Nice Chicken...

If you have ever taken any time interest in the Chinese language, you will find it full of homonyms, often hilarious ones. This was one I learned while studying kung fu. Chicken in chinese is jīrou. Muscle is the same, same tones, just different characters. While this may not be one of those witty puns and idioms in the language, I still find it a bit funny.

When teaching goes haywire...

So I thought I would involve my wonderful little monsters in this one. By monsters I mean 3 year olds, which I have very many of. I can probably make a comic book about the things my kids say and do alone, but that's just going to become another project I'll never finish, so I'll pepper Septembuary from time to time. This was a true event (which is still going on), as my topic for the week was clothing, and kids can only get so excited about clothing so I decided to make it funny. And funny it was. We've now progressed onto "yummy underwear soup" and "I don't like underwear" as well. Give me some credit before you raise an eyebrow, these munchkins couldn't say more than one word when I started with them 3 months ago!

Sketch: Some T-Shirts are Just Amazing

Being a proper Canadian, I will refrain from outright profanity on this site, but the real t-shirt had the whole shebang written on it. This one is funny simply because it's missing the word "a", which now changes the whole meaning. But in general, I can never figure out how these sorts of slogans make it onto fabric. Sometimes you see things that make google translate look impeccable  by comparison!

I think I'll be making these one image sketches more often from now as fillers for weeks when we have no comic strip and just for fun and edutainment. : ) I bet I could make an illustrated book just dedicated to t-shirts in China alone...

Road Safety

Absolute, 100% truth in this one. Yes I have seen a baby in a hood!
While some cities are more strict than others, in general you can happily ride around on any form of motorized 2 wheeled beast without helmets and people or item restriction. Today I saw a man biking a fridge on his handlebars...not even sure how that is physically possible....but!

 

Guess who's back in the middle kingdom once again?? New place, new beginning, new job, but still the hectic, upside down atmosphere of this immense country.  I plan to start updating a new strip bimonthly as of next week, so stay tuned!

How to Relax

90% truth, 10% fiction of course. : ) But the point is, they hurt like hell, but the next week you feel like a champion.

The Four Quadrants of Height and Weight

Obviously this is some extreme generalizing but, overall, this is how the four corners of China seem to be height and weightwise, according to my travels and some conversations with friends and their observations. The north eastern seem paler and really really tall and elegantly thin. Where I lived down south east, people are generally shorter than me, much more tan and incredibly wiry. On the south west, I felt pretty comfortable, with people being just a the shorter than me, and generally of the same weight and size. I have yet to go north east to Xingjiang....but as a lot of people are of a mixed race, some northern, some middle eastern and some Chinese....my assumptions about height and weight are these.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment or like!