neutral language, unlike Portuguese, English and Bahasa Indonesia, which all relate to the colonial past (English? Does the UN administration that followed the Indonesian pullout count as a colonial regime?) and apparently Tetum, the original local language, “has a fairly primitive grammar and thanks to eight or nine different tribal dialects, even this language does not unite the population.” I’m not sure if the “primitive” grammar is included with the dialects as a barrier to unity or not…. Anyway, eight or nine different tribal dialects does not sound like a particularly big barrier to unity. Should be fairly easy to come up with a national standard, especially with a “primitive” grammar. Anyway, if a foreign language has to be imported, why the hell would you choose Finnish? It’s spoken in only one country, and even if you include closely related languages spoken in Finland’s neighbours, you still come up with a pretty small number. Include all the Finno-Ugric languages and it still doesn’t look particularly useful….. And besides, doesn’t Finnish have a million cases? If you really need to import a foreign language to avoid the old colonial languages and Tetum’s “primitive” grammar and ginormous number of tribal dialects, why would you leap to something far more complex? And with such a small place in the world?
Might I suggest French and Spanish would be better choices: Closely related to Portuguese, so no big deal for the older people, and not too distant from English, so no big deal for the young ones, no huge case system, and widely spoken around the world, therefore very useful.
And yes, I’ll admit, I no bugger all about Finnish. The grammar may well be far simpler than I have been led to believe. But still- why Finnish?
And I’m not sure when this article was published, or where.
whatever
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on April 19, 2007
Thursday afternoons I have a two hour class at an oil company down near Gulou. Once again, I won’t bore you with boring work blogging. I was in the toilet and above the urinal, in the space for ads (because you can never miss a chance to advertise) where the public service announcement telling people to park their cars properly (i.e. not in the toilets… Actually, that notice was pretty cool in its own little way) there was now a joke with no obvious value as an advertisement at all. I mean, I couldn’t figure out if it was actually advertising something, and if so, what. Alright, stop waffling: Here is more or less what the joke said:
A man walked into a bar and ordered a drink. Seeing the man was looking rather upset, the waiter (yes, it was a Chinglish joke) asked what was wrong.
“I like men, and so does my brother” said the man.
“Well, don’t worry, there must be somebody in your family who likes women, right?” said the waiter.
“Yes, there is one in my family who likes women: My sister.”
So I suppose I could go into some deep cultural analysis about how this shows the continued strength of Confucian values in a rapidly opening, liberalising society, but I’ll spare you all that bullshit. I just thought it was an interesting thing to see posted on the wall above the urinal in a space usually reserved for advertising.
Yizhuang
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on April 19, 2007
So I got the business district class… Not that that means anything to you. Anyway, this school has been running classes for an oil company out in the development zone in Yizhuang for a while now. So far I’ve managed to avoid it. However, the only other foreign teacher currently here (I wish the other one would hurry the fuck up and come back) has a rather heavy workload and I’ve gotten off pretty lightly so far this semester, so when this class came up I was the only choice.
Anyway, I don’t want to blog about work. That’s boring. But suddenly getting the Yizhuang class means I got to have a look at this development zone that’s been sitting out in Yizhuang for, well, years now. I always knew it was there. It’s been plainly marked on maps for ages. For a while I lived near Panjiayuan and had reason to be going down to Fangzhuang regularly, so I often went past the start of the Jingjintang Expressway with its signs pointing to this development zone. I always kind of wondered what would be out there. Not really wondered, just kind of.
So somebody had the bright idea of giving me this class in Yizhuang which runs from 6 to 9 pm and sending me in a car out there at 4:15 so I’d have time to get dinner (no fucking way am I working unfed) so I got a chance to see Yizhuang first hand. Wow. Exciting.
And what did I see? Wide, almost empty roads that looked and felt like they hadn’t been repaired since they were built several years ago. Traffic lights, most of which did not work. Fancy-looking new buildings. Empty fields. Not a hell of a lot, in other words. I don’t know how long Yizhuang has been designated a development zone, but it’s still very much under construction and there’s stacks of spare land out there, judging by what I saw yesterday. Actually, I would see there’s less “construction density” out there than in downtown Beijing and a large amount of spare land.
Apparently Yizhuang is one of the places designated as a new satellite town. Well, Tongzhou was well on its way to being a new satellite town long before the city government dreamed up this idea. I did see some residential areas in Yizhuang yesterday, but most of what I saw out there was commercial and industrial. Not the kind of place I’d like to live, and there didn’t seem to be much in the way of an actual town being built there. Restaurants? Shopping malls? Entertainment? All seemed desperately lacking.
Still, this is based on one trip on one afternoon focussed very much on getting me into one particular conference room for a three-hour lesson, then getting me home again. Not a good way to form a useful or valid impression of a place.
What was more interesting was the trip round the Fourth Ring Road. Well, no, most of that was pretty boring, but still, once we’d passed Sihui Qiao, the traffic lightened up, we sped up, and I got a look at places I used to know. I haven’t been down that part of town for ages. Of course, the southern stretch of Xidawang Lu and the areas either side Fourth Ring Road from Sihui south have been in various stages of destruction, construction and development for years now. I remember when the Yansha Outlets opened, for example, there wasn’t a hell of a lot else on that side of BeiGongDa. Now there’s a hell of a lot more malls and apartment complexes and what have you- all places I knew from some previous phase of development, but now a lot of those places are complete and open and fully functioning. And yet there’s still plenty of land and old shacks and shanties just waiting for the 拆….
suan le
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on April 18, 2007
So I said I’d write something about that latest article I downloaded from the Sino-Platonic Papers, but forget it, I think John and I already did all the ranting necessary in the comments. Can’t think of anything more to add.
And why am I even bothering to write this? Ummm…. dunno. Just thought I’d inform you all.
uh….
Good to see this site comes in fifth on a google.co.uk search for “formaldehyde headache“…. I think. Now I wonder who ran that search?