olympimania!

beijing welcomes you!

well olympic fever is well and truly here! i was at an art exhibition yesterday and was surprised (why?) by the amount of art featuring the olympic 'babies' (known in Chinese as the Fuwa 福娃）- Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini. Their names go together to mean 'Beijing welcomes you' (北京欢迎你）

Fuwa thangkas (usually thangkas are religious paintings)

Fuwa paper cuts
The one that cracks me up the most is 'Yingying' (the orange one). I always get confused about which ones his eyes are: the big ones or the small ones? it's like one of those optical illusion things. From one angle, you think his eyes are the small ones on top and then from the other side they're the big ones in the middle of his face. Hours of fun!

Any votes on your favourite Olympic mascots (current or otherwise?)

princesses, paintings and playing

mafan 麻烦！

one online chinese dictionary defines 'mafan' 麻烦 as 'trouble/troublesome' but let me tell you that doesn't even begin to describe what 'mafan' means in daily life here. 

this is what 麻烦 means to me:

the hose in the shower broke on thursday - the rubber bit on the inside had busted so there was water spraying everywhere. it wasn't too big a deal as i had another hose that i wasn't using so my flatmate's boyfriend kindly helped us replace it. 

on friday, that hose busted too. so i went out to buy a new one. again the flatmate's boyfriend kindly fixed it.

on saturday morning, my flatmate was having her shower and guess what? yes. we had 3 busted hoses in as many days. 

today, my flatmate's boyfriend is fixing it once again, even as i type. let's see how long this one lasts...

while i'm on the subject of water disasters. over here we get large bottles of water delivered (can't drink tap water here). we usually get two delivered at a time. last monday the delivery man dropped one just outside our door and there was water all over our stairwell. after that, i asked my friend who was visiting to help us put one of the bottles onto the dispenser. there is a bit of a trick to it as ours is not like normal dispensers and also my poor friend was feeling a bit nervous after having seen the  delivery man drop the other one in the stairwell so he ended up dropping it too. it smashed on the ground and we ended up with 5 gallons of water all over our dining room. as we mopped up the water, waves of bad memories from the Great Apartment Flood of 2006 came flooding back to me (sorry about the pun). 

so i don't know why we seem to have been plagued with water worries this last week but it's 麻烦的很 (very mafan)! that's my gripe for this week.