A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I'm back!

There will be a few more catch-up trip posts, as there's tons of stuff I never got a chance to write up. Such as the obsession of many people we met with Cameron's movie Avatar. I swear, every other conversation, someone would mention it. I was beginning to think it would be impossible to escape back to the US without getting dragged to a screening. We probably would have been, except that we fled to Hong Kong... where Oyce called her Dad to tell him we'd arrived safely, and caught him in a movie theatre, watching Avatar.

The next day, we were having dinner with her aunt and uncle, and asked them if there were any good Chinese movies playing.

"Nothing's good!" said her uncle.

"That's not right," said her aunt. "What about that movie with the blue people?"

In an unrelated incident, I also want to mention something which happened in China. We went to a temple complex dedicated to the journey of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (aka Tripitaka) to India. This was immortalized in the novel Journey to the West, which was remixed in one of my favorite manga, Saiyuki, where he was called Sanzo.

In an infamously poorly subtitled bootleg of the anime of Saiyuki, Sanzo, who might reasonably be called a monk or priest, is called a rabbi. The place he comes from, usually translated as Shangri-La, is called Asgard. Add to that some oddly-translated epithets, and the bootleg is known, at least to me, as "Rabbi Sanzo and the Fuck-Monkey of Asgard."

I cannot begin to convey my glee when I discovered that every one of the scholarly and otherwise well-translated plaques at that complex referred to "Rabbi Xuanzang."

I am guessing that both the anime and the temple used the same (strange) dictionary. There were also references on the plaques to amrita, the immortality-giving drink of the Gods, which is usually translated as nectar, or sometimes ambrosia or elixir. Here it was called a "wonder drug." Not very elevated!