Yet more photos of Zhizhang Bridge!
Category: China
I am American. I moved from Singapore to China in 2022.
“English” on signs (January 2025)
I understand almost no written Chinese. But my eyes and brain still pay attention to text in my environment in China. The result is that English text jumps out at me wherever there is any. English text appears even in places where there are few if any people who might be expected to read it. And since there are few if any people who do read it, getting it exactly correct is not a priority; thus it doesn’t tend to turn out exactly correct, though usually it’s clear what was meant, just from the context.
The fun is spotting surprises.
Surprises include signs that give instructions that I usually don’t see on signs; signs that are so badly translated that the meaning is totally lost; signs from The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; signs that display lorem ipsum or other placeholder text; strange ways of writing familiar ideas; spellings that reveal how people write or pronounce English words when they don’t really know which letters and sounds should be there; and grammar, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes that highlight how difficult English is from the perspective of someone whose language follows different principles altogether.
(As you can see, much fun is also in the analysis!)
Meanwhile, English words on clothing can be surprising because they aren’t necessarily expected to mean anything at all! In the English-speaking world, my impression is, the people who create or wear clothing decorated with Asian writing are mainly anime/manga geeks who’d be likely to know what it says—although, to be fair, there are amusing corners of the internet dedicated to photos of mirrored, error-ridden, insulting, or nonsensical Asian-language tattoos, which you’d think people would be more careful with than clothing! But in Asia, many people wear stuff with English words on it, and even if they can read it, maybe they don’t always bother to: the English is just decoration.
Below are three samples of weird English: two safety stickers (those are almost always good for a laugh) and a garment featuring decorative (rather than correct) English.
Places visited in 2024
Siqi and I visited 2 European countries and approximately 9 cities in China in 2024. I took thousands of photos on my phone! The road trip that Siqi and I went on with my parents was particularly special. See below for an illustrated summary of where we went when.
Zhejiang Geological Museum, Hangzhou
Siqi and his mom and I visited the Zhejiang Geological Museum in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.
See below for transcriptions of some informative but somewhat amusing English text, and photos of some of the awesome minerals on display.
“English” on signs
I included some funny English signs in the post about the journey to Longquan; I saw a lot all in on the same day, mostly in the same place. But I saw and took photos of others in various other places. Rather than put them in posts about those places, I’ve collected the rest of the strange English signs here. Enjoy!
Sightseeing in Shanghai
My parents’ visit is coming to an end, and they will shortly fly off from Shanghai Pudong Airport back to the US (via Seoul), and Siqi and I will return to our home and respective offices Hangzhou. But we have time to see a few more sights before we part.
See below for photos of The Bund and Yu Old Street (including some from 2010!), plus a couple of Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, where Siqi and I caught the train back to Hangzhou.
The Shanghai Museum
Although the Wikipedia article hasn’t realized it yet, there are currently *two* Shanghai Museum locations: the old one on People’s Square on the west bank of the river in Huangpu District, which opened in 1996 and is shaped like a ding (an ancient round bronze cooking vessel), and the extremely new huge rectangular one in the east in Pudong New Area, which opened in phases in 2024 (February, June, December). The museum (in both incarnations) is dedicated to ancient Chinese art, and has galleries displaying bronze, calligraphy, paintings, seals (stamps or chops), ceramics, numismatics, and jade. It is waaay too big to see everything in one visit!
On our visit to the new location in the east, we borrowed some audioguide devices and went through the ceramics gallery and the jade gallery—and that was all we had time and energy for before dinner.
Casting around for a restaurant, we wound up at what turns out to be Tripadvisor’s first-ranked mid-range dinner restaurant recommendation for the whole city of Shanghai! It’s a Turkish restaurant called Efes, and it was fantastic.
See below for photos of the museum, lots of porcelain, and a bit of jade. Plus, read about what I discovered when I looked through photos from my visit to the old Shanghai Museum in 2010.
Hengshan Garden Hotel, Shanghai
How do you choose a hotel when you travel? I wanted a nice hotel in Shanghai, somewhere reasonably central, not too expensive, and not too modern and soulless.
I figured I could skip the research phase of hotel selection and just book the hotel in the French quarter that I remember staying at before, in 2010—if I could figure out which one it was. Luckily, in 2010 I took a photo of the hotel sign!
Still, booking was not as straightforward as I assumed it would be. The hotel had been bought by the hotel next door, so the name had changed, from Hengshan Picardie Hotel to Hengshan Garden Hotel. Upon arrival, we discovered they had closed down what had been the main entrance on the corner. In fact, not just the lobby, but also the rooms we stayed in weren’t in the original building I remembered. Still, the experience was fine overall.
See below for 10 photos of the hotel, then and now.
Impression West Lake
Someone at some point recommended seeing the Impression West Lake show, and my parents expressed interest, so we made a plan to go and went. Siqi drove us to the Yellow Dragon Stadium complex and parked, and we all walked to the ticket office, had dinner at a noodle place nearby, watched the show, and went back to the car.
See below for 20 photos from our walk and the show.
Continue reading Impression West Lake
Back to Hangzhou
On the way back to Hangzhou, we detoured to two places that had been recommended to us by the hotel guy in Huangshan City.
First, we tried to visit Ancient Huizhou town. We drove there, parked, got out, visited the washroom, went in the ticket office… and decided we just weren’t up to it. It was just too sunny and hot for walking around. So we got back in the air-conditioned car and left. In the parking lot, I got some photos of car license plates that I needed for my collection of photos of car license plates, so that was good.
Then, we went to another tourist site, a place with yellow mud Hui-style houses. Same problem, but worse: we would have had to take a shuttle bus into the tourist area, which would have made it hard to leave if we got tired of walking around. We called it quits and headed back to the highway to Hangzhou. But we enjoyed the scenery on the little roads on our detour, and the mountains along the highway looked pretty cool too.
See below for 16 photos from our drive from Huangshan back to Hangzhou.
