Saturday, June 20, 2009

Lazy sunday (cultural edition)

I walked around the Taipei 101/Neo19 area yesterday, since there was a 3C (electronics sale) convention. I didn't buy anything, but I did come across a couple things that amused me to no end. The first of which is this 黑八瑪 ice cream pop seller. In case you can't read Chinese, it's phonetically pronounced 'hei-ba-ma' in Mandarin... which means 'black bama' (I should note that this isn't completely terrible, since in Taiwanese, the word for black sounds like 'oh'). Just like how Kwik Meal named his 2nd (or was it 3rd) cart, the Taiwanese have learned to capitalize on the popularity of our new president. Or maybe Chinese people are just really subtlely racist (oops... I wasn't supposed to let that secret out!). You'll have to forgive me if I didn't buy one, even if it was only 10 NT (33 cents), they're just plain chocolate popsicles.


And in the New York^2 area (yes, I live in New York, and this is funny to me) I found this desecration of a US landmark. Usually, the statue is just that, a miniature (and inaccurate) representation of the one in New Jersey (true story, it stands in NJ coastal waters). However, as a promotion for Taiwan Beer's new variety, they dressed up the statue to make it appear as if she were a freakin' lush. Funny side note on the new beer, it's appropriately called 'All Mine' with the promotional slogan as 全麥 (Quan Mai). It's another case of using similar sounds, if you look at the English, it kind of mirrors the Chinese.


No running today, my foot absolutely kills me when I arch it at all. A well deserved rest day if nothing else. Anyway, I plan on making a trip to a different night market tonight, so my back log will be adequately replenished.

distance for the day: 0.00 miles
distance biked for the day: 0.00 miles

distance on the year: 333.05 miles
distance biked on the year: 142.68 miles

1 comments:

Yvo Sin said...

They had to change the name of the cart after someone official made some announcement about not endorsing or approving of people using his name to capitalize ... lol

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