User Comments - bodawei

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'patriotic duty'

Actually Vegemite is one of life's genuine pleasures. There are only two types of Australians: those that like their Vegemite spread thin, and those who like it spread thick.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'one crazy Chinese man in Kunming who sold un-sweetened bread'

I just remembered the main reason we thought this guy was crazy (apart from selling un-sweetened bread).

He would see my wife approaching and if it wasn't freshly baked he would wave her away and say '不不不不不不不不，这是昨天作的!‘

We tried to imagine any vendors in Sydney who would admit to the customer that it was yesterday's bread.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'same old white bread in plastic bags from the supermarket from the 1970s, for toast and making sandwiches'

This is an interesting difference between Japan and China - it appears that Japan has adopted the sandwich bread habit, from the US I am guessing? I have never seen sandwich bread like we have in Australia out west, and I don't remember it in Hangzhou, - I have to be specific about my observations because Baba is watching me like a hawk. ..:)

Here bread is sold as about 6 slices in a little cellophane packet, rather like a delicacy. It is highly sugared and sold beside cakes. My wife regularly makes sandwiches for her students (to illustrate a grammar point!) and she says it a novelty for just about everyone. I have also tried Vegemite sandwiches on my students - a double whammy: bread + Vegemite. Most of my Chinese acquaintences say that they 'cannot' eat sandwiches. So it appears that the culture is quite different here.

As for European/French style bread - it can be found here but it is hardly mainstream, the odd foreign outlet, or one crazy Chinese man in Kunming who sold un-sweetened bread to my wife so cheap, I think because no-one else wanted it.

I like the idea of making bread from rice, must look into that.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Hi zhen

I echo Baba's thanks. That's interesting that the English is 'bread machine' - I have only ever heard them called a 'bread maker'. So we can't even decide what to call them in English.

I guess some people must make 馒头 at home, but the economics are against it - breakfast is so cheap and convenient in China, if you buy it on your way to work or school.

Making bread at home might be something the romantic spouse might do for a few months before the honeymoon ends. :) I say that because a friend told me they did this at home for a while, a minority bread-like food made out of rice flour, boiled balls of dough from memory.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'noone in their right mind' etc.

There are people at present promoting bench-top yoghurt makers - they have been set up below our flat for a few days. The deal is that you buy 30 packets of New Zealand 'starter' (powdered milk etc. I guess) for 300 rmb and they give you a yoghurt maker for free. I saw people buying these things - and I thought I was gullible. I guess that I might find a yoghurt maker somewhere for 70 - 80 rmb and never need to by New Zealand milk. Or I could just continue to buy fresh yoghurt at the supermarket, or fresh yoghurt without any sugar a few streets away, from the Tibetans.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'I never got your email with the Beijing photo'

Oh .. I 'sent' it from iPod, but notice now that it is not in my sent at Gmail. Censored hey? Provoking contrary thinking and all that.

'this is the first time I've tried to pull a swifty'

This surprises me at two levels Baba. :)

One, in the interests of a joke I thought that your swifties were legendary. But second, when it got down and dirty I would have trusted you to stick to the truth. (That's alright, I haven't lost faith - I'll put this down to an extended joke - although other poddies have probably switched off.)

'5,610,000 for "烤炉"..but this latter is less than the proper term for a bread maker... 8,150,000 results for "面包机"'

Doesn't this shake your faith in the method? Hee hee - it just shows that without some down-to-earth knowledge of contemporary culture the message provided by the number of hits is unhelpful.

I was actually being a little artful myself using 烤炉 - there are at least a half dozen possible expressions for oven (like bakeries they do not fit neatly into Chinese culture). There are ovens in restaurants that were probably designed two thousand years ago. There are the little electric affairs that 'everyone' has now sitting on a benchtop - we have two in our house. Then there are real ovens as we know them in Australia, quite a different apparatus - these, like bakeries, are a new part of Chinese culture. People have been watching those cooking shows for years and now they think they might try that at home.

But noone in their right mind would use a bench-top bread maker in China. There, I've gone out on that limb yet again!

Posted on: What's up?

hi randomer

'they remark that there are two third-tones in "nǐhǎo". But the first one isn't pronounced as such! So why bring it up!?'

This is indeed the best way to learn about the tones, because you do not always have two third tones together. Nǐ can be follwed by a first tone, or a fourth tone, or whatever, so you need to learn how to pronounce nǐ in these circumstances. Hope that helps.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'9,210,000 hits for these specimens'

Hey Baba, you asked what I thought of Google searches for finding high frequency words. I think they’re pretty good, but there are limitations. Actually more limitations than I realized before this discussion.

Your 面包房机 (home bread maker) gave me twice as many Google hits as 烤炉. Even the seemingly ubiquitous 电烤箱 gave me only 7 million hits, less than for the bread maker. Whatever the reason, Google hits to do not correlate with prevalence in the general community, but that’s just my view from the solid earth. Maybe the answer lies back in that question about Google’s market share in China.

My point has wafted away like a 中秋节天灯… you are quite confident in your view about the prevalence of 面包房 and the word’s frequency of use – fair enough. When you come to China and you are desperate for a 馒头 or a 窝头 we can have the conversation again.

Incidentally this bread maker could explain some of those hits you have for 面包房, hey? Yeah, there are plenty of gadgets filling the cupboards, even mine - we have a 蒸蛋器 (gadget for boiling eggs), so much more fun than boiling them in a saucepan.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Oh thnks for the Beijing pic. I actually took a photo in Beijing expressly for you - I just emailed it to you - bit time consuming to post it here. Granted it was researched using legs instead of fingers. Just to confirm I found the word bakery in Beijing, it headed the sandwiches section of a menu.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

' I'm loving being on this side of the debate, hehe ;)'

See - I knew I could rely on your search skills. You have come up with dozens of examples in my own back yard of 12 million people (or 15 million pop figures according to the local party chiefs - you won't find confirmation on Wikipedia.) ... I was hurriedly checking that there wasn't one in my own street, that would be embarrassing. There are a couple in my neighbourhood, and one or two in locations that I know and travel through.

So now all I have to do is go and photo the fronts of the shops, and post them, to complete my humiliation! :)

I'll accept that the term 面包房 is used by some vendors ... fair enough.

It is not high frequency, even by vendors (I would still plump for least frequent amongst the various contenders) so I am not sure that we have answered the original question beyond that a lot of different terms are used, and none. Remember how this discussion started - I identified four prominent chains who do not use any descriptors in signage, just something like 'delicious food'.

The dominant term is still no term. I'm not sure if the Google search can help in this argument given that I am arguing that the most common situation is that there is no descriptor - you can't search that.

As to whether the expression 面包房 is used by ordinary people in the same way as they use 书店，邮局，派出所，超市，宾馆，厕所，餐厅，消防站，百货商店，停车场，等等 is unanswered. I think that I was just trying to warn you that it is not this kind of word. And even if it was commonly used, it would cover only a small fraction of the bakery industry - the bit that looks a bit like bakeries in Australia.