Posts Tagged ‘tiananmen square’

Thank heavens for small miracles, folks. Small miracles like globalization.

Why?

Well thanks to this most ornery of mega-planetary economic phenomena, one can always remain confident of somehow finding themselves at an English language bookshop in pretty much any large European city, regardless of the national language. And let’s face it, the very best fictional and non-fictional works today are churned out in the English language, folks, and there’s no debate there. Globalization means more English books available for the road-weary in all of us. Stranded hopelessly because of some geological narishkeit taking place on that lone frigid island somewhere off in the Atlantic. Anyways…

It’s with that in mind that I was happy to stumble across Jan Wong’s most excellent Chinese Whispers: A Journey Into Betrayal (336pp, paperback, British edition, US edition here, affiliate link) in one of my favorite Bern bookshops, Thalia.ch. Thalia’s housed in the “soussol” of Bern’s Loeb department store, located directly in front of the Swiss capital’s main train station, or hauptbahnhof, in case you’ll be passing through the city anytime soon. Note on language: don’t you just love how Swiss German, as a tongue, borrows liberally from the French? – hochdeutsch this throaty German is not, all you linguistic purists out there. Understandable, I guess, given how the country is trilingual (or nominally quadrilingual) and borders, ew, France. Still, I always chuckle whenever I overhear a Berner or Zuricher give directions to some wayward German or Austrian tourist while using the word strasse, or street. Instead of saying the word properly, as a Hamburger or a Berliner might, they drag out their variation’s a, roll its r, and do their level best to sound like Bill or Ted in some cheesy ‘80s flick. The word ends up sounding like straaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasse, which to indeed is an acquired taste; though my love of the Swiss, especially in the German-speaking cantons, remains as strong as ever. The worst part about Swiss German is how they cause all these hot Latin immigrants to gobble up the Swiss German accent hook, line, and sinker. They give them a disease they don’t want to have. It’s like rape. It’s like what mange cake (literally “cake-eating,” but what are otherwise white people) Torontonians do to their immigrants: they make bland white bread out of exotic Latinos and South Americans and it’s a damn cryin’ shame. Though I digress (but I’m entitled to since I’ve just returned from a marathon thirty hour combined train and bus journey).

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