Monday i went to work and left yachi to wander around the area on her own.

i saw yet another car trying to get as close as possible to the train station and then getting stuck. They should probably put up a sign about this. Something along the lines of don't even try to go down this way as it is a sidewalk that ends in a dead end (and you still have to jump over the fence to get into the subway center). Maybe something like that would work.

they also tore down most of the trees on the sides of a street / alley i walk down to get to work. The old trees were dying so they just uprooted them and put new babier trees in. This took about 3 hours as near as i can tell.

when you uproot so many trees what do you do with the old ones? Just make a giant pile and leave them there. Someone will want them for something and you will be saved the trouble of having to remove them yourself.

here is the fore-mentioned pile.

the most exciting thing that happened today was that i saw the subtitles that Jason had mentioned in Shanghai.

slight digression about DVD's. Someone who knows more than me can probably explain this but for the pirated DVD's here they rip out the special features and commentary and add in the Chinese language version and subtitles where the other stuff used to be (all of the above is pretty much conjecture based on a conversation Jason and i had while drinking copious amounts of Guinness so i am not sure how much rigorous debate it will stand up to).

sometimes though it seems that they basically rip out all the subtitles and add back English and Chinese. Most of the time these are just really bad (like in batman begins where Bruce kept getting called bitch) but every once in a while they just grab a copy of subtitles that are handy and push those in. So underworld: evolution (which yachi and i watched) contained the subtitles for detention, a movie no one watched, but for which the subtitles are on many many pirated movies.

if you are ever watching a pirated movie and see the opening line, man speaking in serbo-Croatian... Then a bunch of dialogue which does not apply at all to the movie now you know where it comes from. Say it with me, now. And knowing is half the battle.