There is no huge joke value to this one, but here is how the refueling crew at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport (outside Taipei, and known until recently as Chiang Kai Shek International) looked this afternoon. Kind of a midpoint between the Japanese and mainland Chinese approaches contrasted yesterday:
Some safety gear and a mechanized pump, as in Okinawa, Japan. A certain individualistic variation in stances and posture, as in Changsha, mainland China. And the cold-looking part of people's stance is because a ferocious post-typhoon wind was howling down the runway. For another time, how the Tokyo->Kagoshima->Okinawa->Taipei flight crew looked after the trip, standing in the same wind.
To travel "right-seat" with my friend Peter Claeys, who is Cirrus Design's China representative, as we ferry a Cirrus SR22 from Honda Airport outside Tokyo in Saitama Prefecture, past Mt. Fuji and down along the southern coast of Japan's main island, Honshu; past Kyoto and Hiroshima; to Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu; and, after a stop, from there down the island chain to Okinawa.The next day, to Taiwan. Peter eventually needs to get the airplane to Macau; I will probably get off in Taiwan for some Chinese-manufacturing interviews. This is the planned route.
A year ago Peter and I had our challenges ferrying an SR22 from Changsha, in Hunan province, down to Zhuhai on the southern coast, for the Zhuhai Air Show. This time: we're not going to fly at all at night; we don't "need" to get anywhere by a particular deadline; we're going to big airports that we know have "AvGas" for planes like this one; and we're not flying in mainland China. This should be interesting.
Update: Actually, it was interesting. This update is from Okinawa, after two long flying legs on the first day. The rest of the journey, to Taiwan, might or might not happen, depending on how things develop with a typhoon now knocking around in Taiwan's area, and whose northern fringe we crossed on coming into Okinawa. (For aviation buffs: 30+ knot straight crosswind at 500 feet of elevation inbound on the ILS at Naha airport, which diminished to 11 knots at runway level. Quite a crab angle on the ILS, and quite a wind shear.)
The picture below shows how it looked this morning, soon after sunrise, as Peter walked to the plane at Honda airport and we prepared to scrape the rime-frost off the wings and head to the south.
Thankful for: reader reaction on those tiny Chinese banknotes
On the oddities of coin-versus-bill preferences in Shanghai and Beijing, discussed earlier here, several people wrote to say that I’d forgotten to mention the one truly consequential oddity of Chinese currency, which transcends regional difference: that the biggest note available is the 100 RMB, worth about $13.50.
You combine that with the prevalence of cash transactions in China – we’ve paid for expensive airline tickets, several-month security deposits for our apartment, furniture, etc, all with thick wads of 100RMB bills – and you explain several physical features of modern Chinese life. For instance; men can’t get along with just a little wallet; they often need something more like a purse-let, to carry the cash for the day. And, little corner stores in Chinese cities have cash-counting machines of the kind you see only in banks in the United States.
Also, Bert de Muynck of Beijing wrote:
For people who have used the 1980-version banknote with a face value of 20 cents, they might be familiar with the head images of the two young ethnic-minority women printed on it. Some people think that these two women are drawn by artists. In fact, they are real people.
As he points out, the real people are discussed here
Finally, after the jump, Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, with his discovery about the modern cash culture of Beijing. Thanks to all.
Not so thankful for this at Thanksgiving (Japan Big Brother dept)
Flying from Beijing to Tokyo this morning -- generally an invigorating experience! Japan looks startlingly neat and organized even if you're arriving from Switzerland. And when you're coming not from Switzerland but from China.... Anyhow I arrived excited at the prospect of a few days here.
Unfortunately Japan's way of ushering in the Thanksgiving holidays has been to institute mandatory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering the country. Let me put this bluntly: this is an incredibly degrading, offputting, and hostility-generating process. The comment is not anti-Japanese: when the U.S. does this to foreigners, it's wrong and degrading too (as many people, including me, have pointed out over the years). But Japan has just ushered in this procedure, and they deserve to take some heat for it.
My family has so many real and important things to be thankful for that of course I can only address the ephemera here. For instance:
Windows Vista is no longer consuming the totality of my hard drive! Talk about your happy Thanksgiving Day!
Anton Kucer and his colleagues at Microsoft dutifully tried to figure out why, on a 105GB hard drive containing maybe 30-35GB of "real" data, my computer kept showing that it had virtually no space left.
They came up with an answer! We won't exactly call it a bug, and we won't exactly call it user error, but we will call it an interaction among three forces: Lenovo ThinkPad design, Microsoft Vista design; and JFallows user design. All details are after the jump, but the headline version is: if you have Vista and are using a ThinkPad, there is a way to keep your hard drive from being totally gobbled up. I take my Thanksgivings where I can find them.
Thankfulness is great, but what is the NYT thinking?
The Thanksgiving-day lead editorial from the New York Times, mindful of the difficulties many of its readers may have had in traveling to join their loved ones, praised President Bush for his wise and timely efforts to provide "Congestion Relief":
President Bush’s announcement this week of measures to reduce air traffic congestion was welcome news, especially his decision to open military air lanes along the Eastern Seaboard to commercial planes from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after. The administration deserves credit for not ignoring the mess...
Not to violate the spirit of Thanksgiving, but: are you kidding me???
First, military airspace is at best a minor factor in holiday air-traffic congestion. The worst air traffic congestion is around New York City. As mentioned earlier, there's not much military airspace there to begin with. Chapter-and-verse details after the jump. Anyone who has ever looked at an aviation chart knows this. (I know about it from flying small airplanes on the East Coast over the past ten years.)
Second, controllers already can open up the military airspace during peak holiday travel periods. See this blog by former controller Don Brown for more. To be clear about this: the new order gives controllers a power they already have and have used for years.
Third, the decision did nothing at all about the real problem: too many flights scheduled to take off or land at the same time from a limited number of runways.
So this decision has made, and will make, no difference in holiday travel congestion. Zero. This weekend's traffic will flow well, or poorly, depending on weather, and unanticipated screw-ups, and many other factors. But it will have nothing to do with this plan.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful not to have to wonder what kind of research went into a lead editorial like this.
Good: bonding with other expat Yanks over our shared secret national ritual. Foreigners know about the 4th of July but are always a little hazy about the point of Thanksgiving and when exactly it is. Bad: just another Thursday for everyone else. No NFL on TV.
Last year: a very nice turkey dinner with others of our tribe in our apartment in Shanghai. This year: our apartment building in Beijing is thoughtfully having an evening turkey dinner, advertised this way: "See you in your scariest costume & display your creativity in the Pumpkin Carving Competition." Hmmmm.
But to start the list of things to be thankful for: the English-language state-controlled Chinese media! Life would be duller without it. For instance, today's front-page story about the problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam.
Perhaps the predictions they have in mind are those in the Book of Revelations, about the End of Days? It's a possibility.
Here is the the way the keyboard on my Thinkpad T60 looked three months ago, when it was four months old.
Here's the way it looks today, at seven months of age, after three more articles and one bazillion additional emails have been pounded out on its keys:
This second one is a little harder to see, but here's the casualty count.
Now entirely gone: the E, N, and A keys, plus the < marking.
On their way: L, M, R, S, and >
Worried: D, O.
Should be worried: U, B
No wonder my fingers are tired -- I mean, strong! And good thing China is dotted with electronic parts shops where I can buy a new keyboard, cheap, when too many letters vanish from this one. I can probably find a supplier who sent them to the factory in the first place.
When I find that guy, maybe I'll ask him whether they would consider investing an extra 50 cents for more durable keytop decals. (Yes, I know the Mac's, and others, are molded in.)
Last year I mentioned how disorienting it can be to come across people wildly famous in their own culture whom you'd never heard of and to whom you'd ordinarily never give a second glance.
In that context: we can hardly turn on CCTV at night without seeing one or both of the gentlemen below hosting a variety, talk, or game show:
The pictures, from our apartment TV both on the same evening, don't do justice to the androgynous charm of their varying outfits.
About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel
Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....
What's wrong with this plan?
1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!
It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.
1) From the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the paper "Dereliction of Duty Redux?" by Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine officer and long-time military scholar, whom I know.
The paper's title refers, of course, to Col. H.R. McMaster's book from the 1990s Dereliction of Duty, which argued that the uniformed military leadership in the Vietnam era finally betrayed the military and the country by not more forcefully opposing policies in Vietnam it knew to be doomed. The book was extremely influential within today's officer corps -- and since McMaster himself, a youngish West Point grad when he wrote it, has been centrally involved in combat operations in Iraq (and now is part of Gen. David Petraeus's team), it has become a cliched joke that soon there will be "McMaster's McMaster" -- that is, some young officer who describes how even the person who saw what happened to the military in Vietnam was caught by a repetition of many of the same patterns.
Frank Hoffmann's essay goes into the similarities and differences in the military leadership's performance in Vietnam and Iraq -- and in particular the warring "narratives" inside the military about who will take the blame for what has gone wrong this time:
The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging “stab in the back” thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry it out. Our collective failure to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security.
The essay is not not long and very much worth reading in its entirety.
2) A paper last week from the Pew Research Center* giving data to back up the general impression that Americans are thinking and talking less about the Iraq war than they did even a few months ago, and that the American media are paying less attention to the war. There's evidence in the paper for both sides of the chicken-and-egg question: less coverage because people don't care, or people don't care because of less coverage. Either way, here is the result:
Updated, below
I am so starved for football-related entertainment here -- and there is only so much Chengdu v. Dalian women's volleyball one can tolerate, not to mention Asian snooker tourneys broadcast live from the Philippines -- that I am considering staying up for the wee-hours China time webcast of Saturday's exciting University of Redlands v St. John's University playoff game in the NCAA Div III football championships.
St. John's, a school in Minnesota that I know and like, is unusual in (a) having an on-site Benedictine monastery, and (b) having been in its heyday the crushing titan of small-college ball. Their coach, John Gagliardi, has now passed Eddie Robinson of Grambling to be the winningest college coach ever. Through the decades they have been repeat national champions and have reached the national playoffs 22 times. Etc. Plus (c) lots of other ways.
Redlands, a school in southern California that I know, like, and am on the board of trustees for, is unusual in (a) its overall charm and (b) having been in its heyday the crushing titan of small college tennis. My Redlands High School classmate (and co-member of the RHS tennis team, he #1 and me in the cellar) Doug Verdieck went to the University of Redlands and was the national small-college single's champion four straight years. His father, the U of R coach Jim Verdieck, won the national championship nine times in ten years and was the John Wooden of college tennis coaches. Plus (c) lots of other ways.
Inconveniently for Redlands, they're playing football this time, and St. John's is the higher seed. Also, the defending champion and big power this year appears to be Mount Union College, of Alliance, Ohio. But anything can happen. If you'd like to hear the game from the Johnnies' perspective, their webcast is here. I'm assuming I can hear it from the Bulldogs' side, here. Go team.
Update: I didn't stay up, but I did wake up in the middle of the night and thought, Why not check out this web cast? I listened long enough to hear, "What is killing the Bulldogs today is the turnovers, plus their inability to stop the passing game..." and I thought I had heard enough. Final score: St. John's Johnnies 41, University of Redlands Bulldogs 13. Good luck to the Johnnies in the next round, against the winner of Central (Iowa) v Olivet.
Also: not such a good day for Bulldogs of any type on the gridiron yesterday. Go Crimson.
Are foreigners dissing China by noticing the smog?
After the jump are parts of an intriguing note from Shelly Kraicer of Beijing. He is a Canadian writer and film-festival programmer, based in China for the last four years, who runs a web site on Chinese film, ChineseCinema.org I don't know him personally.
His note is in response to my repeated ."sky is falling" screeds about the disaster of air quality in Beijing nine months before the Olympics. (Note: today, November 16, was a pretty nice day.)
His note raises a question I can't do more than acknowledge at the moment: whether the Western focus on environmental catastrophe in China is, in some way, part of a long process of belittling the Chinese. He recounts the comments of a Chinese media friend:
...who pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they're thinking of China (if at all). ... Now the big idea, Olympics branch, is Pollution Disaster! She pointed out that Athens' big Olympic story was Preparation DIsaster! But since, here, things seem to be generally on schedule, that story is unavailable. So the foul air story is its replacement. I think that what she's describing has an all too predictable undercurrent of looking down from lofty developed Western heights to squalid undeveloped Third World depths ("tut tut, of course they just can't get it right, the way we know we could").
At a strictly logical level, I know that these things are true:
* I personally hope the Olympics turn out to be a big success for China. I'm convinced that the general public here sees them, or has been led to see them, as an occasion of pride for China as a whole, not just "the regime." It would be better for everyone if China ends up feeling happy and successful in its efforts than if it feels embarrassed or, worse, disrespected.
* I genuinely view environmental carnage as Problem Number One for China itself, and as the biggest problem posed by China for the rest of the world. Fewer Chinese people feel as strongly about this because, I think, fewer of them have seen how it is elsewhere.
* And I think that to raise alarms about the air and water in China is fundamentally supportive of the people of China rather than in any way dismissive of them. After all, they are the ones who breathe this air their whole lives.
But I know that more than strict logic is involved in these questions. The note, below, is worth thinking about.
Or maybe: the best $39.99 I have spent on a legitimate purchase, so I don't have to weigh this against the boxed set of all episodes, ever, of The Simpsons, plus all seasons of The Sopranos, plus some other stuff, which together went for something like that price at Even Better Than Movie World in Shanghai.*
And maybe: the best $39.99 not spent on alcoholic beverages, so I also don't have to weigh it against the mixed case of Rogue Dead Guy, Brooklyn IPA, Red Seal, and other American microbrews that I got in Shanghai, back when I still was trying to find good beer and hadn't yet embraced my fate of drinking Yanjing etc through the rest of my time in China. (By the way, shrewd business planning by the Chinese beer industry! These same local Yanjing-etc brewers are ideally positioned to withstand the current and alarming world-wide shortage of, gasp, hops. You can't run out of what you don't use.)
In any case: I'm glad to have spent just now $39.99 for a year's subscription to Personal VPN, from WiTopia.net. I tried it out of desperation and found that it solved two nagging and related problems.
This picture shows three ways I have paid for transportation in China:
The green card at the top is the wonderful, convenient, and all-purpose Shanghai Transport debit card. It is more modern than anything in the United States. You add money to it at a subway kiosk -- for me, usually 100RMB at a time, or $13.50. Then whenever you use almost any kind of transportation in Shanghai -- a subway, a bus, a ferryboat, and, crucially, a taxi -- you swipe the card across a reader and it deducts the fare. The joys of never having to find change for taxi fare are hard to imagine until you've experienced them. (Plus the joys of flat-fare non-tipping, a subject for another day.)
Veterans' Day (and, my interview with Donald Rumsfeld...)
...back in 1993.
By my local China time it is now the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This is November 11, which means variously, Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, or Poppy Day among countries on the Allied side of World War I, and of course Veterans' Day in the United States.
Originally this was a moment for looking backwards, to honor those who had served in the Great War and mourn those who had died. Its retrospective purpose remains. But for Americans right now it should also be a moment to honor the men and women who continue to serve and sacrifice and be injured and die -- and to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our modern history, they do so with absolutely no shared sacrifice or service from the public at large. Everyone knows this and avoids thinking much about it. Today it's worth at least remembering.
Also it is worth looking at several articles the Atlantic has brought up from the archives and made available free, for now. They're about Vietnam, not Iraq or Afghanistan (or Iran), but several are significant in their own right in addition to shedding indirect light on our current and continuing wars. Let me emphasize two:
In Shanghai, the smallest currency bill I routinely saw was the 5 kuai (RMB) note. It's the violet-colored, Mao-adorned one at left in the picture below. (Click on the photo to see it enlarged.) It's worth about 67 cents US. Anything smaller was a coin.
In Beijing I very rarely get coins and instead wind up with pockets full of amazingly penny-ante notes. The 1 kuai note (13.5 cents) is omnipresent. It's the greenish one with Mao on the right, above. What I still can't quite believe are the 1/2, 1/5th, and 1/10th kuai notes, the latter worth just over one cent, that I virtually never saw in Shanghai and frequently get in change at stores in Beijing, as I have in rural China. The 1 jiao note, one tenth of an RMB, is the brownish one at top, featuring ethnic peoples rather than Mao. Indeed this afternoon my wife and I used the very bills in this picture to pay all-paper-money exact change for purchases of 2.3 kuai (31 cents) and 3.5 kuai (47 cents) at a the local outdoor produce market. And we came home with a lot of onions, apples, and potatoes...
No master theory here, but the difference is striking. It may help explain why Shanghai thinks it is more moderne -- and why there are so many more coin-operated vending machines there. And I suppose the use of 1 jiao notes is no odder than the continued existence of the U.S. penny, which costs more to produce than it is worth.
Story about the Wolong Panda Reserve, the one place on earth where you can see herds of pandas, now out in our December issue. Story here. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Free narrated slide show here. While I'm at it, Pandas International site, where Americans can make tax-deductible donations to support Wolong and other panda protection efforts, here.
I see from outside-world reports that Justine Henin might give up the chance to defend her Olympic gold medal in tennis, because she is so concerned about what the air in Beijing might do to her lungs. She has asthma and recently had to drop out of the last tournament she attempted to play here.
As noted earlier, I am against the idea of any threatened official boycotts of the Olympic games. The Beijing Olympics have become (despite many local grumbles) a source of pride for Chinese people broadly, not just for the regime. But I wonder whether we'll see many more individual "boycotts" of the sort Henin has mentioned.
This is becoming less amusing (Olympic air-quality watch)
Today, noon, downtown Beijing:
I like the painterly juxtaposition of the splash of red, from the (ubiquitous) Olympic poster at lower right, with the chemical gray-brown-ochre of what lies above. It's not fog.
I'll keep taking such pictures but will stop posting them. The point is made. But while I'm at it, a couple more after the jump.
Only days ago I was bragging about how crisp, clear, beautiful, and blue the Beijing skies were on the first three days of November: Thursday the 1st through Saturday the 3rd. Maybe November should be Olympic month?
Then it turned out that, by November 4th and 5th, things weren't looking so great any more. Maybe the 1st through 3rd as a concentrated Olympic schedule?
Now I find a report from an American who actually went for a run on that same blue-sky Saturday, Nov 3 afternoon that had raised my spirits -- only to be laid up as if with a sudden case of emphysema. As a reminder, here is how it looked that day:
And here is what it was like to go for a run:
Well, apparently poor air quality doesn't begin to engulf your lungs until they are stressed... With each passing step it became more painfully obvious that the air had overtaken my lungs. For perspective, it was like a having a large man press against my chest and every attempt to gasp for more air only made him heavier.
Small world dept: He was running along (a different part of ) the very same road shown in the blue-sky picture above, within an hour or so of the time I took it. Which means -- something, maybe that there is stuff in the air even when it's blue.*
So, I guess the Olympic target dates are down to Nov 1 and 2. And if you're thinking that Nov 6 might work, here is the view out the apartment window this morning, with 276 days to the Olympics:
*Small world #2: The runner is a young man named J.P. Fielder, who was with a visiting delegation from the National Association of Manufacturers. When I happened to meet him yesterday at a discussion session, he looked very much like a healthy 20-something specimen training for his next marathon, which I gather he is doing. He just won't do much more training here, I'm guessing. Thanks to Carter Wood of the NAM for posting Fielder's account.
Maybe they should hold the Olympics on Nov 1 through 3?
In Beijing the first three days of November were spectacular, as they had been last year.
Yesterday, November 4, some brown and grey in the sky. Today, some more:
Looking south from our apartment on Jianguo Road near East Third Ring Road.
Two hundred and seventy-seven days to go now. It's probably time to take a picture of the sky every day as the Games draw near, for later chronicling purposes to see how and when the campaign to clean up the air finally kicked in. Assuming and hoping that it does.
My friend Richard - a wonderful big Mississippian with a civil-war beard
and a slow drawl went to Paris to play classical saxophone. You know
they always say that thing about "If you just /try/ to speak their
language, they'll appreciate it and everything will go so much more
smoothly"?
Richard went into a corner patisserie or something and said to the
beefy, angry-looking Frenchman behind the glass case: "Ave vous . . . un
. . . croisant du . . . chocolat?" You have to imagine this done
haltingly in a heavy Mississippi drawl.
The big Frenchman leans toward him, hands on the glass case and says, "Spick Anglish! Do nut /waste/ mah tahm!"
2) From Mike Schilling, of the East Bay area in NoCal:
True story: I was out for a walk in Amsterdam and discovered that I was a bit lost. I stopped a passerby to ask directions to the Rembrandt museum.
Maybe they just need to hold the Olympics in November?
Two hundred and seventy-nine days until the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to a big sign downtown. And -- unlike someotherdays -- it couldn't be more beautiful!
My family's first two days of residence in Beijing coincide with two days of spectacular weather. Robin's-egg blue skies; not a hint of pollution; the briskness that follows the passage of a cold front from Mongolia/Siberia, without the actual cold.
Looking north from near the Guomao subway stop, toward the half-constructed new CCTV building by Rem Koolhaas:
Looking east along Jianguo Road:
I was here one year ago today, at the time of an African presidents' summit, and it was just as pretty. Maybe this, as opposed to mid-summer, is the time for international games? Just a thought.
All memories of the last year-plus in Shanghai are fond. But I realize that I took too long to bow to the inevitable: months ago I should have called off my quest to find actual good beer in China and instead made my peace with the thin, weak, rainwater-bland local brews. All in all it's a minor cost of the major adventure of being here.
And here is the representation of my new beer philosophy as I start my new life in Beijing:
That's a little can of Beijing Beer in the foreground, among devotional Mao-era figures. It and (the identical-tasting but oddly more popular) Yanjing Beer are cheap, are available everywhere, and require no thought or effort to locate or wash down.
With all the expertise that comes from a full two days in country, en route to Beijing.
1) These people are tall! For my purposes, human beings come in two sizes: Taller than me, and any other height.* I can't help noticing that many more Germans fall into the first category than I am used to encountering -- and don't get me started on the giant Dutch. I had followed the whole academic/journalistic discussion of the fact that Americans are no longer, on average, the tallest people on earth. It's hard to appreciate this when in China, where people are larger in all ways than they were twenty years ago but on average nowhere near as tall, big, or heavy as the typical Yank. In Western Europe you see that the phenomenon is real.
2) I had better start thinking of Germans as a distinctly good-looking people, because apparently they're how I look. In most places where I don't belong, culturally or linguistically, my outsiderness is obvious at a glance. In Asia or Africa: naturally. Even in France -- maybe it's the clothes, maybe the lack of a Gallic je ne sais quoi, but for whatever reason no one ever approaches me there and starts speaking French.
In Germany, they come up all the time and start speaking German. It's happened every time I've been there, and it happened often this time. My point is not: "people in Germany are always speaking German." What I mean is, "people in Germany are always speaking German to me." Which I can't speak back.
It's quite a strange feeling to be assumed to belong -- as someone asks quickly for directions on the street or a shopkeeper starts making colloquial banter, in the quick informal tone you use only with native speakers -- and then have to explain, haltingly, that in fact you have little idea of what's being said. In Germany (or Holland or Sweden), the speaker then usually apologizes and switches to a cultured variety of English, which completes the humiliation. This gives me a glimpse into the experiences of my Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and Korean-American friends who show up in their ancestral homeland without knowing the ancestral tongue.
* Ask me if someone is closer to 5'6" or 5'10" and I'll say, I'm not sure. Ask me if someone is 6' 1 1/2" versus 6'2" and I'll know exactly, since that's the critical zone.
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
