The Consequences of Knowing English

I feel like I haven't done anything productive in days, the 30 day trial aside. Yuan Yuan has her English tour guide test coming up, English being the key word, and so my days are full of palaces and halls and walls, all dressed in creative spelling in grammar. She'll read a few pages in her book and try to boil it down to a few paragraphs. Then I read those paragraphs, unscramble the grammar, which is encrypted with something that would make SHA-1 blush, and scrap all the words I think she doesn't know, replacing them with the words "has," "with," or simply deleting them. Thus something like "the hall features the unparalleled Wall Of Communist Righteousness, which consists of several frames in which Chairman Mao disembowels the Great Dragon with his purple scepter," becomes "the hall has the Wall of Communist Righteousness which has some photos of Chairman Mao killing a dragon." Then Yuan Yuan files away the finished version to its rightful spot on the floor and proceeds to put the next item on her tour guide menu through a similar process. Nothing is ever reread, which baffles me slightly as it doesn't follow any test-taking strategy I've encountered in the Gamma Quadrant.

In any case, I spend my day between studying French--which I'm doing a few hours per day the last few days--and translating materials from Yuan Yuan's dialect of English to my own. It's a rough life. No one ever tells you when you're single: "dude, forget it, that girl's going to make you learn all about Beijing's tourist spots." But no worries, the test is just 10 days away.

Today's knot, the square knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Just one step different from the granny knot, the one most people use to tie their shoelaces. Although I guess some people use the square knot without realizing it.

Yuan Yuan's English pronunciation of the day:
frodo (feudal) society

Okay, time to go draw...