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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > August > 05 > Entry
Blog: Sexually Inexperienced Chicken … and Other Matters.
BEIJING — After being up about 36 hours straight — traveling to China, getting set up at Main Press Center here at the Beijing Games and getting lost on a what turned out to be an interesting walk Monday night — I finally got some sleep.
I’m staying at the North Star Media Village, which is a collection of 16 high-rise buildings housing 6,000 media from around the world — or about 30 percent of the press corps here.
Like villages from other Games, North Star has its assortment of cafeterias, a bar, some newsstands and some other amenities. But I did notice one thing different on my walk to the bus stop this morning.
In the village is what I thought was a makeshift fire station. It’s a tent-like building in which two red trucks are parked at the ready. I noticed the two firemen standing at rigid attention out front in the already sauna-like heat and thought, ‘Man, these guys have it a lot tougher than the guys I see every day at the fire station at Warren and Buckeye I pass every day back in Dayton.’
Then a closer look revealed what appears to be a missile mounted on top of one truck. “Maybe security,” a Games press officer told me with a shrug. “There’ll be a lot of big shots at the opening ceremony.”
And there is plenty of security here. Olive-clad soldiers stand at attention along many of the streets and especially around all the Olympic venues and iconic Beijing stops like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. There are blue uniformed police, too, and in Tiananmen Square on Tuesday afternoon, I noticed some undercover cops — you often can tell them by their government-issue black shoes.
And yet the security presence doesn’t seem stifling — yet.
Maybe because there’s so much else to see and figure out here. When you don’t know the language, the mores, or many of the intricacies of a culture some 3,000 years in the making, you just wade in with your eyes open and your questions handy.
For instance, there’s a store &— sort of a Chinese version of Wal-Mart — right across from the Village where I’m staying. That’s where they sell Jackie Chan Anti-Falling Shampoo. I’m still not sure if it’s for dandruff or guys losing their hair.
Here are some other things you might not have been sure of until an American instructor at Beijing International Studies University recently teamed with a local Chinese professor to clear up some Chinese-to-English translations on signs, menus and the like around the city.
And so the Donga Anus Hospital became the Donga Proctology Hospital.
Then there was the menu item listed as “saliva chicken.” It meant tasty, mouth-watering chicken. At another place a hog dog was listed as “warm canine.” Of course there are places that serve real dog here, though local Olympic organizers have tried to pressure establishments into taking that item off the menu until after the Games.
And there was the place that served pullets, which are hens less than a year old. That came out on some menus as “Sexually Inexperienced Chicken.”
There was one thing that needed no translation Monday night as a St. Louis writer and I left a shopping center an hour’s walk from the Media Center.
As we headed to the sidewalk, a young woman dressed in a black sun dress came up and whispered “Massage?”
As a menu item, I’m guessing she would not be listed as “Sexually Inexperienced.”
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By Shawna
August 5, 2008 6:58 PM | Link to this
Ah, yes. The joys of translation. Well I remember the “Coffee and Snake” shop in Seoul.