Monthly Archives: May 2010

Run-in with the law (no photos!)

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One mostly amusing sidenote happened on my first morning in Kathmandu, which was also the first day of the general strike.

I woke up early and took a walk around town. On the corner coming into the tourist area, there were about 20 Nepali policemen in riot gear. Thinking this might make a good blog posting, I discreetly took a long-distance picture from way up the street. I then started on my way not thinking anything of it.

As I walked, one of the policemen came over to me saying that photos were not permitted at that spot. It wasn’t that they minded getting photographed (Nepali soldiers typically seem to like posing for photos), but for what was behind them. I should have known from all my previous visits that that was none other than the US Embassy.

I said of course I would delete the photo, but he said no don’t do that. You need to see our commanding officer. So they ushered me into a room inside the embassy and began to take an “incident report.” They said I shouldn’t worry, it happens all the time, but they were certainly thorough, taking flash pictures of me, my camera, the offending picture, and so on. After a call to their supervisor, they told me I could go. But I can only imagine it would have been a lot harder if I had had another country’s passport!

Needless to say, they had me delete the picture from my camera, and I didn’t take another.

Crossing roadblocks to go trekking

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I’m not sure how much Western media has reported of the current events in Nepal, but some of you have probably heard about the general strike that has been in effect since yesterday, the day we arrived in Kathmandu. The Maoist party (formerly revolutionaries and more recently part of the government) were forced out of the government last May amid bitter recriminations. Since then, they have been calling periodic strikes, some of which we had to avoid during our last visit.

The Maoist party has used the symbolic May 1 as a rallying point for their cause. As many as half a million people have gathered in Kathmandu for rallies and potential political action. It is hard to tell how many really believe in the cause, as there are reports that some participated because they felt they had to or just to get a free bus ride to the capital. But regardless, the Maoist leadership is determined to shut down the country until the current prime minister resigns and allows them back into power.

The protests have been peaceful so far, but the normally throbbing commercial areas are almost dead. Some shops are open but almost closed to the street, since the shopkeepers need to close the gates in a hurry whenever a crowd of Maoists come by. The main danger is extortion – the Maoists fund their cause by asking each shopkeeper to give a “donation” of a few thousand rupees ($40 in the US, but big money in Nepal). In a way, the tourist areas were more liveable without all the honking cars and hawkers, but it is obviously not a good scene.

So what about our trek? It was pretty tricky since we had to get permits and it wasn’t clear the government offices would open. But open they did and our organizer triumphiantly returned with all the permits two hours before our flight to Pokhara, the second city of Nepal and a way station on our way back to Jomsom, described in earlier blogs.

How to get to the airport when all roads are blocked and no vehicles are on the street? Nepal has been coping with this mess for so long that it has developed alternative realities that sort of work. The Maoists have no intention to disrupt the tourist trade, the lifeblood of the country and a good source of income for many of their followers. Blocking the airport Bangkok-style would accomplish nothing except antagonizing the world. So the Maoists permit buses marked “Tourists only” to pass through the roadblocks. The airport itself was operating almost normally except for the masses of people trying to find transport in to their hotels.

Our transport to Kathmandu airport was in a rattletrap old bus from a shared bus stand set up on the edge of the tourist district. There were of course not enough buses and it was therefore packed, but it got us there quickly on the streets that would have been jammed with traffic on any normal day.


Arriving in Pokhara, our guide Kinna Sherpa found one of his friends in an army uniform and got him to take us into town in an army truck. Pokhara is small enough that we actually could have walked it in about an hour, but that’s no fun with luggage.

In the morning, we’ll get up at 5:00 to get transport before the morning strike starts. With any luck, we’ll be on the first flight to Jomsom and walking from there on with little effect or knowledge of whatever might be happening in the cities. At the end of the month, we travel directly from Pokhara to Delhi, so we shouldn’t even need to leave the airport in Kathmandu. So please no one worry – we’re experienced and we know how to stay out of trouble.

Assuming we do get on the trail tomorrow, we may not have any more posts for a while. But rest assured, no news is good news.

Chinese at the end of two months

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You haven’t seen many postings by me recently, because I’ve left the blogging to Marcia since we came to Kunming. We’ve both been very busy with our Chinese language studies, and I really wanted to focus on that while I was here. But now as our time has drawn to a close, I thought I would share some personal thoughts about our intensive language program, as Marcia did earlier.

Marcia and I have both been amazed at how far we have gotten in just two months, maybe equivalent to two years of college language courses. We can both carry on simple conversations with our very patient teachers, and we can get through some aspects of basic daily life. I got a haircut and seem to have communicated well enough to avoid major mishaps. I was able to buy an antibiotic by name in a pharmacy.

Knowing a little Japanese has been useful on balance and not particularly confusing, although I still occasionally say “ni” instead of “er” for “two”. That one is particularly difficult since Japanese uses the same character for its phonetic sound, so reading it that way is almost instinctive.

Chinese is SO much easier than Japanese. The grammar is simple and quite similar to English. There are none of the levels of formality and politeness that make Japanese challenging even for native speakers. Although tones and unfamiliar consonants make pronunciation a little difficult, we both felt we got over those hurdles after a couple of weeks.

And the characters make sense. I never tried to learn kanji while studying Japanese, although I did get to the point where I could recognize a few hundred common characters. Japanese kanji are difficult because they are an imperfect mapping of a foreign writing system onto a very different language. Writing Japanese with Chinese characters is no more natural than it would be to write English that way. Until you know how they are combined into full words, you never know how to pronounce each character. So although there are only 2,000 characters in general use, you almost need to memorize the dictionary to know how to read them.

In Chinese, with only a few exceptions, each character represents one and only one syllable’s sound, and often that sound is represented within the character. Once you learn a character, you know how it and related characters are read no matter where they show up in each word. So although Chinese actually uses more characters than Japanese, they are a very natural match to the language and therefore much easier to learn. I have now studied over 1,000 characters and every day it actually becomes easier to learn new ones. Although I’m slow and still have a long way to go, I can now read paragraphs in the textbook and a surprisingly large number of street signs. I hope that I can eventually take this knowledge back to Japanese and learn to read that language too.

As Marcia noted earlier, I took a much more formal approach, for better or worse. I believe in learning a language on its own terms, even if that presents seemingly great challenges. I have worked through a textbook focused on vocabulary and characters, since I think this will ultimately allow me to read and progress faster at more advanced levels. It’s not ideal, since I don’t get as much practice in conversation as Marcia.

Challenges are great. Part of me thought we were crazy trying to learn one of the world’s most difficult languages at our age. And yes, it is harder for us to memorize vocabulary than when we were children. And I get very frustrated with all the words I’m forgetting – unless I practice constantly, vocabulary seems to disappear as fast as I learn it. But by being really focused and persistent, I have been able to do something I’ve always wanted to do, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be.

Technology actually helps. Chinese dictionaries have historically been difficult, because they must be organized either by complex writing rules or by transliterated roman characters, neither of which is obvious to non-native speakers. I’ve bought a superb (though expensive) iPhone app called Pleco, which is the world’s most amazing electronic dictionary. It contains several dictionaries with more than 200,000 words, and it uses hyperlinking to easily navigate from meaning to pronunciation to characters to component radicals to related words. Its character recognition is incredible, finding over 95% of the characters I draw even with my lousy handwriting. So I finally have a tool that is as easy as an English dictionary where I can draw an unfamiliar word and see its meaning, history and associations.

I keep all the words I learn in a giant spreadsheet with columns for the Chinese characters, their transliterated pronunciations, and their English meaning. For a while I also tried to capture the equivalent Japanese word to review what I learned last year and to see how closely the writing systems map, but as the volume increased I couldn’t keep that up. But in any case, I now have a tool that I can search and filter as necessary to learn and review new words. It’s much better than flash cards.

When learning a language, one gains an appreciation for the phenomenal complexity of human experience and our minds that have to make sense of it. Although I might know 2,000 words and be able to remember half of them on a good day, I’d need three or four times that to read a newspaper or conduct daily life. Add another factor of two to be truly literate. We could actually approach that with several years of dedicated effort, but it would be very difficult. Children, after all, spend eight years in school to get to that point.

So what can we do with this? So far, not much other than giving instructions to taxi drivers and barbers. We content ourselves with the knowledge that we can travel to remote regions without being completely defenseless. We may come back to Kunming for some more lessons in the fall, and if we eventually come live in China, we can continue learning.

Yesterday we left for Nepal, where we will go on another long trek. As before, internet access will be rare, so there may be long periods of silence from about May 2 to May 29. After that, we plan to move to the Indian Himalaya for more trekking, returning to North America on July 12 for six weeks. In the fall, we will go to what some Chinese call “wugesitan” (the five “stans” in Central Asia). Stay tuned for more adventures.