On Saturday we went to Yashow to pick up some clothes we had ordered to be made. I got a suit and Alex got a dress, but my real story stems from the weekend before when we were having our final fittings done. We had finalised all the details with the tailor and his handler and the handler’s overseer*and had gone upstairs to check out the food court on the top floor. It was pretty early in the day and so there weren’t many people up there and we were the only westerners. We looked around and decided (despite the earliness of the day) to buy a plate of baozi. Whilst eating we were suddenly surrounded by a mob of Chinese guys. I looked up as they formed a cordon and noticed that they all bore poster paper and fat markers, so I relaxed a little and waited for the best English speaker amoungst them to open what I suspected was some kind of sales pitch.

To my surprise they were not selling us anything and in fact wanted us to write a sign for them in English for their juice bar. I obliged them and in thick blue marker I wrote:

Rape the Juice Bottle with Forgiveness

Well I wanted to. It is really hard not to fuck with them and come up with one of the many crazy signs I see every day. I can see why these signs are so prevalent. It’s not Chinese people with dodgy English language skills, it is Chinese people with dodgy friends doing the translating. What I really wrote was:

Wild Date Juice in a Bottle

*it takes a lot of people to get a job done in China

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