today was a lousy day to begin with..had to literally pull myself out of the cozy bed to get to the office. With the help of the same colleague from the building, Angie, got to the shuttle bus and reached office. the project is not yet decided and am just doing some "desk research" which means going through lots of ppt's... lot's of and understand the china market... there are several new things that i came to know about chinese.. the first that the china does not have a very uniform culture throughout and it is much like india, the north chinese are very different from south chinese, and the shanghainese are quite unlike someone from Beijing. i could understand that because Beijing being in north (and hence very cold) with political centres and its patriarchal culture stands very differently from Shanghai which is the commercial hub and has more aggressive and independent women.
one of the other interesting trivia i came to know is that chinese do not bathe in the morning like indians. they believe that bathing is needed to get rid of all the dirt and dust gathered in the day and hence they take a shower in the night before going to bed... well that's strange to me but that's how this billionly-populated country lives. about the language which is called mandarin, i guess is also not same across the country and shanghainese, for example, is different from Chinese. Mandarin does not have alphabets like English or Sanskrit which join to become words. instead, Chinese has symbols which are phonetic in nature and combine according to sounds so an English word is not directly pronounced in the same manner in chinese. almost every english word (even proper nouns) have a Chinese translation. China is not china, india is not India in Chinese and actually the names that we hear of people are their english names and not their original Chinese names. In fact, people choose an English name after they have learned English. that's again strange because Indians keep their Indian names and just find a spelling in English to suit that pronunciation.
well..more on the language when i figure out more... the practical application for me today was that i could not have said the name of my apartment to the cab driver as it would have a different chinese pronunciation. so it is advisable in china to have the name of your destinations written on a card that the cab driver can read. i put this knowledge to test when i came down the office bus alone while returning home. well.. it isn't so difficult... i guess...it wasn't tough today ..at least..
before taking the cab... i checked out a couple of malls with lots of electronic items.. the place is quite cool and India is yet to see such huge malls... i have just checked the rates today and couldn't assess if it was cheap or not.. maybe next time i will take some Chinese friend, if possible and then do shopping...
it is Diwali in India today..and so i decided to avoid non-veg today (which is quite tough in china) and managed to eat some rice with an aloo baingan (potato and egg-plant/brinjal) and some yogurt and salad.. the food was good... i think i am getting used to the Chinese taste really fast...
well... i have to make my itinerary for the weekend. may be i will do the Bund and the shanghai museum this weekend and also figure out flights to hong kong and check if i can afford the costs...
rest... tomorrow....
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