This popular local eatery repeats this slogan across four windows.
I can only hope that I someday speak Mandarin as well as many here can speak English. But sometimes, the "English" translations still make me giggle.
Like, for example, T-shirts. I cannot list all the "funny" (or maybe profound and I'm just missing it) things I've seen written on t-shirts worn here. Just in the past week, I've seen the following (I started jotting them down or snapping a quick pic when one caught my eye):
"Eyes without the cloudiness"
"Retreat:
When I'm with you I feel Gentile"
"Just take the pluge"
"Didn't"
"Transient Lovers"
"evil slot mach ines"
"MLFD
of beauty is
taste
the creation of
style is art"
"HERD BOY'S:
Italy cutt neat and smooth glossy
Corporate management, it is refining"
And menus. Most menus in the restaurants we go to frequently don't have English. But last week, we went to one that did. Sort of. Dishes (we didn't order) included:
"Spicy Chicken Guts"
"Big Ear Pieces"
"Bursting Bullfrog"
"Lettuce Burn Belly"
"Millet Pepper Small Cock"
"Original Ecology Pork"
And my personal favorite:
"Purple Department Volume"
I have much to share but it's been a long week, so for now will just pass on a few moments that I didn't capture on my camera this week ...
... The man listening to music in his earphones, hands clasped behind his back, walking down the street - backwards. (My young friend D tells me that it's just another form of exercise. I've seen it several times so asked her about it.)
... The woman squatting on the ground beside an outdoor prepared food umbrella station, cutting up a large fish with a huge meat cleaver, stopping every few minutes to sharpen the cleaver on the grooved alley pavement (or maybe to clean off the edge? Not sure - multiple hard swipes at about 45 degree angle on both sides of the cleaver), before going back to hacking at the fish, then handing up the cut up parts to her partner who drops them into his enormous wok.
... The three elderly ladies chatting it up beside the sewing woman who, apparently distraught to see me sit down on the sidewalk while waiting for my jeans to get fixed, cluck cluck at me, then get up and start ... talking forcefully at me, pushing a bag at me, and gesturing that I must sit on that bag, not the bare sidewalk. (I only noticed the smell of .. urine after I was already down there and figured that it was in the water on the street, not up on the sidewalk.)
... The elderly woman on the sidewalk tsk tsking at the prior patch jobs on my jeans, and then fixing them -- and the new holes -- on her old foot-treadle Singer sewing machine. For 20 rmb (about $3.25).
... A fish jumping out of the tub at the wet market; only to be quickly scooped up by the woman working the stall who was obviously used to this routine.
Happy Sunday everyone!
