At one of my Chinese class, one student told me a funny story. When she was traveling in Hangzhou(杭州), She saw a very funny sign at the front door of a bar: Puke bar.
"Does that sign means everybody get very drunk and puke in that bar? "
She went into it and asked the staff works there. It turned out that
there are different poker cards for customers to play when they have
some drink in that bar.
She asked me why? Hehe... I guess you already figured it out.
The Chinese word for poker is 扑克,and the pinyin for 扑克 is Pūkè, without
the tone symbol, the spelling of which looksexactlylike the English word puke. :D
Based on the theory of Chinese astrology, the year of 2012 is a year of
water dragon. It began on January 23,
2012 and will end on February 9, 2013. Among the Five Elements, the color of
water is black. So the water dragon is also called as Black dragon. A black
dragon can dive deeply into the ocean or lake to hide and wait. Your mind will
be filled with all kinds of horrific, cunning, and mystery ideas when you think
about it. So it is said that something unexpected may happen in this year. For
someone it will be a big successful year, while for some others may be a very
bad year.
Chinese people love dragon, because dragon is the symbol of being
powerful, intelligent, and noble. Dragon patterns are used to decorate the
emperor’s clothing, baby is named as Long (龙, the
Chinese character for dragon) if the baby is a boy. Such as, the Chinese name
of the famous action movie star Bruce Lee is 李小龙; and
Jackie Chan’s Chinese name is 成龙.
There are 12 animal icons in Chinese zodiac; dragon is the only one being
alive in human’s imagination. Dragons can swim in the water, crawl on the land,
and fly in the sky. Some dragons are the
kings in the sky or under the deep ocean. Some fall down to the ground and
become snakes. That is why snake is just behind dragon in the sequence of the
12 zodiac icons. Since most of the time
the dragons fly in the clouds or swim in the wave, nobody can really see them
very well. A person whose zodiac symbol is dragon will be considered as very
independent and hard to understand or the “deep one”. The following video shows you how to write this dragon in Chinese.
Thanks to Jacquie, my lovely teacher and good friend, sent me this web link. I really like this web site. It gave me lots of interesting and useful information about learning mandarin. An interesting link about learning mandarin
Happened to watch this funny and delicious TV program on travel channel today. I have lived in Chengdu rather long time. This film just reminded me lots of things and made me feel foodsick(just made this word based on homesick, hehe !) I really miss some of my friends in Chengdu and those delicious spicy food now