The Second Chinese Revolution

Few months ago my friend Lola give me a book titled “La segunda revolución china” for the author Eugenio Bregolat (ex-Spanish ambassador in China). I just finished it today and it give me a very good perspective of the changes China has gone through during the last 25 years.

The book mentions about the litter presence of Spain in this part of the world. This part was very encouraging for the study of my Mandarín as there will be a lot of opportunities related to China.

Yesterday, I just finished my fifth week of Mandarín classes and the learning process goes very slow. Although I am happy as I am now able to say few words in Chinese. A different thing is that I am being understood when I try to say something…

Today I went to visited Instituto Cervantes of Beijing and I was very impressed about the building and facilities. Then, I was having lunch in a Spanish restaurant. I used the cutlery for the first time after some weeks using only chop sticks.

I will finish these lines with a phrase I read in the book. This was said by a former Chinese primer minister (Deng Xiaoping): “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”.

Ni Hao!

When you are in a foreign country, where you do not know the language, you discover things that cannot find back at home. I have discovered in China the three dimensions of a restaurant menu card.

The Chinese food is very cheap. Yesterday, I paid 30 cents of a Euro at the cantina of the university where I have already been for two weeks. Today, I paid 2,5 Euro at a very nice restaurant. However, it is not always easy to order what you really wish. Today for example, we have tried to order four chicken brochettes at the same time as tried to practice the numbers in mandarin. For our surprise, only one brochette arrived to the table…

The word “menu”, by the way very useful word as it is very similar to the mandarin expression of “beautiful girl”… has different formats depending the place where you are. If you are in a local restaurant, the menu will be only in mandarin (dimension 1). If you are in a restaurant where foreigners go as well, the menu will also be in English (dimension 2). Then, there are other restaurants which think on everyone and have the menu with pictures of the different plates (dimension 3 – international language).

The graphic dimension is very practical and although very often it is associated to typical restaurants for foreigners, it is really useful for me now. This dimension can also be fun, last weekend I played to try to guess countries by doing gestures about typical places from those countries (guess what the gesture was when Spain had to be guessed…) and I enjoyed it very much.

I think in the future I am going to give it more importance to the graphical dimension. In the mean while I will continuous learning mandarin characters which I will have to study now as I am having tomorrow my weekly exam. May be in few months I will manage to order what I want in a Chinese restaurant where only mandarin characters are on the menu…