Let's turn back the clock about a month, to the 2009 Knox County Fair. This year's event took place from Aug 12 - 16, and we actually modified when we left Nebraska to come to Taiwan so that we could attend. It was a lot of fun, and I will write more about the fun everyone had another day, but today I want to start off with a look at something that shocked me - the prevalence of Chinese character tattoos on attendees of the fair.
Call me old-fashioned, but Knox County, Nebraska is not a place I expect to see this:
Since I hadn't done much in terms of Chinese in a good couple of weeks at that point, it took me a few moments to decode it, but here are the characters: 友人, yǒurén, meaning "friend." OK, I can understand this tattoo on this person, makes sense to me.
Then I saw this guy:
The first two pictures are of the left side of the back of his neck; the third photo is of the right side. The left character is 恶, è, meaning vicious or terrible, and the right one is 鬼, guǐ, which means ghost. Put them together and we have 恶鬼, èguǐ, or "vicious ghost." OK, this one also makes sense, some characters to put forth a fearsome or menacing message from a man. Interesting how we have a welcoming, happy message of "friend" from the woman and the opposite, "vicious ghost" from the man.
I was at the fair only a fraction of the time it was going on, and I saw two people with visible Chinese character tattoos. This says nothing about the people whose body markings are not visible in regular clothing. We can see from this small sample that a) tattoos are becoming more and more commonplace, and 2) people in Knox County, Neb. like the Chinese language. 
Finally, this guy doesn't have any visible tattoos, in Chinese or anything else, but he is about the least-motivated looking person I have seen in a long time! OK, monitoring the bouncy house may not be the most exciting job on the midway, but come on!
"Get me out of Knox County!"
GJS
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