Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Lifting walls

This is just an update. I once spoke about the banning of websites here in China and so I feel it is my duty to update things.
Blogger is no longer blocked here. The unblocking happened sometime during the holidays, probably before the Olympics.
Wikipedia of course has been available for a year now. I don't know about the editing though, since I've never tried that. [me? make a Wiki entry??]
I'm not sure about Xanga though... think it's still banned.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Fifth Year

I don't think I'm going to be a big fan of the new post-midnight flight timings of the Sri Lankan Airlines. On the Colombo-Bangkok leg I was watching "Ironman" and I fell asleep as soon as the final battle started. On the Bangkok-Beijing leg, I decided on the new Indiana Jones movie and again fell asleep during the final fight scenes. It's been more than a week now and I still don't know how they end!!

Other than the timings, the journey was pretty good. This time my one day Colombo transit was at the Club Hotel Dolphin, which was the best Sri Lankan transit hotel so far. I've heard that there are even better ones but this large establishment was really good. To be critical though, it could use better room-furnishing.

At first, when the plane touched down at the Beijing airport, I thought we were headed to the new, and now famous, T 3 - the largest terminal in the world to date. But to my dismay we skirted around the new one, back to the familiar old terminal. So I missed it again, maybe next time....

The bus brought us to Yichang from Beijing, on Monday, and the first good news awaiting us was that we didn't have to move anymore. The day before we left China for the summer, it was announced that we from the 2nd floor, would have to move to other rooms or perhaps go outside the university. But I'm glad the higher ups finally came to their senses and just let us be. Now the students from the 6th floor are required to shift to other rooms...

In related news:

This is the last semester of studies for us and the University wants us to remain till March. We're doing the "jian xi" at the hospital again for the first two months, and then it's back to the classroom before the final exams.

The first sunday in Yichang was good. It was great to meet old friends, get new ones and miss the ones who weren't there. Umm...? Well actually, the last part was no fun at all. None whatsoever.

The university has been changing in our absence... not too drastic, but changes there are. The new football stadium coming up behind the G-building looks like it's going to be grass! [the other two we have are synthetic turf] Can't wait to play there, but in all probability, we'd have to pay entry fees like we did in the first year for the synthetic ground in front of the library.
The food market is still not open, though work looks more than halfway through. Wish I can get back to the chaofan shops there soon. I wonder if they'll still be around for the new and improved Snack street.

Since most of the courses are 4 years long, it makes us the "senior-most" students in the University right now. [Of course there are post graduate students, but who's counting them] Guess this makes us feel more responsible.

Our seniors are taking the MCI screening test in Delhi the coming sunday. We've been hearing quite a lot of rumours on the possible outcome of this event. Hopefully, the more disturbing ones won't turn out to be true.

Anyway, this is the year we move out of the comfort zone. Hope we can all make that move comfortably.

Monday, September 1, 2008

W

As part of a recent drive to reenforce laws in Mumbai, all hoardings announcing the names of business establishments in the city should be bilingual, with the Marathi name displayed prominently. Since Devanagari [the script used to write Marathi, Hindi etc.] is a phonetic one [unlike the Chinese jigsaw puzzle] it isn't very hard to write close approximations of the English names, now prevalent, in Marathi. They've successfully managed to rewrite names such as Haute Couture, Smokin' Lee's, Nature's Basket, Not Just Jazz By the Bay etc. But mistakes do creep in and I saw that the Marathi name, for a ladies ethnic work wear store called "W", was "dubloo".

But I guess this one can be comfusing so I shall not laugh at them. When I learned the alphabet, this little symbol was called "Dubbli-yoo". I can still recall, thanks to my amazing memory, the nursery rhyme, "you, we, dubbli-yoo, ex, why, ezed". I had always wondered what "dubbli-yoo" meant until later on I realised it could be "Double-U". But why doulbe-U? Why not double-V?? It definitely looks closer to a double-V and a double-U! Besides, most of the time it's read as double-V anyway : vvhat, vvhy, vvhen rather than uuhat, uuhy, uuhen.

UU-hat?? No vvay!!