There’s an increasing opportunity for the curious among us to learn about the Chinese language as the number of newcomers to Charlottetown from Taiwan and China increases every day.

I’m used to learning new programming languages, and programming languages tend to be logical and to follow similar rules; today’s Chinese, like today’s English, is the process of hundreds of years of evolution, so isn’t necessarily logical at all.

So Chinese writing is like a big complicated puzzle to me; but, with help from my Chinese-writing friends, I’m gradually beginning to parse it apart. Take this sign, for example:

The sign is on the side of the new downtown social club and I had no idea what it meant. I tried writing the characters into my iPod touch, but to no avail; no matter how carefully I drew out the characters, I could never get the iPod to match what I saw on the sign.

What I really wanted was a “take a photo of Chinese characters, upload it, and get back English” service, like Google Goggles for Chinese (it doesn’t support Chinese yet itself), but none of those I tried worked.

Finally, I fell back to where I should have started: I asked my friend Winnie at Tai Chi Gardens and she told me, quickly and with a smile, that it means “China Town.”

And, according to Google Translate, she’s exactly right.

(Interestingly enough, when I handed my iPod Touch to Winnie and let her write in the Chinese for the first character, it recognized what she wrote on the first go even though, to both her eyes and mine, we created almost exactly the same shapes).

The sign on the door with hours was a little easier to parse apart:

For this sign the Days of the Week in Chinese page was a big help, specifically:

The modern Chinese names for the days of the week are based on a simple numerical sequence. The word for ‘week’ is followed by a number indicating the day: ‘Monday’ is literally ‘week one’, ‘Tuesday’ is ‘week two’, etc.

And of course one can assume that Tuesday follows Monday, and so on, so it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that:

• 週日 is Sunday
• 週一 is Monday
• 週二 is Tuesday
• 週三 is Wednesday
• 週四 is Thursday
• 週五 is Friday
• 週六 is Saturday

Some other things I’ve learned:

• People from Taiwan write using “Traditional Chinese” characters and people from China write using “Simplified Chinese” characters; in general one can understand the other, but not always. For example, 中国城 is the Simplified Chinese for “China Town” while 中國城 is the “Traditional Chinese.”
• Historically Chinese signage would be read right-to-left, but contemporary signs are generally read left-to-right. Which is why the sign read “China Town” and not “Town China.”
• If you’re Taiwanese and using a computer, you can either use a touchpad-like device to write character as they are, or use something called Bopomofo; watch this video to understand more on this from a 5 year old or this video to see how to use this yourself with Windows.
• The peichinese.com website is the place to hang out if you’re interesting in learning more about the Chinese-speaking community in Prince Edward Island in Chinese.

Still so much more to learn!

It’s municipal election day in Charlottetown, Summerside, Stratford and Cornwall today, and starting after 7:00 p.m. when the polls close you’ll be able to get live election results updates from results.electionspei.ca.

After supper tonight Catherine and Oliver and I headed to the new tea house on Grafton Street to see what it was all about.

It’s in the large space recently vacated by Pinky’s Place, across from The Pilot House. Before Pinky’s it was a travel agency and the building was originally home to the Prince Edward movie theatre.

The concept of the new place was explained to us as “you come in with your friends, you drink tea, you eat snacks, you play cards.” And to facilitate this there are several large tables, each with its own tray of snacks, menu (in Chinese only, for now) and deck of cards:

We ordered a couple of oolong teas and some sort of strawberry beverage for Oliver, and were told to just consume snacks as we liked and it would all be added up at the end.

We enjoyed a couple of rousing games of Go Fish! and attempted, in vain, to recall the rules of Crazy 8s. The tea was very nice, and our cups were constantly topped up with fresh hot water.

Leading off the large open space are some private rooms that you can reserve for groups; we were told that mahjong is to be played and an additional selection of desserts will soon be available.

One of the missing links in the Charlottetown social scene has been a place to hang out, after supper, that’s not a restaurant or a bar; this new place – it has a name, after the couple that owns it, but my Chinese typing abilities aren’t up to it – stays open until 10:00 p.m. seven days a week. It would be great to see it evolve into a sort of cross-cultural downtown night-time hangout.

There’s a new tea house, opening today, at 59 Grafton Street in downtown Charlottetown, in the space formerly occupied by Pinky’s Place and, originally, by the Prince Edward Theatre. Oliver and I stuck our head in the door mid-afternoon and got the lay of the land with a promise to return for tea after supper (they’re open until 10:00 p.m.).

If you’re downtown today it would be a nice gesture to welcome this new business to the community and have a cup of tea; don’t be put off by the Chinese-only signage: the owners speak excellent English and will give you all the tea-ordering guidance you need.

Earlier this month I learned that for many years here in Prince Edward Island an annual local almanac, the Prince Edward Island Calendar, was published. As someone with a long-established interest in Almanacy things, I set out to learn more, and along the way found that the University of PEI library has a copy of the 1857 edition in its collection.

I asked my friendly collections librarian Don Moses if it could be added to the queue for scanning under the banner of Island Lives, and this afternoon came the news that it’s now available digitally (if you follow that link and click Download, you’ll get a high-resolution PDF file that’s full-text searchable – an amazing resource).

My favourite page so far is number three, a page absent of printed material and so left to the doodles of the owner, a man, one might surmise, named Robert Wade (there’s a Robert Wade mentioned as “Serjeant-at-Arms” of the Legislative Assembly on Page 31; no idea if this is the same person or not):

From his Just chillin!-style tweets, I assume that Hon. Doug Currie, Prince Edward Island’s Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development, manages his own Twitter. Which makes tweets like this one even more impressive:

He beat the CBC to the punch by five minutes and, in that crazy new-style way, “got his message out there” before it was mediated.

It was parent-teacher interview day here in Prince Edward Island today: a holiday for students, an appointment for parents.

We’re blessed that Oliver, for the fourth year in a row, has a smart, flexible, creative teacher, along with a great team of support staff, and more often than not we leave the school impressed with just how much education has changed since we were kids.

Case in point: Oliver’s been using an AlphaSmart keyboard for a few years as it’s much easier for him to write at the keyboard than by hand, and his mind was being slowed down by the need to hand-write.

But the AlphaSmart, as innovative as it might have been in the early 1990s when it was first released, has more in common with a TRS-80 Model 100 than it does with the Mac on Oliver’s desk at home, and we were beginning to wonder if it was more hindrance than help.

So we brought this up at a meeting a few weeks ago and the school’s response was to locate a laptop for Oliver that he could use instead, and to suggest that we invest in a portable “thumb drive” to shuttle documents back and forth between home and school.

This has been in place for a week, and while there have been some growing pains – they couldn’t figure out where to plug the flash drive on day one – it’s working really well.

And remember The SketchUp Conundrum?

Well, it turns out that Oliver’s teacher uses Google SketchUp himself for woodworking, and he’s going to arrange to have it installed on the computers at the school and Oliver’s going to teach his classmates how to use it.

I’m the first to admit that I approach schools with a suspicious and cynical attitude, mostly based on my own experiences.

I forget, at my peril, that today’s teachers have had 40 years of evolution since those days (a 50 year old teacher when I was in Grade 4 would have been born in 1926; Oliver’s had teachers born in the 1980s).

They don’t always get it right, but it’s been our experience so far that demonstrating strong interest in Oliver’s education has earned us their respect, and they what we used to see as an intractable rule-based system is, more often than not, willing to be as innovative and experimental as situations call for.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of Charlottetown geography knows that Colonel Gray High School is mere steps away from the strip of University Avenue that’s home to all manner of restaurants, mostly fast food ones.

And so every school day at lunch a torrent of teenagers streams east from the school to eat. They say that Charlottetown’s Dairy Queen is the busiest outlet in the world, and I’m sure that this daily influx of students plays a role in this.

Five years ago, in one of the city’s darker moments in recent memory, The Noodle House, a restaurant that lies directly on the Colonel Gray-Dairy Queen axis, became the focus of what appeared to be racially-motivated teenage anger. It was a disheartening episode, and although parts of the community were quick to rally round the restaurant’s owners, it unveiled one of the the seamier sides of the Island Way of Life.

Which is why it gave me such pleasure to walk into Seoul Food, just around the corner from The Noodle House and the Dairy Queen, to find it packed to the gills with high school students, voraciously wolfing down Korean lunches.

They all dashed back to class shortly after I arrived, and I learned from my server that it’s a daily occurrence: one student brought her friends, who brought his friends, and so on and so on.

While the unseemly fear-of-the-unknown still lurks in the darker corners of the Island soul, surely this is a good sign: Colonel Gray students no longer attacking a local Asian restaurant but rather warmly taking it up as their own. Good for the students (and healthier), good for Seoul Food, and good for a more inclusive community.

(The next time you’re at Seoul Food, I highly recommend you finish your meal with their new Quince Tea – it’s the perfect antidote to a damp, cold fall day).

Full of vig and vigour after Saturday’s trip to the Wayzgoose, and with a newly-cast piece of type, fresh from the Gaspereau Ludlow type-casting machine, burning a lead hole in my pocket, I resolved to start Monday printing instead of coding today. And with my mind still somewhat muddled from long road-trip, I got all experimental.

That last one is not experimental at all – it’s Crane Lettra paper. But who knew you could use a letterpress to print on rubber gloves, paper bags, and paper towel. Printing on the shiny-new cover stock of the Globe and Mail newspaper was especially pleasurable: it’s a luscious medium for ink.

Early on in the game of focusing my eyes on all-things-letterpress I came across news of the annual Wayzgoose in Kentville, Nova Scotia at Gaspereau Press. A wayzgoose is a sort of open house cum celebration cum demonstration cum merriment unique to the printing trade, and this year was to be Gaspereau’s 11th one.

My excitement over the prospect of attending gradually gave way to dread as I realized just how far (seemingly defying all geographical logic) Kentville is from Charlottetown: the five hour drive quoted by Google Maps seemed more like how long it should take to fly to Ireland, not how long it should take to drive to a city (apparently not) so close by.

So my plan to attend was all but dead until my new letterpress friend Erin came on board. I met Erin through a circuitous route about a month ago when she gave me some fine paper to use on my press; by way of thanking her I gave her a tour of my tiny letterpress operation. A visit that – and letterpress is wont to do this for those of the right disposition – kindled an interest in Erin in learning the trade herself.

When Erin said she’d come along to Kentville, it was enough to push me out of my geo-dread; and that Erin could really only make the trip work if we went out and back in the same day transformed the dread into giddy anticipation at the pure inanity of spending 10 hours driving in a single day so as to be able to hang out with other printers.

And so my alarm went off at 4:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, I was out the door by 5:15 a.m. and in Erin’s driveway in Miltonvale Park at 5:30 a.m.

I am unused to getting up so early, and especially unused to operating a motor vehicle, in the dark, so early. Which is the only excuse I can offer for how it was that I managed to get us lost even before we’d left the Island.

We headed along Rte. 2 to Hunter River, took a left onto Rte. 13, and I fully expected to emerge, 20 minutes later, in Crapaud. What my muddled brain forgot was that you have to take a right at Brookvale to achieve this. I did not. Which is how, 30 minutes later, we ended up back in North River. As if this were not shameful enough, our route actually took us right past our old house in Kingston, something I didn’t notice at all.

Chastened, I managed to follow Rte. 1 to Borden without further incident, and the rest of the trip, through New Brunswick and over the mountain to Truro where we switched driving, was uneventful. Fortunately Erin took over the driving at Truro, and was responsible for getting us from there to Kentville. Which seems like it should take 10 minutes but actually takes a couple of hours.

Almost five hours to the minute after we’d left Erin’s house we pulled into downtown Kentville, figured out where Gaspereau Press was, and walked in to the middle of the “Morning Shop Talks and Demonstrations” part of the day.

There was much fun to be had at the Wayzgoose, most of it coming from simply being able to ramble around their building, which houses a publishing house, commercial printing house and letterpress shop along with various related offshoots like paper-making equipment, and a Ludlow type-casting setup. It was all very informal – it reminded me a lot, in spirit, of MacAusland’s Woolen Mills – and as the day went on there was more and more activity, and more and more people filling up the space.

After a quick round on first arriving we set upon the “offcut paper sale,” and both spent 30 minutes poring over the various bits and bobs of paper on offer. Once I’d had a chance to set aside my ream of paper, I got a chance to meet both Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield, the founders, as well as several of their staff, and to watch Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. do his combination letterpress demonstration advocation:

Around about noon we decided to head off for lunch before the festivities really geared up in mid-afternoon. In our semi-catatonic state we fortuitously happened upon Pizzazz Bistro, a very pleasant place run by a Bosnian and a Slovene and thus offering  ćevapčići, which I felt compelled to order (it was very good).

Still somewhat catatonic after lunch, I followed Erin’s lead and had an espresso at the nearby Café Central (very, very good coffee) and then we headed back to the Wayzgoose.

On returning there we found things much more bustling: Amos was in full form, they were casting type on the Ludlow, making paper in the back room and running prints off the Heidelberg press. Thaddeus Holownia from Sackville, NB was doing demonstrations on the second Vandercook press, and I overheard conversations amongst printers of all stripes about everything from press registration to what to do with your Linotype machine after you die.

It was all, in other words, a bit like letterpress fantasy camp.

Ever-aware that at some point we were going to turn back into pumpkins, after one last loop around the shop and a round of goodbyes and thank-yous, we piled back into the car and headed off back toward the Island.

After a brief detour into Amherst to drop off a box of books for G., and dip into Sackville for supper at the Bridge Street Café, followed by a thrilling battle through to the Confederation Bridge through (theoretically) moose-infested territory, we were back in Erin’s driveway around 10:00 p.m. and I was back at 100 Prince Street around 10:30 p.m., exhausted, but very happy to have returned from a great adventure.