Ok, I've received a few comments about the odd sign in the bathroom. Here is a link to the full picture (big!) so you can read it yourself. We've also seen a few other gems today that badly garble the English language. For example, the sign that apparently wished to express, "Keep off the Grass" read instead, "Observe the life. Keep the joy." Hopefully, we'll pass it again to get a photo.
As a way of introduction, I should point out that MANY Chinese express a strong desire to speak English, and there literally 20-30 people each day which greet us with, "Hello" or "How are you?", and desire to practice their English. Their hunger for knowledge and adding a 3rd or 4th language is certainly admirable. There are also many many folks wearing t-shirts with relatively random English words on them, some of which make some sort of sense, but others are just 10-30 English words strung together as a marketing ploy. So, with this amount of hunger in the marketplace, there is a strong market for tools to learn English. When we went to Wal*Mart today, we got three great packages of language flashcards, obviously designed to teach Chinese children some simple English words. They are awesome, because they have Mandarin pronunciation (pinyin), Simplified Chinese characters, and English, with the reverse in Simplified Chinese. They'll be great for teaching us some simple Chinese. However, 5 of them badly garbled the spelling or meaning, which is pretty bad when you think about someone thinking that the word for "close" is spelled "colse", and that "few" means a single item. (Clockwise from upper left, the English reads, dean, colse, wetermelon, sheep, sheep, and few) The Happy Giraffe split-pants we saw at Wal*Mart had pictures of what appear to be kittens, bears or something else definitely NOT a giraffe, which certainly sends a confusing signal. And the picture of Rachael? Hey, she's a cute kid, so I'm looking to toss her picture in wherever possible.
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