一些好笑的事 － Some Funny Things

So I just woke up around 11:30 here, and I've got about an hour-and-a-half before I make my trip into the immigration office to pick up some official documents for my stay, so I figured I'd write a more informal blog entry.  The beginning of the week is pretty low key for me and most of my classes are in the evening, so my sleep schedule gets kinda messed up.  If you're teaching until 10 PM and you don't get home until 10:45, you're gonna want to sleep late, guaranteed.  Unfortunately, this also contributes to the misery that is Friday and Saturday mornings when I have to change my sleep habits to wake up at 6:30 AM.  But enough about that.  On to the meat of this post!  

Amid the classes I'm teaching, the adventures I'm having, and generally my figuring out life in Taiwan, I've run across quite a few funny things that I wish I had someone else around to appreciate with me.  It's kind of embarrassing to randomly crack up on the crowded subway or while waiting at the intersection and have people look at you like, "what is this foreigner doing?"  

Most of these amusing thing have to do with the English translations for places and products.  They're usually great direct translations, not at all like the ones on mainland China which were incomprehensible, but they still could've used a native English speaker to go over them.  Some of the phrases are just plain hilarious.  Some of the things below are kind of, er, inappropriate, but that's why I got a kick out of them.  Can't say I didn't warn you!

1)  Racist Toothpaste:  This has more to do with the actual Chinese characters written on this particular brand of toothpaste.  There are two different kinds the company puts out, one reading "white people toothpaste" and one reading "black people toothpaste".  Not even kidding.  The "black people toothpaste" has a picture of one of those old timey minstrels with a blacked out face and a top hat.  The English translation of the stuff is now "Darlie" but I've been told that not too long ago it was called "Darkie" toothpaste until people (rightly) got pissed off and made the company change it.  Just wow...

2)  D-cup Café:  I very quaint corner cafe on my way home from work, complete with scones, croissants, and tea cups and saucers.  Had they only known what D-cup really means in English.

3)  Cock soup:  This is an instant chicken soup product.  You buy the bowl, add boiling water, and voila, you have chicken soup with noodles!  This is another case however where a quick proofing with a native speaker would've avoided this unfortunate product name.  

4)  Semen spa and massages:  In this case, the owners bypassed the English translation of the name in the first part in favor of the sound transliteration of the Chinese characters: "se" and "men".  This was no doubt in an effort to avoid any potential English puns.  Alas, how wrong they were...

Hopefully I'll run across a few more inappropriate/humorous signs, places, and products.  To be fair to the Taiwanese though, I have an equally funny/inappropriate story of my own.  I was talking to one of my adult classes and we were discussing what we like to eat.  I told them that I was a vegetarian and that Taiwan has a lot of great vegetable dishes.  "I like to eat tofu," I told the class, which proceeded to burst out laughing.  Apparently "eating tofu" in Chinese has the slang meaning of "performing oral sex on women".  So in the end, I end up looking just as silly when the language barrier is involved.  Fortunately enough, I wasn't in charge of a company mass producing a million products with the quote "I like to eat tofu" written in Chinese characters.  :)