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Stink Billyums posted:Last time I was in Japan I saw a lot of signs in Chinese saying poo poo like "don't shoplift, there are cameras watching", "don't litter", "don't touch this", without having similar signs in English. I live in Bangkok and used to take boats up and down the river frequently for work. There would be signs posted in Thai and English saying things like, "Stand here for boats going north/south," and then next to them were signs in Chinese that said, "Stop throwing your trash in the river." Cheesemaster200 posted:5000 years of legendary hospitality: In Taiwan, 酒店 means "brothel" and not hotel so this gets a double chuckle out of me. CIGNX posted:It started as a Cantonese thing that is sort of spreading into Mandarin in southern China. People used to refer to younger women professionally as 小姐 or "young lady", but that term become more and more associated with prostitutes. People in rural Guangdong started using 靓女 or "pretty girl" as a substitute, and then it spread into mainstream Cantonese. I haven't heard it much from people in northern China, but I haven't been back there in a while, so who knows now. 小姐 is still the default in Taiwan and I don't think I ever heard 美女. 妹妹 was somewhat common as a nickname or name of affection for little girls (like parent to daughter).
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Jan 30, 2020 04:44
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Cheesemaster200 posted:Maybe it does in Xi'an too; would explain a lot. I'm under the impression that in China it's just a bog standard hotel, but who knows about specific provinces or cities. A couple of goons lived above one in Taipei for awhile and they (the brothel, not the goons) made meth in the basement so there were regularly fires and police raids. They have since moved out of the building.
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Jan 30, 2020 04:50
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Grand Fromage posted:酒店 just means hotel in the mainland. Though there are plenty of prostitutes associated with hotels of course, but there's nothing implied by the name other than hotel. Does China do the thing Korea does where the elevators in a hotel would just be covered in the business cards of prostitutes and the concierge would hand them out to discerning patrons?
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Jan 30, 2020 04:58
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Just renewed my visa in Bangkok. They had people taking temperatures at the door to the immigration center. But if you didn't want your temperature checked you could just go in the back door.
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Feb 6, 2020 05:36
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Bangkok also has bathroom attendants who give massages and warm towels after you wash your hands. These are also legit clubs as far as anything in Bangkok is legit. The attendants expect a tip of like $0.60 per massage though.
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Feb 7, 2020 10:18
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My school issued thermometers to all students and we have to have them all take their temperatures midway through the day. There's been only a handful of cases in Bangkok and none at my school.
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Feb 13, 2020 12:58
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bob dobbs is dead posted:Surely berns is a husbands Bernie is all things to all people.
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Feb 13, 2020 13:58
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This is probably the best opportunity ever to visit Angkor Wat.
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Feb 17, 2020 00:49
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Mr. Mittens once caught and ate a roach and then sat meowing at the spot on the wall where he had last seen it hoping more would appear. Then he started begging me to help. He was not the smartest cat.
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Feb 28, 2020 10:16
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First death in Thailand. This guy had a miserable last week of life as he somehow managed to get coronavirus and dengue.
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Mar 1, 2020 09:18
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It's worth noting that China did literally mount an invasion of Taiwan once. Obviously a naval battle and landing that happened 70 years ago isn't exactly comparable to today, but the absolute failure of the Communist Party's attempt to finish the Civil War and unify China is the reason why it never happened again. Seriously, a single ROC boat was in the wrong place (for China) and it completely ruined China's day. What's fascinating is that since it was such a complete catastrophe for China, Taiwan probably could have declared itself independent and the Republic of Taiwan at that very moment and we wouldn't be in the situation we are now. But Chiang Kai Shek was such an absolute gently caress himself that he genuinely believed that he'd eventually reclaim the mainland. A lot of people don't realize that some of the dumbest parts of the status quo, like Taiwanese sports teams being called "Chinese Taipei" were because of the insistence of CKS and had nothing to do with China. China of course has benefited from the hubris of CKS and likes things pretty much the way they are.
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Apr 11, 2020 03:47
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Didn't Taiwan end mandatory service?
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Apr 11, 2020 04:15
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Reading up on this, apparently they have not. There have been talks to end it and there was a timetable in place to end it by 2014 (this is when I left Taiwan and I hadn't followed up) but mandatory service is still very much a thing. There are apparently a bunch of alternatives to actual military service available and the service time may be as low as 4 months. But that's something I need to stay on top of because my son will likely have to serve if things stay as they are. gently caress.
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Apr 11, 2020 04:23
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Shumagorath posted:It takes some serious effort to be a worse leader than Mao but CKS made it look easy. My favorite CKS trivia is that he was such a poo poo, he became a running joke in the Bush family. Jeb! of course didn't get the joke and thought HW was being totally serious when he talked about "unleashing Chiang" while playing tennis. This culminated in the absolutely bizarre ritual of Jeb! bequeathing a sword to Marco Rubio and dubbing it "the sword of Chiang". LimburgLimbo posted:Edit: you beat me. Also your son can live with running around for 4 months. I'm not worried about him doing it, I'm worried about us forgetting to make sure he's registered and him getting in trouble for not doing it when he goes to visit grandma.
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Apr 11, 2020 04:56
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LimburgLimbo posted:I mean, don't forget? I'll try not to. Point I'm trying to make is that only two hours ago I didn't think the requirement even existed. Something good actually came out of this thread!
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Apr 11, 2020 04:59
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Alan Smithee posted:trump got a call from the Tsai and he went "got a call from the president of Taiwan congratulating me!" when he won the election. When people were like "uh dont say the quiet part loud" he went "what, it's weird that we sell them millions of dollars weapons and don't acknowledge them" and then he had to backtrack The funniest thing about that was literally everyone and their brother was suddenly an expert on cross-strait relations. Even Dave loving Chappelle had a bit about it. There were so many hot takes.
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Apr 11, 2020 05:49
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WarpedNaba posted:Hey, I like Dave Chappelle! Yeah but his take on Taiwan wasn't exactly savvy.
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Apr 11, 2020 06:42
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Horatius Bonar posted:Also, They have or had a branch in Tucheng, New Taipei City and I used to drink at it semiregularly. The algae beer didn't do it for me (tasted like soap) but the other ones on the menu loving ruled. I mean, they only had four beers total, but there wasn't a bad choice. I miss being in my 20s and living in Taiwan. Back to Ajumma chat: I've told this story before, but it's relevant so here we go again: Aside from getting elbowed on train platforms, my one notable experience with them was when I was coming home from Hongdae at like 6:30am and was sitting on a subway next to a group out for their Saturday morning hike. They were all very familiar with the I'm-about-to-puke-face I was making, likely having seen it on their husbands for the last 40 years. Within second I was swarmed by a dozen plastic baggies and they didn't really seem to mind me vomiting copiously next to them. Good times, good times.
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Apr 23, 2020 11:28
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I went into a restaurant in Taiwan for lunch one day and was browsing at the menu. The waitress started talking to me and I blew her off because, "Sorry I don't speak Chinese." She then continued, "That's fine because I'm speaking English." She was an ABC and had only recently moved to Taiwan. I felt like a total jackass, but the reality is that your brain just makes assumptions about your environment. I had 0 reason to think that a waitress in small town Taiwan spoke English since none of them had at that point and I was focused on the menu and not what she was saying. My wife and I used to get spat at when we were holding hands in Korea because everyone thought she was a Korean woman dating a foreigner. She is not Korean. They probably assumed I was a soldier because we were in Dongducheon and I kept my hair fairly short. I even had soldiers approach me asking for directions on occasion, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. Still rude to spit at people though. My Chinese-Canadian friend would get severely scolded on the metro in Seoul when she was out with other English teachers for the same reason.
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Apr 29, 2020 08:26
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Shadow0 posted:This may just be because Koreans really love spitting for some reason. While this is true, it was a little bit too deliberate and aimed at our feet.
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Apr 29, 2020 08:43
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BrigadierSensible posted:Whilst we are talking language I have 2 gripes. 1 general, and 1 personal. I've been an expat long enough that I'm over this. Some people have a knack for language, some people take hours upon hours of study to make meager progress, some people have no idea if they're going to be in a country one week or five years or the rest of their lives. Learning a language is a serious commitment, requires exceptional dedication, and not everyone is at a point in their lives where they can sit down for even a single solid hour of self-study a night, let alone paying for lessons. And that's assuming the local language schools are even any good and aren't just a giant blackhole to throw a fairly tiny salary into. My wife can be in the same room as a foreigner and as if by osmosis will be speaking their language. She grew up bilingual and started learning English in elementary school and her brain is just good at picking up language in a way mine never will be. My kid is growing up trilingual and he can listen to a song in a language he doesn't speak and if he likes the song, he'll be doing a phonetically perfect imitation of the song after a listen or two. I spent years studying Chinese and even taught myself to read and write. By the time I was good at it, I was off to Thailand in a completely unexpected change of life plans. After being here five years, I've only just now started considering that I should learn more than just how to give the taxi driver directions, but I also don't really have much motivation to do so outside of impressing judgmental assholes who look down on me for having lived here awhile but barely being able to speak it. My family isn't Thai, I work in an international environment, and telling a taxi driver how to get me home has gotten me by for five years. quote:2)When I lived in Namhae, I knew a bloke whose Korean was better than mine, but would never speak to people. Because language was a thing to study, pore over, and then perfect. As opposed to a thing to use, and get better by making mistakes. Dude would actually get angry at me for making grammatical mistakes when talking to people, but wouldn't say a word himself. This dude also had a monster case of "Yellow Fever", and came to Korea because he was a fan of Girls Generation, and would constantly tell me how hot the 19-20 year olds, (at the time) were. He left Namhae because it was too small a town and moved to Daejon because, and I quote almost verbatim, "I can't meet any hot chicks here, in a bigger city I will have a better chance." We not surprisingly had a falling out and are no longer friends. This is just weird though and is basically like the reverse of the guy in Japan or Korea who has spent their entire life studying English and as soon as there's an opportunity to use it with a real life foreigner, he immediately shuts down and either forgets or pretends to forget everything. I also had a friend in Taiwan who refused to speak Mandarin once he knew I could because he wanted to keep it in his back-pocket and ambush people with it if necessary. quote:I'm not Korean, but instead a middle aged Australian and I'll be leaving Korea in a month, (probably). But I'll be your friend. Let's all be friends!
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Apr 29, 2020 10:57
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Shadow0 posted:Yeah, it's especially egregious when they are teachers. Like you want these kids to learn a foreign language and you can't even be bothered to learn the language of the country you are in??? Some people aren't really teaching English so much as just being paid clowns. There's not exactly a lot of pedagogy going on in these language academies. In that sense, they no more expect the kids to learn the language than they intend to have a career. I still don't hold the ones that are actually teachers to that standard either just because of how loving hard it is to learn a language, especially when you're working full time, planning lessons, and managing a family or social life. Learning a new language is just not something that everyone wants to do.
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Apr 29, 2020 10:59
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, same. At least if we're talking like high level fluency. Knowing literally nothing seems like more trouble than picking up the real basic poo poo. You can get by very well in a country with nothing more than your please/thank you/give me/numbers level of language. Right, knowing absolutely nothing seems frustrating as hell. I've got coworkers like that and they're completely dependent on everyone for everything. It's not hard to learn to count. When I was in Korea, I think I picked up hangeul in like twenty minutes and then had to revise a day later. I can still read it 11 years later. poo poo was easy. I did actually start to learn to read Thai but that system is frustrating for about a billion reasons and no thanks. At some point I'll probably cave and just force myself to do it, but it's about as frustrating a system as you can get before it turns into the madness of Tibetan.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:22
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Taiwan is more wet than hot and from like October-March it's downright cool. But it's not like humid wet. It's "don't see the sun for two weeks at a time" wet. Just completely overcast with this horrible on-off drizzle.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:29
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Alternatively to the guest angle, I'm only in whatever country I'm in because they have work they need done or want me to do that for whatever reason they've decided a local can't. The government has agreed with this and provides me a path to legally be in the country and work. At no point along the way are there any requirements for me to have any knowledge at all of the language. This is different than an education visa (to learn the language) where they might actually check your progress in the language and your attendance record to make sure you're not just using the visa to bum around (this was a huge issue in Thailand very recently). It's not quite the same as someone showing up in a country that was getting along fine and then demanding to be a part of that society and putting no effort into learning things that make being a part of that society possible. Again, I think learning something is better than learning nothing because it dramatically improves quality of life, but I don't even see it as rude. It just is. Also, it's kind of silly to think if you can't speak the language that you're going to be shopping by feel. Packages have labels on them, usually bilingual. It's not like you can't tell if something is a pack of chicken wings or a stick of butter. Checkouts almost always have displays with the total and change and I've been probably to a handful of places total in all of Taiwan, Korea, Japan (admittedly I was only in tourist areas), and Thailand that displayed prices in the local language and not in Arabic numerals. They're basically universal. It is very, very easy to get by without speaking a word of the local language and not interacting with staff beyond handing an item over and reading the display. I'm not advocating living like that, but if you're a specialist in something and get hired from abroad and are paid better as an expat than you would back home, I don't really condemn them for just living their life and not bothering with the local language, even if they live there forever. It's their life, not mine.
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Apr 30, 2020 07:54
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Shadow0 posted:When I first moved to Japan, I didn't really know how to cook. On my first trip to the grocery store, I looked at the various beef-like things there and bought one at random (maybe it was the cheapest one). I'm pretty sure it was cow stomach. I ended up cooking the chewiest, blandest thing I've ever eaten in my life, haha. The big mistake I made once was getting ground pork instead of ground beef, but that's really not that big of a deal for what I was cooking. I'm not sure how you look at stomach in any condition and think it's beef though. Magna Kaser posted:food labels in china usually are only in chinese. a coworker of mine with a very huge peanut and sesame allergy learned the characters and words for those fast. Well I can't speak to China as I've never been. When shopping, if the label was strictly in one language that I couldn't understand, I tended to avoid it unless someone I trusted told me what it was first or the picture was obvious. If I had a food allergy, I'd do that triply so. If I were in China, I'm not sure I'd even trust the labels though. Probably just safer to buy raw ingredients and cook for yourself. As I said though, learning the language is definitely possible. But like in Thailand, with online shopping and specialty grocery stores, literally everything is in English and you never have to interact with anyone but the guy dropping off your order.
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Apr 30, 2020 08:38
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My wife just goes by part of her Chinese name because it's theoretically easy since if you ignore the tone, it's basically a name that exists in English. But everyone she's introduced to, be it Thai, Taiwanese, Chinese or a native English speaker, won't take her word for how it's pronounced and will change the vowel in it for no good reason.
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Apr 30, 2020 10:36
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The most annoying thing in Korea was being told that I couldn't order certain items off a menu because it was too spicy for foreigners. Like you just know that at some point some white rear end in a top hat ordered something and then complained that it was too spicy. The story spread and now everyone assumes that no foreigner can handle heat. I'd regularly eat spicy food to the bewilderment of my colleagues. Between that and the chopsticks, they didn't know what to make of me. Frustratingly, I actually gave them reason to think I couldn't use chopsticks on my first night. I had just flown in from the states and was very jet-lagged. They took me to a nice BBQ restaurant and sort of sheepishly asked if I wanted a fork. I said no, grabbed the chopsticks, and tried to get to eating. Well, it turns out that Korean chopsticks actually are different than chopsticks from other countries. I've been using bamboo and plastic chopsticks regularly since I was a kid, but Korean chopsticks are metal. They're also flat as opposed to the commonly found round ones that most people are familiar with. I was definitely clumsy with these new chopsticks and they eventually slipped a fork to me that I used because I just wanted to get to my bed. But outside of that first encounter, I never had an issue and like others have said, literally for the entire next year, coworkers who saw me eating with chopsticks every day would remark on how amazing it was that I could use them.
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May 3, 2020 10:27
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There have been at least two goons deported from good China and one actually was arrested once as a suspected foreign spy. Another goon's mom actually was deported as a foreign spy.
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May 25, 2020 03:48
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Dont Touch ME posted:goons really are the illuminati, huh They're terrible at it though. The one arrested as a spy literally just drove his scooter onto a navy base because the road was open and he thought there would be a good view for taking photos. He spent hours in handcuffs. He was eventually deported for completely unrelated reasons with a story similar to Url's. Pay your fines when abroad. The mom attempted being a spy and was trying to get healthcare information out of Taiwan (I think abortion records maybe?) during the White Terror and she accidentally mailed her drop to the wrong address. She was given amnesty after the democratization and lives there as a professor now.
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May 25, 2020 04:03
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Magna Kaser posted:it's crazy to me that people get deported for not paying fines, but "working illegally for years and years" seems to be a pretty low-risk thing to do. No idea about Bad China, but Good China cracked down hard on working illegally back in like 2008 or 2009. They didn't eliminate it, but they certainly made the penalties on the locals much harsher to make the risk not worth it. It used to be much more common for people on tourist visas to work at a buxiban and to do visa runs. Most people who work illegally now are doing it on student visas, but even that isn't super common. The actual illegal work that is super common is foreigners teaching kindergarten. It's openly done basically everywhere, but every now and then someone will report a school (either a disgruntled parent or a rival school) and officials will have to do a sweep. This is often why schools have unused areas to hide foreigners in. I've received loads of texts over the years from friends who are bored because they're locked in a room to avoid being caught teaching kindergarten. I taught kindergarten for years in Taiwan and our school never had an issue, but we were small time and flew under the radar. Still, all of these teachers have valid work permits.
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May 25, 2020 04:25
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GoutPatrol posted:I have one friend now who is going through a world of poo poo right now because he has been doing visa runs since 2018. He got his degree online from a university that doesn't exist anymore (as far as I can tell, was not a DeVry type but just a school fell apart normally) and the gov/consulate is not going to give him another work permit, even though he had one his first year here. The usual visa run path is through HK, but the gov. was shutting down most flights to there since January, so instead in March he went to Okinawa and came back. But then his job wouldn't let him come back to work for 3 weeks after he left the country, even after he got a negative test result back. Being non-salary like many buxiban jobs, that means he lost several weeks from new years, the delay in restarting classes from the initial outbreak, and several weeks from this, realistically about three months pay. I'm actually surprised someone even looks into the status of universities and the validity of degrees.
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May 25, 2020 08:11
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I guess we're crossing the streams here because all of my stories/anecdotes on the last page have been from Good China (aka Taiwan).
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May 25, 2020 08:54
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Magna Kaser posted:i think 100% of my taiwanese friends would cringe at being referred to as "good china" lol they all want to just be Taiwan and want as much distance between them and "China" as possible. they don't even like to be called "Chinese" in English. Yeah I would never actually use that phrase around Taiwanese people. It's just something that became common usage in this thread.
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May 25, 2020 09:01
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Yeah I often forget people's user names.
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May 25, 2020 14:41
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Look, I've known a lot of people in Asia to be taken into various forms of custody. I can't be expected to keep all the details straight. My favorite is the goon in Thailand who got picked up while on a jog for running through a firing range. There was of course a lot of questioning of who he was and then when they realized he was just an idiot who ignored the (Thai language) signs, they invited him to watch them blow some stuff up.
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May 25, 2020 15:23
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Mistle posted:"No, America imports tall Africans to play basketball, like we import Cubans to play baseball." I work for an international school and as part of our accreditation process, the organizations we use expect to see "internationalism" integrated into our curriculum. One of our admin staff suggested that for PE, we teach each race what sport they're good at. Then she produced a list.
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May 26, 2020 00:40
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I ate leftover rice today and now thanks to this thread every time I do I have to ask myself if this is it, this is the time leftover rice does me in.
Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 08:03 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 06:30
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I had mine with my trademark curry recipe, which also uses coconut milk. My son hates spicy food most of the time unless the food he is eating happens to be spicy. Then he says, "It's not spicy, it's sour," or some other nonsense justification to explain why he's stealing my lunch. Four year olds are weird.
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May 27, 2020 09:15
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Someone tried the baby formula scam on me in Bangkok a few years ago and I wasn't anywhere near a tourist area. I was flabbergasted.
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Jun 1, 2020 10:51
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