Bus-spotting in Lima (Peru)

 

On my second visit to Peru in October 1987, I had a few hours to kill in Lima before catching my flight back to London, so I walked around Lima. 

At one point, I found myself on a busy road with buses looking like those American school buses one sees in movies. 

Ancient looking to me, partly because I’d first seen them in my younger days in movies, but more because of the design. 

Also ancient looking because Peru is so poor, so a lot of things are re-hashed and re-used. 

One of them had “Canada” on the front! 

I thought, “Wow, a clapped-out thing like that going all the way to Canada!” 

It turned out that Canada is the name of one of the districts in Lima (like the Angel or Highbury in London), not the country thousands of miles away!  Hahaha. 

I sat on a bench and watched all the buses going past, hour after hour, taking photo after photo of the different buses.  I could’ve stayed there all day.

(Peru, 1987)

Students’ tones in Mandarin Chinese (London)

One of the common mistakes made by my (non-Chinese lineage) Mandarin students over the decades that I’ve been teaching — whichever level, whatever the age of the student — is getting the tone wrong almost every single time for the same character, no matter how many times they might’ve encountered that character before.  The same student can pronounce the same character in as many different ways as the number of times they come across it.

There was a student who once said, during a tone drill session, “Why do you keep correcting my tones?!?  I’m saying it exactly as you are.”  He couldn’t hear the difference.

This puts me in mind of a British TV double act in the 70s and 80s called Morecambe and Wise, a kind of comic variety show, with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

One of their sketches featured André Previn as the conductor with Morecambe as the pianist who kept missing his cue because he (Morecambe) was very tall and couldn’t see Previn through the propped up lid of the piano when the cue came.

After a few more times of this, Morecambe started to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto, all out of tune.  Previn said, “You’re playing all the wrong notes!”  Morecambe said, “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.” 

I’ve now taken to telling my students this story, adding: “You think you’re saying the right tones, but they’re all in the wrong places.”  They love this version.  We all get a laugh out of it.

(London)

The Turkish Van cat (England)

Jenny, an Australian colleague at the film company (producing The Heart of the Dragon, a 12-part documentary series for Channel Four, 1984), was visiting a friend when she spotted the kitchen sink tap dripping, so she turned it off more tightly.

A little while later, it was dripping again, so she turned it off again. This went on a number of times, so Jenny told her friend about it. The friend said, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the washer. We’ve left it like this deliberately, as our cat likes to sit under the tap and let the water drip on his head.” 

The following day, Jenny walked past the toilet and saw the cat’s head protruding from the toilet bowl, its body immersed in the toilet. 

It turned out that the breed of the cat is Turkish Van, from Lake Van in Turkey, where they swim in/across the lake all the time. 

(England, 1980s)