For the basketball fans

One of my language lessons a couple weeks ago covered some basketball vocabulary. I learned the Chinese versions of Jordan, Shaq ("O'Neill" here, or rather Ao-ni-er, which is about as close as you can get in Chinese), the Chicago Bulls, Washington Wizards, and James Naismith (the guy who invented basketball, in case you didn't know). This turned out to be a fairly useful lesson today when I went to the post office to mail a parcel.  (By the way, unlike in the US, where you're supposed to bring everything nice and ready, here they want to see what you're sending, so you can either bring an unsealed box or they'll pack it for you. Not having found a box the size I wanted, I went for the latter option. Anyway, between the packaging and the paperwork, it takes a few minutes, which should explain how there was time for the following.)

Today I got a very friendly postal worker (oh, don't worry, there are disgruntled ones here, too) who, when he saw that my package was going to the US, asked if I was from America. When I said yes, his first question was, "Have you ever seen Yao Ming?" I told him that while I knew who he was, I'd never seen him play, and that I preferred watching college basketball (NBA is huge here, mostly because of Yao Ming, but basketball had made inroads before he signed with the Rockets, too). My Friendly Postal Worker agreed that he had heard US college basketball was also very good, and continued talking about it. Somewhere in the sentence that followed I was thrown by a word that I wasn't familiar with, and it took me a while to realize that he was talking about... Duke (doo-kuh -- as with Qiao-dan and Ao-ni-er, it has a Chinese transliteration, tones and all, so if you're not expecting a proper noun, it can confuse you. My assumption was that it was just unfamiliar vocabulary, but it was the description "very famous" that caused the penny to drop). I couldn't resist telling him that they had just lost a big game.  :)

So there you go, even in China, they know about Duke. Hm, I wonder how they transliterate Krzyzewski (and is anyone impressed that I spelled that correctly without checking?? Well, I am). It did not occur to me to ask whether he was familiar with my Terps, as we had already moved back to NBA discussion.  For the record, Friendly Postal Worker Man also thinks highly of Gilbert Arenas. And I really hope Zhan-mu-si Nai-shi-mi-si never comes up in conversation.