I still think of Chinese cities as being like Nanjing, in which it seems no street keeps the same name for more than a few blocks. I was once asked to meet someone at the KFC on Guangzhou Lu. “Which KFC?” I asked, not realising Guangzhou Lu was really only long enough to support one. A few blocks west and it’s 清凉门大街 and a few east it becomes 珠江路, somehow making a 90° turn along the way. So it still surprises me to find streets that keep their names, despite this being the norm in most cities. The other day I walked from the Bund to Jing’An Temple without once leaving Nanjing Lu. As far as I know, it might just keep going until it turns into 珠江路 in Nanjing itself.
The following is one side of a phone conversation, the long pauses mercifully edited out. The speaker you hear is my 司机 from a few days ago, talking to someone else with whom I was late to meet. It turns out they gave me the wrong street name, substituting a 南 for a 北, leaving both the driver and I scratching our heads. The address doesn’t exist on Qinzhou Nan Lu. Qinzhou Nan stops at 1000 and change, and mine was well above 1000.
A couple notes on the recording. I’ve beeped out the actual address past “一千” for obvious reasons. I will mention that the first two times he says the address, he does so in Mandarin. The third and final time it’s in Wu. Most of the recording is in Shanghainese but it does break into Mandarin for a few seconds here and there. The audio is in two parts, 0:50 and 0:40 in length.
The first half:
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The second half:
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These were recorded on my phone and then edited in Audacity. I’ve been having problems lately with Audacity giving me garbled files when exporting as mp3. I did a quick spot check on these so they should be fine but if somehow I missed something let me know.
