Clueless

Its been raining cats and dogs the whole night. So much so that it totally flooded the road that I have to walk through to get to my train station. Perfect excuse to not go to work. But it didn't happen, as Pete offered to drive me instead.

However, even he wasn't prepared to drive his car through knee-deep water (we saw this guy trying to ride his bicycle through - but he stacked it), so instead of dropping me off at my usual train station, he drove me to the next station along my train line.

And this is where I remembered this shop. We have probably driven past here everytime we go and eat shanghainese food. This shop was probably first pointed out to us by Mon, and everytime we drive pass it, we said we will blog about it. But both of us never realy did, (Sorry Mon, but I couldn't resist testing out my new camera phone). Yes, thats right, I finally got my new phone ~~ ! The Sony Ericsson K800i. The camera is so cool.. 3.2 mp ~~! And I can even blog straight from my phone to blogger. :)

Anyway, enough about my new phone, I'll talk more about that later.

Here is a photo of the shop in question:

I guess only the people who can read chinese will find this funny. The shop itself is supposed to be a hairdresser (no idea who would actually go there to cut their hair), but they used the wrong chinese words on their sign. The words used, actually means somewhere around the lines of 'ILLEGAL SHOP'. The pronounciation still sounds the same as 'hairdresser shop' - atleast in Cantonese it is. I'm not sure about Mandarin.

The first character means something like 'Not' or 'Non' when used in a sentence. The second character means 'Legal' or 'Law'. The third character means something like shop. So putting it all together, you get something around the lines of "Not-Legal-Shop'. Or Illegal Shop. (Pls correct me if I am wrong, I've never really learnt chinese and all I know now is from playing online chinese games).

This is the chinese character for hair - 髮

It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to type that, so if anyone else knows how to type out the chinese equivalent for hairdresser, pls post it in the comments section... thanks.

And no, I don't live in an Asian country. This would probably never occur in an Asian country. With a name like that, the shop will probably get raided by police everyday. Only in Australia would you see something like this. Although I can't be too sure, if the owner of this shop knows which country he is in.

Take a look at this...

Before anyone actually says that this is the Australian flag. Let me just say it isn't. The Australian flag has only 6 stars. This looks more like a cross between the Australian flag and the American flag.

So either the owner of this shop is completely clueless, or maybe they are just trying to convey a political message.... That Australia will one day become the 52nd state of America ???

I hope not.