Shanghai'd

Basketball.
Top five differences between pick-up lan qiu in China vs. the US:
5. You say 犯规 "fan gui" instead of "foul"
4. When "fan gui" is called, play happily resumes immediately, without the typical 5 minutes of bitching that inevitably ensues at home.
3. Instead of shirts and skins you play home Yao Ming red jerseys vs. away Yao Ming white jerseys. Yeah, he's popular here, but I also see a lot of Wade / James / Carter and unfortunately Bryant jerseys too.
2. No "check" to start play. When you try this, the other team will assume it was a really stupid pass and take the turnover.
1. The hoop is usually only about 9'8", which turns me into a dunking power forward instead of a point guard.

Rain.
Of course, no sooner do I post the last entry than the skies darken over and I am caught in a driving rain storm on my bike ride home from work!

Humid and Hot.
We're supposed to be entering the "Plum rain" season in Shanghai, a month long period of steady rain. Instead the last few days have been Men Re. Record high temperatures are pushing a sticky 40 C (over 100 for the Celsius-challenged), the latest installment in Shanghai's consistently crappy year-round weather. In Austin the heat is undeniable, but if you stop to think about it, how often do you even notice? Most people blissfully leave their air-conditioned homes for their air-conditioned commute to air-conditioned work and back again. Thankfully our apartment has air, but my bike, most taxis, restaurants, and my office (for all intents and purposes) do not.

On the bright side ... my colleagues told me that some schools and businesses will send people home if the temp gets above 35 C. Kinda the Chinese equivalent of a snow day. In reality, I've come to realize that just means the "official" temp in China is uncannily reported as 34.5 or 34.7 regardless of how hot it really is!

Signage.

The first of hopefully many posts on bizarre Chinese zhi shi pai. Entire PhD theses could be written on this subject, but I find this one is particularly poignant:



It falls into the category of grammatically (mostly) correct, yet strangely existential.