More routine
Claire is looking so thrilled here partly because of how
absurdly and improbably long these beans are (over half a metre?!); but also
because she is doing something we have had little time to do.
Cooking. In the flat.
We are trying to get some more routine into our schedule. As
you may have gathered from the blog to date, we are constantly doing a hundred
things at once.
This is only the second set piece meal we have eaten in the
flat since arriving. Pie, mash, and incredibly long beans, watching Game of
Thrones. Normality!
Well, nearly. As well as lounge about, we had gone out for
lunch, Claire had gone to work for 4 hours and I’d done a 2 hour run. Maybe
this is HK normal?
Markets
We also discovered today the extensive ‘covered markets’ near
us. There are sets of these all over HK in municipal buildings, where the
government tidied away street stalls for tidiness/cleanliness purposes a few decades
ago. Nonetheless, they’ve retained their very local flavour.
Imagine Brixton covered market, with the new posh
restaurants stripped out, and everyone shouting in Cantonese and you’ve got it.
We had some broken banter with the stallholders, including
one who had no English at all, and got the beans, some spring onions and some
potatoes for about £1.50.
Multiple meanings
Which brings on to the multiple meanings. Our Canto is
coming on – taxis, basic conversation, colloquialisms to impress and get locals
to laugh/be nice to us are in the armoury. My new colleagues at work are taken
with my attempts to learn, and are being very encouraging (even if they do
laugh at me a lot).
But the tonal thing remains baffling. There are somewhere between
6 and 9 tones in Cantonese (the fact that people can’t agree on that shows its
complexity), which makes learning vocab tough. The variations in tone to a western
ear are so subtle that I often cannot make out the difference.
I have tried to explain this to our Canto-speaking
acquaintances by asking them to say ‘800 white pens’, which comes out as “Ba ba
ba ba”, with different tones and slight hints at the end of each word that they
end in a ‘k’ or a ‘t’.
Other good recent pitfalls include:
Chicken – in a
slightly different tone, it’s also the word for prostitute. Awk. Ward.
Tong – means TONS
of things:
-
And
-
Sugar
-
When combined with ‘see’, colleagues.
-
Gather
-
Take
-
Pass or card
Green beans – and
today we learned green beans are ‘ching dao’. Which sounds almost exactly the same as the pronunciation for the Chinese beer
Tsingtao. But has a slightly bugger emphasis on the ‘a’ for the bean version.
And when we suggested it sounds like the beer to the
stallholder in the market, he looked at us like we were idiots.
Good fun to learn. Bloody hard work.
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