Holiday memories

Hi Shirley,

Your holiday in Bali sounds very romantic (congrats on your anniversary!). And your pictures looked great too! They also brought back lots of happy memories for me. When I lived in Bandung, I often nipped over to Bali and remember with great fondness the beaches of Candidasa and the lovely villages in and around Ubud.

Unfortunately, all my holidays there were in the old days before digital cameras so I don't have any snaps I can share with you. But I do have a couple of more recent (digital) holiday pictures that might make you smile.

I don't know if you listened to a recent 6 minute about Chinglish. I captured my own example of this variety of English on film when I was in China (in Tianjin) a couple of years ago. To get the joke, you have to know that a tick is a very small insect which attaches itself to other animals or humans and drinks their blood.


Not perhaps something you really want to queue up for and buy!

And here's one from Budapest, which shows just how fantastic I think I am!

Who says I'm big-headed?

It's hard to say what my favourite holiday has been so far. Now that I'm working all the time and only have five weeks' holiday a year (which I know is a lot compared to some other people), I do look back fondly on my school days when we had weeks and weeks and weeks of holidays. I can't believe I ever had the nerve to moan when I was young, 'I'm bored mum There's nothing to do!' Oh, to have nothing to do now!

And now, from holidays to work …shall we take a look at a few examples from your writing where your meaning could be clearer Shirley?

1. In this one you've mixed up a couple of expressions:

We stayed in one hotel to another

Instead, you could choose from one of these:
a. We went from one hotel to another
b. We stayed in one hotel after another

2. This next example made me smile, unless of course you and your boyfriend have an enormous car, or you're both incredibly vertically challenged!

My friend and I got lost inside the car

3. A temple is a building. It can't pray. People pray. Can you think of a better adjective to describe the temple?

You can see the praying temple

4. This next sentence has a few issues – sparing, directions and for. Sparing is a good word but it's not quite right here. It's also a very formal word, so not quite what you want to use in a friendly, informal blog. Also when you mean 'instructions that you give or get to find a particular place', the word directions is always plural. Finally, you ask directions from someone. It's true you ask for directions but you still have to ask for directions from someone. So let's look at your sentence:

… sparing us nobody to ask for direction

Usually we'd use spare like this:
The solders killed all the men in the village but spared the children
The hurricane destroyed our house but luckily we were spared

You could rework your sentence like this:

Apart from us there was nobody to ask directions from

But if you're lost you wouldn't ask yourselves for directions, so the apart form us is actually redundant. You could reword your original sentence in lots of ways. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

a. There was nobody to ask directions from
b. There was nobody around to ask directions from
c. There was nobody around we could ask directions from
or, more formally, d. There was nobody from whom we could ask directions

Finally, I don't know what the abbreviation GWK stands for. Can you let us know?

All the best,
Nuala

Vocabulary
congrats - short for congratulations
nipped over – went
snaps – photographs
Chinglish – the incorrect use of English on some Chinese written signs
captured – caught (or here, took)
on film – with a camera
get the joke – understand what makes the punchline (the final part) of a joke funny
queue up – stand in a line behind other people, waiting for something
big-headed – having a very high opinion of yourself, thinking that you are very good or very clever (the joke here is that the picture makes me look like I have a big head, so that makes me look big-headed)
look back fondly – remember with good feelings, with fondness
nerve – the rudeness of doing something that you know will annoy or upset someone
moan – talk negatively or complain about something
enormous – very big
incredibly vertically challenged – humorous way to say that someone is very small
redundant – unnecessary because it is more than is needed

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