John's 新航道博客

Well, I've decided to move my Blog over to Sina Blogs. You can find the new site here. Thanks to all of you for joining me at Bokee; I hope you'll also come and visit my new home at Sina. :)

我决定把博客搬到新浪Blogs。新的博客在这儿。

为什么要搬呢？我一直对博客网的控制面板有些不满意，这两天我一直在试着用新浪，觉得它还是好一些。 而且，我认为作为一个大网站新浪的博客服务在未来的几年里应该会继续发展，与时俱进。：）

谢谢大家在这儿的参与，希望以后在新浪网见！

（还有一点，为了把内容都放在一个地方，我可能会把这儿和以前的博客的一些内容放在新浪网Blog上。）

http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/John

We watched Stephen Speilberg and Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds last night. I thought it was very 一般. I just didn't find it very believable. Of course, a story about aliens attacking Earth doesn't really have to be believable, but I didn't really buy the relationships either.

If you would like to know more about the origin of the War of the Worlds story, see here.

There was an interesting article in the NYTimes the other day about the increasing popularity of Chinese classes in US schools.

I found this quote particularly interesting:

The Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks Chinese as one of the four most time-intensive languages to learn. An average English speaker takes 1,320 hours to become proficient in Chinese, compared with 480 hours in French, Spanish or Italian, the institute says.

昨天的〈新京报〉登了关于我的文章，这边可以看到：链接

我觉得写的挺好的，应该谢谢马记者把我写的那么好！其实，有些细节性的错误（比如：我是在康州上大学的，但其实是北卡人；那篇关于道德经的文章是我和我的老师一起写的，而不光是自己写的［这个错误其实最早是《中国青年》的错误］），但大意都是对的。

Hu Laoshi and I had a lecture at 清华附中 today. It was fun for me because I used to live in a building on the campus when I was a student at Tsinghua. I remember going into the school to eat at the cafeteria and play ping-pong. That was almost five years ago. Wow.

今天〈新京报〉的记者过来采访我，他们有一个栏目叫做〈北京客〉，想让我做一期。采访了一个多小时，谈的还挺开心的。今天晚上他还让我写一篇300字左右的文章，题目叫〈客语北京〉。

以下是我写的东西（写的优点多），请多指教：

北京故事

王渊源

崔健写了首歌叫做《北京故事》，开头是这么唱的：

“唱了半天还是唱不干净
这城市的痛苦，
可痛苦越多越愿意想像
那明天的幸福。”

北京经过历史的各种各样的磨练，它有过非常辉煌的时候，也有过很悲惨的经历，但今天的北京是个往前看的，充满了希望与活力的城市。北京有一种无法用语言描述的精神，它有一种另人兴奋与悲哀的精力。北京是一个寻找梦想的地方，全国的（甚至全世界的）人聚集到北京寻找自己的梦想，有人找到了梦想，也有人会寻找一辈子。大家都盼着明天的幸福。

我长大的地方往窗户外面一看就有很多树，北京的窗户往外面一看似乎是每天都起了一棵新的钢铁和水泥的树。有时候我会想念那些用木头做的树，也会想念家里的亲戚和朋友，但同时也很高兴在北京能够有这么多好朋友和有意思的经历。

我来到北京是件非常偶然的事情。当时有个留学的机会，觉得放弃很可惜。坐上往北京飞的那架飞机，跟家人告别的眼泪还没干，除了看过几本书以外，我对北京一点都不了解。

来中国之前，听说中国人很多，到了北京发现人比我想像的还多，在无数陌生的面孔里，我忽然发现每一张脸都能讲一个故事，而且所讲的故事都是我很不熟悉的。我当场决定了要试图了解这些脸讲的故事，想了解中国的故事，也想让美国和中国互相了解彼此的故事，痛苦，梦想与希望。

迄今为止，我在北京已经待了四年了，估计也还会在这儿不少年。我很感谢北京给我的这四年里的喜怒哀乐，同时也对北京和我的将来的发展充满希望与期待。

很遗憾昨天没去看超女在北京的演唱会。 ：）

I hope everyone had a great National Day. I spent most of it in the classroom, which was actually a lot of fun. Thanks to all of the students in my Culture Class for making it that way.

Here's an article on the guy who used to translate for Soviet leaders in their meetings with US leaders. He met seven US presidents!

It should be an interesting read for those of you who are interested in translation.

It's been quite a week.