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A Donkey’s Bridge to Remembering Language

You’ve just arrived in a brand new part of the world and it’s all incredibly exciting. You’ve remembered to get all your jabs, pack more than two pairs of underwear and your passport is somewhere safe (you can’t quite remember where that place is, but probably in that pouch thingy your mum gave you, stuffed down the front of your elephant pants). You’re ready to explore this new and exotic place all guns blazing – but when you try and find the bus stop you realize you’ve missed something.

Everyone is making these weird sounds, all the signs are in squiggly lines and you can’t for the life of you figure out where to get the bus to somewhere to sleep, let alone ask someone and understand what they are saying. To you, it’s all Chinese. Which it probably is if you’ve come to China (unless you already speak Mandarin, and it’s plain sailing).

Language barriers can be a bit of a struggle, but overcoming them is an amazing way of breaking the ice, especially when you make mistakes the locals are likely to find hilarious, and boom – you have yourself a new best friend for life. Whilst learning every language on the planet can be tempting to some and a living nightmare to others, there are certain little tricks you can use to help you along the way.

The German’s call the Eselsbrücken – or Donkey Bridges. Simple things that help the stubborn, donkey-like learning centre in your adult brain remember things it would have soaked up and stored in seconds for lifelong use when you were a kid. Back in the day, you read a word and it was stored automatically. Cat became gato, dog became inu, or vacuum cleaner pipe became stopsoucherslough, or whatever.

Now though, it helps to remember simple courtesies and random words by remembering what they sound like in your own language. With a little imagination, the Russian word for dog, ‘sabaka’, almost sounds something like the English phrase ‘It’s a barker’. Handy, huh?

You’ll be surprised what doors open, what new friends are made and how much a little bit of local lingo can smooth your path in this exciting world. So here you have it, dear reader, a non-extensive list of donkey’s bridges for useful words, the language they are in, and what they sound like in English. Enjoy!

German

Feel and dunk

Sounds a bit like: Vielen Dank

Meaning: Thank you very much

Goo 10 tag

Sounds a bit like: Guten Tag

Meaning: Good afternoon

Spanish

Grassy arse

Sounds a bit like: Gracias

Meaning: Thank you

Kettle (overpronounce the last e as an a)

Sounds a bit like: Que tal?

Meaning: How are you?/ How’s it going?

Portuguese

To do bong

Sounds a bit like: Todo bom?

Meaning: How are you?/ How’s it going?

Oi!

Sounds a bit like: Oi!

Meaning: Hello!

Russian

Ya table – loo blue

Sounds a bit like: Ya tebya lyublyu

Meaning: I love you

Horror show

Sounds a bit like: Harasho

Meaning: Good, fine, ok

River

Sounds a bit like: Riba

Meaning: Fish

Japanese

Don’t touch my moustache

Sounds a bit like: Doitashimashite

Meaning: You’re welcome (said in reply to ‘thank you’)

Eat a ducky, mass

Sounds a bit like: Itadakimas

Meaning: Something like ‘bon appetite’ (said before a meal)

Gucci sauce on my desktop

Sounds a bit like: Gochisosamadeshta

Meaning: Thanks for a great meal (said after a meal – this one will impress!)

Chinese (Mandarin)

War eye knee

Sounds a bit like: Wo Ai Ni

Meaning: I love you

Vietnamese

Come on!

Sounds a bit like: Kah moonh

Meaning: Thank you

Come car seat

Sounds a bit like: Com Kasi

Meaning: No problem

Indonesian Bahasa

Tear out my car seat

Sounds a bit like: Terimakasi

Meaning: Thank you

Summer Summer

Sounds a bit like: Sama sama

Meaning: You’re welcome (said in reply to ‘thank you’)

Hat-y Hat-y

Sounds a bit like: Hati-Hati

Meaning: Be careful/ caution

Reincarnation. What’s the worst thing to come back as?

All, Learn

You’re gonna die. Sorry to break it to you.

It’s nothing personal, just the nature of life. We’re all gonna die someday, but don’t worry – you might just get another crack at it…

In Thailand, it’s believed that after death, you’ll be reincarnated. You’ll come back as someone or something else, depending on how well you behaved in this life. Maybe you’ve been really good and you’ll come back as something awesome-fun and cool. Or maybe you’ve been naughty and you’ll come back as something really unpleasant.

Which got us thinking; what kind of asshole would you have to be to come back as a foot spa fish on Bangkok’s Khao San Road?

When we thought it through, however, we realised that maybe there’s a surprise in store when we find our selves back again for another chance at life.

I mean, at first glance, it seems like a shit existence – sweaty tourists lowering their stinking, sunburned feet into your home. You suck on crusty flakes of dead foot-skin – cheesy foot after cheesy foot – all day, and on Khao San Road, all night too.

Your fearless Rat & Dragon crew tried this freaky experience. (If you’re up for a laugh, you can watch the fishy fun on film here!)

One thing we couldn’t help but notice was the gusto with which the foot spa fish fed on foot. The little guys went absolutely berserk – hundreds of them, crowding over feet, squirming between toes and enthusiastically biting, rasping and sucking at hairs, nubs, corns, freckles and fleshy toenail cuticles.

It seemed the cheesier the part of the foot, the more they actually loved it. In fact, the little fish seemed to be delighted. You could see the little grins on their fishy little faces. (see them on the film!) Could this be the foot spa fish’s ultimate lifestyle? Is this what a lifetime of happiness looks like?

Think about it – a safe place to hang with a load of your schoolmates. You’re looked after lovingly by your owners, because you’re their money-spinner, after all. And all day, and all night, you have totally free access to all the foot flesh and toe jam (which you especially love) you could ever want. All you need to do is chill and munch.

Compare this to a wild fish’s lifestyle – swimming around endlessly in grotty wild-water, sifting through mud in search of food, and ever fearful of being eaten by a bird, a crab or a bigger fish.

When you die, if you’ve been a really nice person, what if you come back in the next life into the form of a being that is so happy and so fulfilled and has all it’s needs delivered, as a reward for all the good you have done in this life? You know what you love, and you get loads of it.

What if, when you’re not such a nice person, you come back as a being that works hard, toils all day every day for a lifetime, and is never quite fulfilled no matter how hard they work, no matter how much they have, always wanting more? Thinking they know what makes them happy but not being able to get enough of it?

What if the most important thing in life is knowing what you want, and getting loads of it? Maybe coming back as a foot spa fish wouldn’t be as bad as it first seems.

How are you behaving in this life..?

Preserving Dreams

All, Learn

The Egyptians did it. The Mayans did it. The Tibetans did it. Even the Koreans and German Housewives do it, en masse and with gusto – in the latter’s case with the resulting treasures to be stashed in some cellar shelf to collect dust, or to be given to secretly reluctant friends at Christmas so that they in turn can clog up their dusty cellar shelves. They all pickle stuff.

Preservation of food nowadays takes just a few choice chemicals, so participation in this activity is often down to taste and nostalgia. The more grizzly ancient practices of human embalming however, were widely exercised to ensure safe journey into the afterlife – for those fortunate or tyrannical enough to be able to afford the entry fee to the afterlife. So what is it, in these modern secular times, with communists pickling their dead leaders?

Our Epic Journey has taken us through Russia and China, the biggest countries on the globe influenced by communist ideology, as well as some little ones such as (North) Korea and Vietnam. We have previously studied and travelled Latin America extensively, and this continent’s ongoing toying with the idea of the ideal socialist state is also apparent whenever you witness yet another disgruntled citizen complain about the corruption of the government, the marginalisation of the working class and the inherent ‘stupidity’ and hypocrisy of anyone who gets into capitalist power. The Revolution will come – it’s just that no one seems sure of when and how.

You may be surprised to hear that Fidel Castro, one of our potentially soon to be pickled protagonists, wasn’t originally out to turn Cuba communist. He was in fact only persuaded by this very intelligent, but for Fidel’s liking somewhat too radical left-wing guy by the name of Ernesto Guevara (that’s ‘Che’ for all you cool kids out there). Che, counter to the beliefs of one of the kids in our 9^th grade way back in the day, did not “die fighting for the legalisation of weeeeeed, maaaan”. But it was the Revolution with a capital R (i.e. people’s rule over themselves and freedom from the meddling US and USSR) that pulled both men’s heart strings.

Importantly, something about the structure of both the Revolution and socialism make it most effective in creating and retaining political power – and this very thing might just explain these governments’ fondness for formaldehyde. No matter how much any leader may bang on about the ‘power of the people’, the most widely used tool in maintaining structure and leadership has been a very simple one: a solidly entrenched personality cult.

“Religion is the opium of the people” said Marx, and did away with it. Just like throwing your board shorts out to sea during a tipsy skinny dipping session seemed like a good idea at the time, some people would be absolutely fine crawling back to shore butt naked and proudly stomping off to get a towel. For others though, getting rid of what used to be an arguably somewhat fantastical but nevertheless very emotionally supporting trust in a guiding figure left a void only another supreme being could fill.

With even the Flying Spaghetti Monster out of bounds due to the whole anti-religion doctrine, the Maos, Stalins, Lenins, ‘Uncle’ Ho Chi Minhs and Kim Il Sung’s of this world got ready for a field trip. Guiding their people through wars, struggles for independence and the turning inside out of the political system needed a well-oiled propaganda machine, of which symbolism is one of the most effective tools.

Walk down a street in Moscow, Beijing or Hanoi and you’ll have to be blind or completely engrossed in Tinder to not see the victorious faces of Lenin, Mao and Uncle Ho everywhere. The machine is ticking over, the saviour everywhere and the country in control. But then – he gets old, sick, loses interest, maybe even his mind… the authorities who have been happily building this one figure of reference suddenly start to sit up and take notice. Unlike other forms of government, there is no automatically accepted son to follow in the king’s footsteps a royal bloodline, no new supreme leader chosen by God – or in a democracy, the people… although there are sound arguments against the existence of such a democracy even in our modern, enlightened, ‘Western’ world. But that is another debate within itself.

As admiration, guidance seeking and numbers of followers grew throughout the ‘liberator’s’ lifetime, of course always assisted by a vast network of propaganda, government officials found themselves incredibly concerned how the system would fare once the figurehead of it all kicked the proverbial bucket. Then, 15 months after the hype surrounding the discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen’s preserved body, the genius idea struck one of Lenin’s homies. “Pimp my dead leader!”, he exclaimed, and Lenin (Moscow Mausoleum) was preserved and put on public display in 1924.

Paradoxically, the idea of preserving bodies of communist anti-religious leaders may also on a subconscious level be likened to the Christian Orthodox belief that one of the dead giveaways of someone having been a Saint was that parts of or even their entire body would not decay. Nevertheless, this dappling in religion didn’t seem to deter the ministers surrounding Mao Zedong (Beijing Mausoleum), Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il (both in the Kumusan Palace of the Sun, Pyongyang), Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi Mausoleum), Mongolia’s Khorloogiin Choibalsan, Angola’s Agostinho Neto, Guyana’s Forbes Burnham and, most recently, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (not Dagenham).

Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria’s Georgi Dimitrov and Joseph Stalin were also given the star treatment, but after a botched procedure, the fall of communism in Bulgaria and a general hate of Stalin’s guts respectively, the bodies were removed and put to rest using alternative methods.

Interestingly enough, the afore mentioned embalmees were rarely asked whether they would agree to the procedure, with Ho Chi Minh explicitly instructing to be cremated. The preservation of the state over personal wishes may have been the last sacrifices these leaders made to their countries. It certainly worked on some levels as millions of local and international tourists flock every year to catch a glimpse of particularly Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, always in a solemn atmosphere and with some tears shed as well amongst the more nostalgic of the socialist era.

We defy you to tick them off like trump cards on your travels around the globe, but witnessing the power one person’s image can hold is a truly thought provoking experience. Let us know what you experienced when probably seeing a dead body for the first time – we’d love to know your thoughts.

The Ultimate Songkran Survival Guide

All, Learn

You are about to step into any 5 year old’s dream of dreams. Welcome to one of the craziest national activities on the planet. You’re about to get soaked to the bone and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Traditionally, Songkran (Thai New Year, although it’s also celebrated on a smaller scale in other South East Asian countries) was a rather subdued and spiritual affair, with everyone gathering to bless each other with little droplets of water from a small bowl, often with fragrant herbs added, in order to wash away the bad and begin the New Year afresh. Then some 5 year olds figured out that taking the whole practice to a new level was incredible amounts of fun, which handily coincided with the invention of the Super Soaker.

You have just arrived from the airport for the festivities, you have your brand new backpack full of travelling ‘essentials’ on your back, you are bright eyed and bushy tailed… and suddenly the world turns upside down as a huge bucket of green coloured, ice cold water soaks through your undies, Iphone, Passport and emergency teabags.

Disaster has struck… but rewind just a second. You have the Rat & Dragon team on your side, so make sure to take these precautions first:

1) Keep your bag at home

It’s definitely a good idea to avoid travelling on the first day of Songkran and up to 5 days after depending on where you’re heading. Whilst most places including Koh Phi Phi are only crazy for the day, Chiang Mai and Bangkok’s Khao San can see you being drenched at any point in the days to come. Mostly, overzealous tourists and the more crazy kind of local, often armed with Wiskey & Redbull buckets, are to blame. Either way, if you don’t want your stuff to get ruined, keep it well away from the streets.

2) Waterproof your phone

Finding friends, taking pictures, calling your mum when you’re really drunk and realize how much you love her whilst de-tagging yourself from all the pics of you throwing up on facebook is only possible if you have that most valuable possession of the modern backpacker on you. Your phone is your cherished connection to the world beyond your blurry field of vision, and numerous shops will be selling waterproof, transparent, and even touch sensitive pouches for your mobile device. Seal it up, and snap happy but remember, don’t drop it in the sea or the loo – your phone will be a gonner.

3) Get your Go Pro out, stick it on your water gun

Nothing captures the spirit of Songkran quite the same as a GoPro in the middle of the action. Check out our very own frontline report from Phi Phi 2014. For an extra bit of oomph, don’t hold it or brand yourself a tool by selfie-ing with a telescopic stick. With the help of a roll bar mount or even just a good helping of duct tape, you can create your very own Super Soaker cam, by mounting your GoPro on your water gun of choice, facing towards your victims (or toward you, if you’re into that kind of thing).

4) Buy beer cheep at flooded 7 Eleven

Bars will waterproof themselves, stay open for all the action and charge accordingly for booze. If you’re on a budget, don’t be scared to go into 7 Eleven (which if on Phi Phi will most likely be under 3cm of water everyone has to slosh through to get to the fridge), hand over your dripping 100 baht notes and stock up on cheap Tiger.

5) Eat enough or get supplies in advance

All that partying will dehydrate you, and all the beer will do so even more. Keep your energy levels up and party longer by adding regular fuel to your body. It’s easy to forget to eat if you’ve started partying at 9am, but actively make sure to get a good breakfast, a quick lunch and a dinner or two – preferably down a side alley out of view, and FAST! Otherwise, before you can say ‘not spicy’, someone will be washing your Pad Thai straight out of your hand with a nearby hose. It may also be an idea to stock up on emergency snacks the day before, as many restaurants will close early.

6) “Mummy’s wearing Chanel, darling”

If you haven’t clocked on by now, here it is in plain English: during Songkran, you are going to get wetter than you ever have been in your entire life. Wetter than whilst being underwater, in fact. The best thing to do is wear a bikini/board shorts and clothes over the top that a) are easily wrung out and b) can be thrown away at the end of the day if need be. Many people add extra kicks to their waterpower by putting food colouring to their tanks, which looks awesome when green and red splattered people run down the streets after each other, but can also stain your favourite Gucci. Talcum powder also features heavily and people are covered in it on a regular basis – so again, you have been warned.

7) Keep warm – and don’t get naked

Remember that whilst you’re having ice cubes shoved down the back of your Chang singlet, that even in a country as hot as Thailand, you can catch a cold. Make sure you’re a comfortable temperature at all times – avoid both heatstroke and flu. You can get arrested for nakedness, so try your best to keep your kit on, and consider taking a break to warm up after about 10 hours. Remember that at nighttime, there are no warming rays to dry your clothes, so stay away from the ice cubes.

8) Get some kick ass tat sunglasses

Whilst it’s frowned upon, sometimes you will get a squirt of water straight into your eyeball. To avoid this, consider buying some cheap sunglasses to a) look mega Breaking Bad/DEA-chic, b) protect yourself from pinkeye.

9) Beware of dirty water

With all these water guns that need filling, constantly and for free, you can imagine what goes into the ground during the festivities. No matter how appealing it may look, joining those other guys with the camel toe tattoos from Manchester as they take over the neighbours’ kid’s paddling pool is probably not the best idea after 5 hours of mixing body fluids. Whatever you do, don’t drink any of it and try and keep it out of your eyes and nose. And take a shower once in a while, cause you’re probably dirty.

10)Stay safe, enjoy and forgive

As with any mass party, staying on the safe side of crazy is always a good idea. Road traffic accidents double during Songkran, so stay away from motorbikes and pick up trucks as much as you can and as always, use your common sense. Smaller accidents can easily happen with people frantically giggling and blindly shooting water at each other. Make sure you enjoy yourself, take a break if you get fed up, forgive others for mistakes and keep cool so everyone has a good time.

11)DON’T get a tattoo

That is all.

Songkran is one of the world’s top festive experiences, whether you’re a 5 year old in body or at heart. You can see what it all looks like in real life in our Phi Phi 2014 report, and we would love to hear your experiences from different parts of this beautiful country.

How to shoot an Elephant

All, Learn

We’re up for big film challenges, so jumped at the chance when we were asked to film an elephant ride in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam. “Never work with kids and animals” is advice you’ll hear from any seasoned industry professional, but being the Rat & Dragon maverick team (animals are in our name!), we didn’t shy away. This was going to be a tricky one though. Due to a last minute changed schedule (in Vietnam, the word “schedule” has a pretty loose definition) and the fact that this particular ride took us not jut around the lake shore, but actually straight through the water, meant that we had nearly no time to prepare, and not much idea what to prepare for.

When we started off on this Epic Journey, we set ourselves the mission of gathering travel content to knock your socks off, and while we had a spectacular subject in hand, how were we going to deliver the shots? Quick on your feet thinking saved our not-so-thick skins.

Know the route

No amount of amazing kit can capture an animal, if you don’t know where it’s likely to be going. Getting ahead of the elephant and shoot it coming towards us was the only way we could show it off, so with no time to get a translator to speak with the driver, we had to employ some Sherlock Holmes style detective work Cumberbatch would have squee’d at.

Obviously, when the elephant was on a road or path with no turnoffs, it was a fair assumption that you could race ahead, but when it spotted some tasty leaves on the other side of a soon to be ex-shrubbery, we had to admit that flexibility was key. Keep in mind that elephants do reverse, and it’s a very very bad idea to come up close beside an elephant or from behind.

If you’ve never had the privilege of seeing an elephant in person and swapping jovial anecdotes over a cup of Earl Grey or a tumbler of scotch, you will be forgiven to believe they are rather large, round and loud animals who stomp their own paths wherever they go, inevitably flattening plants, insects and the odd pigmy in their wake. We have news for you – your childrens books lied.

Elephants are surprisingly tall structured, and unlike a cow or water buffalo, their cross section looks more like a peach stone with legs than an apple. This allows the elephant to put one foot gingerly in front of the other, meaning they can walk on paths as narrow as just one of their feet, and through surprisingly narrow gaps in trees and houses. Make sure you don’t lose your star down a small alley way when your back is turned!

Shooting the lake from its muddy shoreline brought it’s own challenges as flip-flops and other lose fitting shoes will disappear into parallel universes. In our case, bare foot was the way to go and looking for footprints from previous elephant trecks was also a great way to anticipate the elephant’s next move. Fortunately when trying to work out where he’d exit the lake, all we needed to do was find giant, knee deep craters in the mud.

Prep the right kit

As soon as the elephant ride was sourced, it was ‘action’. No ‘lights’, no ‘camera check’ or ‘sound’ and no clapperboard. Just ‘action’ and our lead talent was off. Luckily we had super-light kit ready – one of us on the elephant with a GoPro, and one of us with a snowboarding backpack with a DSLR, GoPro, tripod and batteries all ready loaded.

Elephants may look slow and lumbersome, but their relaxed gait is actually a steady jog for a human, so getting ahead of it needs a solid pace, and catching up to it after a long shot and getting ahead with time to set the camera required a flat sprint.

Once our lead talent hit the lake it was off with the shoes to wade around in the mud. The snowboard backpack (you were wondering, weren’t you?) allowed these to be stored outside the bag in a heartbeat.

Lenses

From the top of the elephant, the super wide angle of the goPro was great, and perfectly suited the ‘selfie’ style we were aiming for in the final edit. From the ground, we initially followed with a light DSLR with 18-55m lens and a x0.45 super wide adapter. We were hoping to get right up close to get maximum effect from the super-wide, but abandoned the plan as we were dealing with a big bull with matching tusks so had to keep at least 3m distance, so the adapter was no longer needed, which made focusing a lot more reactive.

Safety

Elephants are gorgeous and intelligent, but they’re also ridiculously strong and at the end of the day, they are wild animals adapting as best they can to human ownership. As such, it’s best to keep your distance when running past. Never get too close behind and don’t run around in front or beside where any animal can easily be startled. If filming from ahead, stay still and preferably beside a tree as well where you look less intrusive.

Chose the right one

We cannot stress enough the importance of animal welfare, which is one of the reasons some film makers avoid working with animals as taking proper care of them on set can go way beyond the budget of independent productions. However, including animals in your films adds an unbelievable amount of life, beauty, emotion and interest, so wherever you do chose to film an animal, make sure you are supporting an organization that looks after the creatures in their care. You can find a list of accredited organizations here:

And if you happen to have shots you would like to share, we would love to see your best ones in the comments below. And yes, your beloved pet Chihuahua can star as well.

The adventure that is food in China

All, Learn

“I Kina spiser de hunde”, title of the 1999 Danish action comedy says it all. In China, they do really, actually, indeed eat dogs. But hold on a second, before you snub your nose in disgust, dear reader, hear us out.

Whilst other nations pride themselves on their culinary creativity and Masterchef haute cuisine skills, China certainly has something going for it. Pretty much everything edible (and sometimes definitely not edible) will at some point pass through the kitchens of this great country. And don’t be fooled, this has nothing to do with your Friday post-clubbing greasy pseudo Chinese on the corner. Yes, we know you do it.

If you don’t, see the Oatmeal’s wonderfully descriptive sketch of ‘Diarrhea Dragon – the pan-Asian takeaway mystery with an ‘2 star – adequate’ food hygiene certificate every small town has instead of a decent restaurant.

Chinese people really enjoy eating everything, and this is quite admirable as none of the animal that has lost its life for our nutrition goes to waste. As we found out during our Beijing project, local traditional food consists mainly of offal based soups and shredded sheep’s stomach, which with the right seasoning are quite enjoyable. Intestine, eyes, skin and even boiling leftovers such as feet and heads for stock are commonplace, which really means cooks are getting their money’s worth.

Diet goes way beyond traditional western farm animals, with a whole array of seafood to choose from. Tentacles on sticks can be found at any self respecting food market, as well as dried squid, fish, oysters, crabs, all kinds of prawn whether large or small and of course numerous other shellfish, mollusks and sea slugs. Preparation can also get somewhat extreme in the case of beiju soaked live shrimp, that are so drunk they forget they’re being eaten by you.

Insects are of course also on the list, with Zhejiang Province putting enormous deep fried spiders on the plates of hungry punters. And as Kharma would have it, insect eating lizards are also impaled and deep fried. The Rat and Dragon team can confirm that tiny frogs and soft shell crabs are surprisingly crispy and tasty when deep fried, and go very well with beer.

Peking duck is world famous, but how about some duck head soup, chicken feet and testicles, or grilled chicks? And the imagination doesn’t stop there, but goes on to birds nest soup, boiled in-shell duck embryos and ‘thousand-year old eggs’ that are buried in clay for a couple of months until the whites turn to brown translucent jelly and the yolks are a healthily stinking mould green colour. The sight of one instantly makes you forget the slight chronological exaggeration.

But enough of the freak show. After all, the Chinese allegedly invented ice cream, and their confident experimentation with food has led to global hits like Ketchup.

China eats everything, and from a very young age, children are encouraged to do the same, meaning less wastage and a more rounded use of floral and faunal resources (of course you should always steer clear of endangered species!).

You, nose snubber, we know you are secretly bold and would love to taste a bit of the world. And you never know, some previously ‘inedible’ dishes may be your next favourite!

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