Still in China

Hello everybody! So no updates in the last week and a half because I have been working like crazy the last few days. Some schedules slipped, a few extra bugs appeared, and we extended our trip to finish deploying our project in a professional manner and to prevent as many loose ends as possible. Unfortunately for me, that means that I go straight from here to Singapore, so a 10-day trip just turned into a 25-day trip.

Anyway, here are some things I've seen and done in the last few days:

For one, I'm learning some Mandarin. Not much, but some useful things that help me get by. The first word I started to recognize on my own was "zhong" which means "middle" or in the midst of. It's written like this: 中
If you want to draw it you do it like this:
中-order.gif
You see it everywhere, because the Chinese name for China is Zhongguo: 中国 or "middle country".

Another one is "da" which means "big". Mostly used when ordering food. 大

One that I hear a lot is "lu" or "road": 路 I think it looks like a bus driving past a road sign.

The other utility words I now know are "zhage" and "nage", meaning "that one" and "this one" respectively. You hear locals use "nage" a lot as a filler word almost in daily speech. It sounds much like the slang "nigga" one might hear in the inner cities, which makes an odd contradiction when you hear someone babbling in Mandarin and then suddenly switch to a rap video.

My name in Mandarin is something like this: 卡梅伦 Kameilun. Individually the words mean "card" "plum" "relationship" so take that for what you will.

(For you pedants out there I am intentionally ignoring tones for this post, although they are important)

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