The glory begins...

So I thought I'd try out this "blogging" fad that's been going on for a while (which I believe will blow over soon). Hopefully I will become famous and make lots of 元's before that happens...

What will I be blogging about? My escapades in Shanghai and the rest of China, learning Chinese and my quests to conquer Shanghainese gold diggers. Thats right, women. Yeah, I went there..

Anyways, I have been living in Shanghai (or "The Hai" if you will) for 1.5 years now. I have been occupying myself with studying Chinese, a healthy dosage of DVD's and the occasional internship stint.

So, I thought I'd start off this luscious lemon drop of a blog by retelling one of the many prickly situations I have gotten myself into because of my lacking Chinese abilities. I take this up now because my teacher just wrote an article about this particular incident for some tool website. This happened when I had just been a month or so in Shanghai.

In the building I live, there is a dry cleaning store in the lobby. The night before I spilled some shit on my high quality italian fabric suit (tailored to perfection at the fabric market), so I threw on some sweats and went down to see if I could get it dry cleaned. But first I wanted to look up how to say "pick up" as I wanted to be able to ask when my shit would be ready. I looked it up and decided that 捡 jiǎn was the word I was looking for.

So I go down with my suit (which looked like I had worn it while storming the beaches of Normandy):

Me: 你好！我有一件西服要干洗 (Yo! I have a suit I want to dry clean)

Wrinkly old man: 好的。(ok)

Me: 我什么时候可以来捡我的西服? (When can I "pick up" my suit?)

Wrinkly old man: 什么？(What?)

Me: (repeat sentence)

Wrinkly old man looking at me like I'm a fucking retard: 什么？我听不懂！(what? I don't understand!)

Turns out 捡 is used when picking something up from the ground, what I should have used was 取 qǔ, which means to claim or retrieve something.

I managed to get my point across by frantically pointing at different dates on his calendar (I was severely hung over so I resisted the urge to put my ball sack on the date I wanted to pick up my suit). It all worked out and I got my suit back five days later, clean and ready to be severely abused again.

Final summation: when learning Chinese you will get into embarrassing situations, but that's the best way to learn.