Chinglish sign of the month

Here's a little gem that I found on my trip to Qiandao Lake this weekend. I don't know where they came up with the word "speel." Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh, hello blog

You may have wondered if I forgot about NYAFC. Well, I haven’t. Between a crazy work schedule in November, a Thanksgiving getaway to Hungary, I let my blogging fall by the wayside (And I missed it!) No longer, though. I got some advice from an esteemed journalist in Shanghai, who blogs here, and he strongly recommended I blog. So there you go. Straight from a fellow journos keypad - I need to blog more.

There’s much to blog about too. And I missed a lot of things to blog about - Shanghai fire, NKorea, all this wikileaks stuff and the lengths the Chinese are going to prevent people from going to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. But I just returned from a weekend retreat with my colleagues and have plenty of stories to share. That starts on Monday.

I do want to share one anecdote from my trip to Hungary to visit my boyfriend, who I met in China and who lived in here for five years. While in Budapest we stumbled upon a Christmas bizarre in the center of the city that attracted locals and visitors alike. We were really excited about trying and food and as we sat down to eat our kebab and pretzel a group of Chinese tourists sat down at our table. They were chatting away in Chinese and luckily they spoke in accents we could understand. It was funny listening to them as we were sure they figured we didn’t know what they were saying.

They didn’t reveal anything too interesting - just talked about the food. But as they were leaving we both said “Zai Jian” (goodbye) and “man zou” (walk slowly - a common add on to goodbye). They giggled and were a bit embarrassed that the whities sitting with them knew pretty much everything they were talking about. How ironic that when I try to leave China they seem to find me anyway.