Lost in Translation

Finally got the internet up and running again after 4 days offline. According to my Chinese co-worker who I am supposed to call whenever there is a problem, the internet people on campus do not know what the problem is and they need to negotiate with a third party but the third party says it is not their fault. After hearing this for 3 days I told him to just call them again and tell them just to get my internet to work because I must have it for class. He suggested we walk to the office where I paid for the internet, and when we did it turned out they merely lost my information (?) Anyway, now it is working and I can catch up on some posts. I was surprised to see exactly how few people speak English and also how difficult it is for Chinese people to understand anything I say in Chinese. Many of them completely shut down and seemingly do not even try to understand me. The good news is that there always some English major students who do speak fair English and are extremely motivated to learn. There are 7 universities all within a 4 square mile radius and whenever I am in the area at least one student will run up to me and want to "be my friend". This has been very helpful since they take me around the city to wherever I need to go, plus they insist on paying for everything, no matter how hard I resist. When I do go the supermarket by myself, I have to try to understand what something is by the feel and look of it. The few products that do have some English writing on them are clearly not translated by good English speakers. Take a look at the translation on this bag of sugar free oatmeal (click to enlarge):

What exactly does this mean: "the finger does not increase whatever external sweet copy"? The money situation is rather interesting as well. Similar to the Eurodollar (€), the RMB aka Yuan aka Kuai comes in notes of 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 as well as a coin for 1. The similarity ends there. There are also paper notes for the



Jiao which are the smaller denomination, each Jiao is worth 1/10 of a Yuan. There are 5, 2 and 1 Jiao notes. Here is a picture of a 5 Yuan note and one of a 5 Jiao note. Apparently sometimes tourists who try to be tricky by exchanging money on the street at "better" rates are given Jiao notes instead of Yuan notes...


To add to the confusion, there are coins for both the Yuan and the Jiao, see below. The top right coin is the 1 Yuan coin worth 10 times as much as the 1 Jiao coin on the top left and 2x as much as the 5 jiao coin on the bottom right. Also, as you can see the 1 Jiao coin has been changed in recent years to be much thinner and smaller than the old 1 Jiao coin, but about 3 times as heavy. To further add to the confusion, there are also Fen, which are worth 1/100th of a Yuan and they also have paper notes of 5, 2 and 1 as well as coins of the same value. There is apparently a big problem dealing with all these small denomination coins, so much so that there is a big shortage of coins and banks now charge a 1 Yuan fee for every 50 coins they count and many vendors will only give you change in napkins and candy! Here's the link: http://english.hanban.edu.cn/english/China/232499.htm maybe someone can help me do an embedded link, I've tried some scripts but keep getting errors.