Kim from East-West Station (I like that blog, by the way) posted this nice reflection on ‘English, with Chinese characteristics’, commonly known as Chinglish.

I traveled to Nantong in Jiangsu province today, together with 2 colleagues from work. We visited customers at two shipyards, Nantong Tongde and Nantong Hantong shipyard. Both yards have many new projects for the offshore industry, like pipe laying vessels, accomodation barges, and anchor handling tugs.

The trip from Shanghai takes about 4 hours by car, including the ferry crossing of the Yangtze river. Because we still have a few visits tomorrow, we decided to stay the night in the Huatong Hotel in Nantong. The price list for the convenience items has some remarkable descriptions on it. None of the items could be found in the room by the way. Bummer, because I forgot to bring my own ‘Shave must knife’ this trip, and RMB 10.00 seems like a bargain.

Banks, graft, and corruption go together like a horse and carriage, not only in China, but also in other ‘developing nations’. But every now and then you run into these bizarre ‘only in China’ stories. Like those two bright little lights that robbed a bank of 51 million yuan (about USD 8.1 million), only to spend most of it on lottery tickets!

Ren Xiaofeng, 34, and Ma Xiangjing, 37, were the vault managers at a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Handan city, Hebei province, when they started “borrowing” money from the vault to play the state lottery.

The two thought that by buying millions of yuan worth of tickets they would eventually win back enough to replace the missing funds and enable them to leave their low-paying jobs for a life of luxury.

“I really regret that I have been so stupid in doing such a dumb thing,” Ren said after his arrest.

“Ma Xiangdong and I both like to play the lottery. We thought that we could use the money and buy lottery tickets and win the big prize.

“We were going to pay the bank back. We never intended to rob the bank.”

The two first took 50,000 yuan ($7900) from the vault on April 1 and spent it all on lottery tickets.

After failing to win, they returned to the vault over the following days to take out more and more money.

They spent a total of 47 million yuan ($7.45 million) on lottery tickets in Handan, about 300km southwest of Beijing.

“The most we ever spent on lottery tickets at one time was 14.1 million yuan. We were thinking that we could win double what we had stolen,” said Ren, the father of two-year-old twins.

“But we didn’t win. It was at that time that we knew we were finished and that we had better escape, so we decided we should steal some more money and flee Handan forever.”

On April 13 and 14 they stole another eight million yuan.

They told their wives they were going away on business, bought another six million yuan in lottery tickets, then parted ways.

As vault managers the two, who had been promoted to their posts months earlier, had the only keys to the vault.

The pair also knew the vault combination in violation of bank policy.

During their after-hours thefts, they cut the electricity supply to the bank to disable video surveillance cameras.

Ren and Ma are facing charges of corruption and the illegal use of public funds.

They face execution if convicted.

Hmmm, something tells me that there might be something wrong with the lottery system as well. I mean, 47 million on lottery tickets and no win??!? Some friggin’ lottery…

Well, I think I will keep doing my banking in Hong Kong for the time being.

How could I have done without my daily capsule of Vigor-Joy stuffed up my arse, and all these ‘extreme small molecules’ entering my ‘ppostatits’? For best results to be taken in combination with Fukitol, like the happy guy in the picture obviously did.

Vigor-Joy and Fukitol, two top products from the famous ‘Shanghai No.2 Ever Happy Golden Five Stars Fornicating Lizard Medicinal Herbs Co., Ltd.’

When you have the feeling that it’s just all a bit too much for one day…

Everybody who has worked a while in China is familiar with the culture of expense records and ‘fapiaos’ for everything here. From taxi rides to lunches with customers, from purchases of office equipment to ‘entertainment’ in KTV bars, for everything you need an official invoice or ‘fapiao’ in order to claim it as expenses.

During my overseas travels I used to keep some receipts which were funny. I sorted out some of my archives this weekend, and found this long forgotten gem from Singapore. At that time I thought it might cause some confusion if I added THIS to my expense record.

This article was in the South China Morning Post today.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Anger over ship deaths as relatives visit China

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Seoul

The families of South Korean sailors missing after an alleged “hit and run” incident on the high seas headed for China on Tuesday as anger grew over the tragedy.

The “Golden Rose” sank after colliding with the Chinese container ship “Jinsheng” in darkness and fog before dawn on Saturday off the port of Yantai in Shandong province.

Local media reports and foreign ministry officials have said the Jinsheng failed to stop after the accident and did not report it until seven hours later.

All 16 crew of the Golden Rose — seven from South Korea, eight from Myanmar and one from Indonesia — remain missing despite a Chinese search.

“The 21-member family delegation was to receive a briefing by Chinese maritime authorities at a Yantai hotel in a desire to clear all the suspicion,” an official at Bookwang Shipping, the ship’s operator, told AFP.

“They want to know as much as possible — why it happened, when China’s authorities received the initial accident report, how they started the search, what the Chinese ship captain says about it and so on.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the families were willing to visit the location of the sinking. He said he had no first-hand information about any delay in reporting the accident.

Seoul officials have asked China to check why the Jinsheng failed for hours to report the collision. Media reports said the delay fuelled suspicion that the Jinsheng had been trying to flee the scene.

Anger was brewing among the families of the missing.

“In my 15 years working as a crew member, I never heard a case in which a ship causing an accident kept going to where it was headed without doing anything to save the lives of people harmed,” Jeong Hae-Do, whose younger brother was aboard the Golden Rose, told the JoongAng Daily.

The Korea Herald said in an editorial: “If the Chinese ship involved in the collision had stopped to rescue the seamen in distress, and if the Chinese authorities had acted faster, the result would have been very different.”

Yonhap news agency has quoted unidentified foreign ministry officials as saying the Jinsheng may have violated the law of the sea in failing to give immediate and full assistance to those in danger.

Its crew only reported the accident to China’s maritime authorities seven hours later, they were quoted as saying.

Chinese rescuers have so far found only wreckage from the South Korean ship, which was laden with 5,900 tons of steel.

Fleeing the scene of an accident is an act of extreme cowardness. What’s even worse in this case, is that lives could have been saved if the Chinese ship would have stayed and searched for survivors. I can only hope that those responsible will be brought to justice. Given the reality here in China they probably won’t.

Han-ticipation (n.): Expectation, intuition, or foreknowledge that something will go seriously wrong, because you are dealing with Han Chinese. See also Cluster fuck (Charlie Foxtrott) and Chinese fire drill.

Or follow this link to the first hand account of a real Chinese fire drill.

One of the main activities of the company I work for is marine repairs. Some of these works are being executed on board, but we also have a workshop ashore. Here we do standard repairs, like reconditioning of connecting rods, valves, pistons, cylinder heads, fuel injection equipment etc.

Every now and then though, we do some special repairs. Like the two anchors we received in our workshop yesterday. The bore of the hole, through which the anchor is connected with a shackle to the anchor chain, had worn out over time.

To repair this, we first machine the hole to an oversize, in order to allow a bush with the correct nominal diameter to be shrunk in. The bush is machined separately.

After heating the upper part with a propane or butane flame, the bush can slide in and is being held solidly in place after cooling down.

Both the oversize hole and the bush insert, have a bevel machined to it. To finish the repair, the groove between bush and body of the anchor top is filled up by a circular weld.

Han-onymous call (n.): Some cunt calls your mobile, because he made a mistake when he jotted down the phone number of that KTV girl he was with the other day. He only bleats ‘wei?…wei!…weiii?’, and refuses to give his name or the nature of his business. You hang up on him, and the above process is repeated another 20 odd times. After all, he is Chinese, so he can’t have dialled the wrong number.