An Olympic ticket postscript. Having booked and paid for all my lovely women's hockey tickets online, I went to the Bank of China this morning to pick them up. I handed over my passport and it was duly photocopied and …well… filed, I suppose. Where DO all the photocopies of passports go in China, there must be warehouses stacked full of them. (This morning I had to provide another one to get an ID card to walk in and out of the compound where I live.) Anyway, I was handed the tickets, and asked to sign for them. I had to copy out the script word for word, and the script was:
"The thermal tickets marked with the date of printed have been picked up."
I pointed out that this wasn't actually English, and the bank clerk told me that many other people had said the same thing, but 'it's come from above, we can't change it.' And of course she couldn't, so there was no point in complaining, I just buckled under and copied it out.