Conversations with Chinese Friends

Years ago I posted about a lawyer friend referring to Kyoto as "the protocol place". It happened again yesterday with my Chinese friend, who is an assistant professor of environmental law. This was just after she told me that she went to Japan on holiday.

Me: Oh, where did you go?

Friend: Tokyo and... what do you call that place? Jīngdū?*

Me: ...

Friend: You know, where we had the protocol!

* Jīngdū (京都), as I found out, is the Chinese name for Kyoto.

* * *

Another conversation with a Chinese friend who speaks very little English (but that's all we have, since I speak no Chinese at all):

Friend: In my province, the main... I can't remember that word. For example, Christmas is an important ___?

Me: Festival?

Friend: Yes, festival! So we can use English to learn English.

It's a form of what programmers call bootstrapping. In Bengali, we have a great phrase for it: মাছের তেলে মাছ ভাজা (literally: frying fish in fish fat). When you lightly heat a piece of fish, the fat starts to melt, and thereafter you can fry it in its own fat. I guess it works for bacon too, but Bengalis eat a lot of fish, so we have several excellent proverbs and idioms about them.