Angus's Personal Site: Chinese Mystery Meat

This is a tongue-in-cheek account of my trip to

(that's Hainan Dao (Island) to you and me), South China, at the end of May / beginning of June 2002. Hopefully you will find it both entertaining and informative, and that you'll enjoy reading it even if you don't know me. Who knows, by the time you've finished you may even know some genuine Chinese!

Chapter 1: Longquan Coffee
The trip began with a night flight to Hong Kong, then on to

(Haikou) City, the main town on Hainan Island, or

as the Chinese would put it.
The first eating place my friend Rannie and I went to for food was called Longquan Coffee ... a restaurant located beside the Longquan Garden Hotel in

City. It was probably the most Westernised place I would eat in, but of course I wasn't to know that at the outset. You could get American Breakfasts and Continental Breakfasts from there as well as Chinese ones, and quite good they were, too. What amused me the most was that the bread rolls and croissants came from the Barker as opposed to the Baker. Was this a case of barking up the wrong tree?

Chapter 2: A Chinese Lesson
You've probably noticed by now that

and

both begin with

. This is not a co-incidence - it's pronounced like "hi" and means "sea." This seemed logical being an island, and with

being a port, it is not surprising that the word "sea" should feature in its name. I further discovered that

("kou," pronounced such that it rhymes with "no") means "mouth."

Chapter 3: Rannie's People
Rannie introduced me to her parents the next day. This was entertaining as they tried to communicate with me in Mandarin and I could only reply in English. Of course they could understand as much English as I could Mandarin, i.e. zilch (or next best thing to it). Rannie, however, was able to act as an interpreter for me so we could at least understand the basics of what each other was trying to say.
During the course of the stay I was intruduced to a number of people, all very nice, some of whom also tried to communicate with me in Mandarin. Sometimes these people would communicate to each other using Mandarin, at other times it was Cantonese, and at other times their own local language - the Hainan language. Rannie would explain to me which they were using, but as it was incomprehensible anyway it didn't matter really - it was all Greek to me (duh!).

Chapter 4: Did mother curse the horse?
Chinese is what linguists call a tonal language. This means that the way you say a word can alter it to an entirely different word. Take for example the word "ma." Said one way, it means "mother." Said using a different tone of voice it means "horse." You can see the problem that Westerners would encounter when trying to learn this language. Using the other 2 tones available and just this one word, you could ask the question, "Did mother curse the horse?" I must admit, I can't think why I or anybody would want to ask this, but there you have it.

This article is unfinished.
Chinese Characters used in this Document, carefully sorted into a random order and does not mean anything at all in Chinese, English, Turkish, Arabic, Welsh, Zulu, Double-Dutch (especially Double-Dutch), or any other language you care to think of...