Take a walk in my mind...

...and packs of shirtless Chinese men are roaming the streets. Yea, that's how they roll out here. Seriously though, this weather in Shanghai makes me want to molest my inner child. It's that bad. Not only is it hot, it's drippingly humid. It feels like I'm trapped in some very obese man's armpit. I can only pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and hope that the electricity holds up through the night so that I may continue to shower in the cool, dry air that is so copiously vomited forth from my air conditioner.

So that's how it is.

You know what really grinds my gears? Bad Chinglish for the sake of being bad Chinglish. So right now I'm editing a children's TV show for the Chinese market and there's a small 1 minute segment within the program that's supposed to teach children the English word for the object the characters found in that particular episode. Now, in pulling double duty, I go in and record the English work and spell it out a few times. Done. Easy Peezy.

Wrong.

Apparently, I don't pronounce it "correctly".

Case in point. One of the words is "hiccup". I pronounce it as we would back in the United States, with a soft "p" at the end that cuts off the air and ends the word.

I was told that I needed to pronounce the word as:

"hiccuPUH"

with an over exaggeration on the end of the P resulting in an extra syllable being added.

The reason why, is that in Mandarin Chinese, no words end in a consonant (except for a soft "n" that sollows certain vowels) and as such, I grew up being called "Edawada". Yes, a normally 2 syllable word was, and still is, being stretched into a 4 syllable word.

Re-fucking-tarded.

Yea I know, I promised more blogs, yadda yadda yadda... but I've been busy! Anyway, I gotta head outta the country for a bit since my visa is expiring next week so I fly to Hong Kong today on Shanghai Air flight FM845. All I'm going for is to land at the airport, go get my passport stamped, then take a bus over the border again to Shenzhen, where I'll board Xiamen Airlines flight MF8316 to the port city of Xiamen. Why Xiamen? Well, my dad is there now and It's nice to get away from my work in Shanghai for a weekend and visit him! I'll be back in Shanghai on Monday so it's a fairly short getaway. Oh well. When I get back, I promise to blog more! Seriously!