Days 63 to 65 - Sun Dec 4 to Tue Dec 6 - A plague upon you, plagiarists

December/January is the end of the Chinese university semester, so most days Dre has a lot of free time to spend with us, in between private lessons and exams.  This year he's taught his third year students to write research essays in English and which leaves him with 160+ papers to mark before the final exam on December 8th.   Pierre and I are recruited for a few days to help out with some of the easier aspects of marking, such as format (proper margins? proper font and bibliography style?) and plagiarism patrol.

Every year in school, Canadian professors warn students that it's incredibly easy to spot plagiarism.  I sometimes get the impression that the faculty find plagiarism not so much unfair as insulting.  The general consensus among profs and TAs seems to be "Really, do they think we're that stupid?"  Now I better understand what they mean.   When you go from "Dickens is many years ago all fame writer..." to "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches..." - well, you've got plagiarism.  Sometimes it's really that simple and obvious. (PS. That's an actual sentence "borrowed" by a student, courtesy of John Steinbeck.) 

Since the students are new to APA style referencing, the plagiarism in this semester's papers has to be judged on a curve.  Andre's general rule is this:

• if the text in question is not set off by quotations or indentation, but the text borrowed is listed in the bibliography and/or noted in brackets at the end of the quote, that isn't considered plagiarism on this assignment.

Otherwise, it's plagiarism.

A lot of the students have referenced their quotes with indenting, etc, so those essays are quickly added to the "to be marked" pile.  The ones with obvious or suspected plagiarism are put in the  "to be Googled" pile.  By the tenth time we have to head over to the computer to Google phrases, we start to get pretty annoyed.  

The signs of plagiarism are usually pretty obvious - drastic shift in the quality of writing, turns of phrases that Normal Mailer would be proud of, and so on - and with ESL students, the signs are even more clear.  Especially clear are any cultural references that aren't within the experience of your typical, atheist/Buddhist, never-been-abroad student.  A flawless paragraph of text that includes the phrase "As Allah has taught us..."?  Plagiarized.   References to lesser cultural institutions such as the 4-H club within a well-crafted sentence? Plagiariffic.

We find ourselves start saying thing like "You guys aren't going to like this one - proper use of the semi-colon." 

Plagiarists aside, we're all impressed with what these students have written and it's an interesting introduction into Chinese culture and thought, siphoned through the minds of Chinese university students.  Their writing includes a lot of interesting idioms  - we learn things like: the Chinese equivalent of "bad apple" (as in "one bad apple spoils the bunch") is "the dung of a mouse" (as in ""the dung of  mouse can destroy a pot of soup").

We also come across a saying about choosing your friends wisely: "Friends always will have an immeasurable impact on people.  Just as the saying goes, who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl."

Original thought and any effort to craft an original sentence get points for the students, even if their sentence results in an unfortunate punchline.  In the case of a female literary figure whose downfall is caused by premarital sex, we have the memorable: "...it was her honesty, care, braveness, and penetration that led to her tragedy."

Some skip the dictionary and work with what they know, such as:

        Exhibit A: "she refused to be babied"

        Translation via context:  She didn't want to get pregnant 

        Exhibit B: "Female are really made of water."  

        Translation via context: Girls cry a lot.

Some sentences prove that electronic translators, like Babelfish, are not always so useful:  this sentence, regarding some Australian holiday ritual, is mystifying in a way that only an electronic translator can be: "At holiday evenings people take the drinks to the forest to hold a picnic which called 'Pakistan do not occupy.' "

Babelfish does have its poetic moments, such as one student's discussion of the benefits that newly graduated teachers brought to the rural villages where they had taught: "Once section of time, they had woven riot color dream for the village children."   Not English, exactly, but beautiful - I love the idea of weaving a "riot color dream" for someone. 

A lot of the essays make us laugh, but in a respectful (though drink-spraying) kind of way. Myself, I find English blunderers charming.  These are my people.  I fully realize that they make the same caliber of mistakes that fumble out of my mouth when I speak other languages.

At one point, while we're trying to riddle our way through a few sentences, I say to the guys "You know, some of these papers are thrown together and full of plagiarism, but they're still  probably a lot better than some papers that North American profs have to mark.  It must be so depressing to get this kind of paper from a native English university student."   What a sobering thought - the three of us share a moment of silence for those profs and TAs as we continue to mark. 

Several of the students are very eloquent and, in addition to the funny bits, we read out some of the more impressive ones, like this mini-rant from Wayne regarding the study pressures on Chinese kids (title: "Crisis of Adolescents' Values Education"):

"In any era, children should be the people who are light-hearted and spend most of their time playing with friends.  However, children are the busiest, saddest and thorniest people.  What education gave children are: exams but not dreams, reciting but not singing, homework but not hankering, marks but not hopes, get up early and sleep late."

Days 48 to 76 - Sat Dec 20 to Sat Jan 17 - Livin' La Vida Huizhou

This short blog post is my way of fudging through our time in Huizhou.  I've decided to make this entry the great dot-dot-dot of blog posts for a few reasons:

a) I want to shorten the lag between the actual date as I write this (mid-January) and the date of the trip blog (still back in mid-December) so that I'm not too far behind while we're touring Cambodia.

b) We aren't really doing much in Huizhou (sounds like "hway-jo"; rhymes with "away go").  

In university, Christmas vacation was traditionally the time of year when I'd go home to mom and dad's for a visit.  In a good year (take home exams or full year course with no mid-term), I could manage 3 or 4 weeks at home between the end of classes and the start of the new semester.  Those weeks were always spent doing a mishmash of things, and usually included great visits with family and friends, lots of movies and books, home-cooked meals.  When the weeks were over, I could never figure out where all the weeks had gone but I knew I'd enjoyed almost every minute.  

That's the best comparison I can think to make for our 4 weeks in Huizhou.   We're spending a lot of time with Dre and his Chinese family, getting into the city, exercising, doing a bit of footwork for Pierre's work visa, catching and fighting off colds, watching episodes of "How I Met Your Mother", and so on.  It's not the way we plan to spend our next 6 months in China, but it's feels perfectly respectable for a winter holiday.  

Days 46 to 48 - Thurs Dec 18 to Sat Dec 20 - Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the first place where we've spent any length of time without a guidebook to guide us.  I wouldn't recommend visiting Hong Kong on a budget without a guidebook, especially if you can't read Chinese or speak Cantonese.  

I find that travelling without a guidebook leads to a lot of wandering around looking for decent, inexpensive meals.  This is fun in moderation, but can lead to long gaps between meals and snacks.  I don't do well without regular meals - when Pierre's hungry he handles it graciously, remaining polite and interactive.  I, on the other hand, have to shut down a few systems to keep things civil.  Until my blood sugar gets back to a normal level, I work hard to muster up a polite tone of voice to say things like "Can we maybe not talk until I'm fed?"  This isn't new to me - in every city and every country we always have to fumble around a bit before finding places to eat.  By the time we leave Hong Kong on Day 48 we've almost got the food thing figured out, so we're a little more prepped for upcoming visits.  (We'll need to drop into Hong Kong a few times over the next seven months to catch flights to other countries and for visa runs.)

The first two nights we stay at the Dragon Hostel, which is located in the Sincere House building on Argyle Street near Mong Kok station. In spite of the dodgy-sounding signs of some of it's neighbours ("Hourly Spanish Hotel- 70 HK$ one hour") it's an award winning hostel and in a decent, central neighbourhood.  

In Canada, Pierre tried to describe to me the quirks of the hostels in Hong Kong, but I didn't really understand.  Here's what I know after my trip to Hong Kong: a hostel's office may be located on the 9th floor, but it may also have blocks of rooms on multiple floors.  A hostel may have rooms on only one floor, but no one floor is dedicated to only one hostel.  From what we saw, the Sincere House building has many floors (let's say 16) and each floor is a mishmash of personal residences, hostels, businesses and whatever else someone decides to use their apartment space for.  

Since something got mixed up with our reservation, Dragon House has a room for us Day 45 (6th floor), a room for us on Day 46 (9th floor) but nothing on Day 47.  So, on that day we switch to another hostel that's conveniently located a few metres away from our Day 46 room, which in turn was located next to an apartment-slash-belly dancing studio.  

The main reason we're in Hong Kong is to get to China and this requires a tourist visa. Getting a visa for any country can be a hassle (especially without a guidebook to ease the way) and according to my Internet/news reading, Chinese tourist visas are still a bit tricky to get - this is a hangover from the tight restrictions initiated for the 2008 Olympics.  On top of this, it's Thursday morning before we start getting our paperwork together, it takes at least 24 hours to get a rush visa, and the visa office isn't open Saturdays.   We really don't want to stay in Hong Kong until Monday or Tuesday just to get a Chinese visa, so we cave in and pay Dragon Hostel to take care of the footwork for us.   Our tourist visas/passports return to us Friday afternoon without a hitch - it costs a couple hundred dollars for two double-entry visas but it's worth every penny.  I don't know if we would have had a chance to see much of the city otherwise.

I've been saying "Hong Kong" a lot but, technically, during this visit we never cross over to Hong Kong proper .  Our hostel is located in Kowloon, north of Hong Kong.  When we walk south to the pier and look across the water we can see Hong Kong.  Near dusk, Hong Kong looks like this (on the left): 

...and at night it looks like this:

During our next visit we plan to check out Hong Kong, but on this trip we've got our hands full with Kowloon. A tourist brochure we pick up at the airport recommends a few self-guided walking tours, which lead us to the bird market:

 

...the flower market (where the flowers are pretty typical so this is the only picture we have from the flower market):

...the goldfish market...

...and, eventually, a night market:

On Day 47, we wander around outside a bit before heading into the Harbour City shopping mall.  It's hard to describe a mall and make it sound different, but this one's really big -  two-million-square-feet big.  The mall has piers next to it to allow cruise ships to pull up and drop off passengers for a few hours of shopping and these cruise ships are dwarfed by the mall.

(Part of me says, "hey, the square footage of the West Edmonton is more than twice Harbour City's" but, really, I think that 2 million square feet is the point at which "really big" and "bigger" stop meaning much.  Super Big Gulp vs a case of pop...either way is still too big for one person to be drinking...)

We get disoriented wandering around the different wings of the mall before we escape to the street again, but the visit is not a loss - we find both a reasonably-priced restaurant with amazing food (Canton Deli) and a huge mostly-English bookstore.  I'm 90% sure we can find both of those stores again someday.  

Photo credits: P, P, P, P, P, P, D, P

Day 45 - Wed Dec 17 - BKK -> KUL -> HKK

The 10:30 am flight from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur is short and uneventful; the main terminal building where our flight lands is dull and in transition.  Wall posters line the corridors advertising the names of shops, saying "Stop by and Shop here.  It'll be just what you want." After a short walk around, we figure out that this message means that the stores are coming (soon?) but that right now there's nothing here to window shop.  Our stopover is only about 6 hours long - not enough time to take a guided tour from the airport into the city - so we resign ourself to sticking around the terminals.  A shuttle train takes us over to the Satellite Building where we can kill time and catch our next flight. 

The Satellite Building is the usual mix of liquor/tobacco/electronic shops.  I usually find that those kinds of stores hold few surprises, so I'm pretty impressed when I find this:

Yes, wooden Lord of the Rings tobacco pipes, with a different design for several key pipe-smoking characters.  Now you too can own your own tobacco pfiefe.  I don't remember ever seeing these in Canada - maybe it's a German thing?

We wander around to stretch our legs, and ride on the long pedestrian Travellator conveyor belts ("The Travellator has ended").   Airport signs are all in English, Malay, Chinese, and sometimes Japanese.  After 6 weeks of inscrutable Thai script, Malay with its Latin script is a treat.  Malay seems like a pretty language.  Take the term Tuala wanita for example - no other language has ever made "sanitary disposal" sound so good.  Some words, like "Immigation/Customs" are clearly borrowed from English (Imigresen/Kastam).  Other words have no links.  "You are here" becomes Anda Di Sini, and the word for children is so nice they use it twice (kanak-kanak). 

We manage to find a reasonably (by Canadian airport standards) priced meal at a Malaysian coffee shop/deli chain called "Doma." Pierre enjoys his Malaysian meal, but is more blown away by my fish and chips ("It's what all fish and chips should aspire to be"):

Our flight to Hong Kong leaves around 6:30 pm, and on account of the time change we don't arrive at Hong Kong International airport until around 10:45 pm.  Between  immigration (passport stamp is good for 90 days for Canadians), customs, search for Internet access (to find our hotel address), and locating the bus to the city center, we just barely manage to catch the last city bus into town.  At 30HK$ each (around 5$CAN), the bus is several times cheaper than taking the speed train and metro, and much more convenient.  Pierre's been to Hong Kong a few times before so he gets to lead this part of the dance. We settle into our bunk-beds well after 1:00am and are very grateful to finally stretch out and sleep.

Random Thai Stuff - puffy food bags

These really aren't all that exciting, but I found this style of packaging food to be particularly Thai.  At the very least, I haven't yet run into this anywhere else: everything from tiny bags of soy sauce and bags of fruit/desserts, take-out soup - it's all packaged up in ballooned plastic bags like this:

Not only does it pass the cute test, but it's very practical - keeps your food from getting squished, stands upright on its own...genius. Some places have a rows and rows of bags prepped this way:

Photo credits: P

Random Thai Stuff - keychains

Almost every place we stay at has some signature key chain that is never quite what I expect. I start taking photos of them a few days into the trip so I can remember them and I've put a few here as samples.

Several of the rooms we stay in have electricity that shuts off whenever the key chain is removed from a custom wall cradle - this way you never forget your TV/AC/fan on all day while you're out:

The thinking behind most other key chains seems to be "If we make it big and clunky maybe the bloody tourists will stop forgetting them." It works - you definitely know when you have your key on you.

This one came with a glasses case attached: 

Another key came with both a doll and a rectangular slab of wood attached, complete with a picture of our bungalow:

The winner for classiest key chain is definitely the P. California guesthouse in Nang Rong with its handmade ceramic thingy:

Photo credits: D

Random Thai Stuff - Garbage Cauldrons

The garbage cauldron is the Thai equivalent of a metal garbage can in Canada.  They sit at the roadside near the end of driveways where, I assume, the garbage truck comes by to empty them from time to time.  (We never saw a garbage truck do this, so I'm just guessing.)  The sides are constructed from a tire turned inside out, and the bottom and lid are constructed from other various bits of tire.  This was the most scenic one that we saw: 

They're tiny compared to a metal garbage can, and don't hold all that much garbage.  Thai's tend to burn a lot of garbage so most trash goes up in smoke rather than out to the curb.  Very smelly, and even resorts will burn trash near restaurants if and when they feel like it. 

Photo credits: D

Random Thai Stuff - The King (and I)

The King of Thailand's image is everywhere - on the money (of course)...

...but also on buses, in restaurants, in homes.  Every town has it's own image of the king and queen outside on display, often 10 feet or more high with a thick gilded frame.  There are rules surrounding how to treat the king's image, which extends as far as not licking a stamp that has his image on it - the proper way to attach one of those stamps is to use the damp sponge made available by the post office.

Thais seem to not only have a deep respect for the king, but also a real affection for him and it ends up rubbing off on me.  I  know that the information I read is propaganda, but my inch-deep-mile-wide tour of Thailand leaves me with the impression that the king was a hip cat in his day. By far, my favourite picture of the king is what I call "The king and The King" (assign the capitalization to each man as you please):

Oh, skinny Elvis, you were so fine.  

I searched around but wasn't able to locate a copy of this photo for myself, so I took a photo of the photo as a consolation prize.  

 Photo credit: D

Random Thai Stuff - Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages

When graphic warnings first became mandatory on Canadian cigarette packaging, it sounded like a good way to get the point across.  We have kids on packages (title: Don't poison us), droopy cigarette ash (Tobacco use can make you impotent), people on life support (Cigarettes cause lung cancer) and more.

Thai cigarette packaging is way more intense.  Every time I walk by  a cigarette stand it blows me away.  The pictures show tracheal-tube holes, rotting teeth, cancerous lips, last rites on corpses - the Thailand's ministry of health decided that gritty was the way to go with their messaging.  

Random Thai Stuff - Thai @#&! Payphones

Thai payphones are unreliable. There are multiple types of payphone, owned by multiple companies and which each seem to prefer a different phone card.  Even if you manage to locate three identical payphones side-by-side, each one will react differently to your attempted call - this one won't accept 10 baht coins, that one won't accept phone cards and the third one just won't dial your number.  Pierre had the worst time trying to find phones that would let him make calls to Canada, and even local calls were sometimes a gamble.  To change Pierre's mood to "seethe" all I have to do is bring up Thai payphones.

The only thing in their favour is that some of them are pretty:

Photo credits: D

Random Thai Stuff - Terrible subtitles

We watch a number of movies in bars while we're in Koh Tao - it's hard to resist the floor cushions, leather couches, and large screen TVs.  The bars on the island are all open-walled, like a birdcage (if the birds could come and go as they pleased).  To compensate for the ambient noise of motorcycles on the street and drinkers all around you, the staff puts on the English subtitles.  

All of the movies in Thailand seem to be bootlegs - the latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is available on DVD at the bars only a few days after it opens in theatres.  To meet the demand of getting these tapes out onto the streets, the Head Bootlegger seems to pay someone to whip up some English subtitles.  

It's not that I haven't seen bad subtitling before.  Closed captioning, for example, is consistently bad on most North American shows.  The best example I have of this is from New Year's Eve 1997, when I found myself stuck at Ottawa U's then-campus bar The Nox (or as I like to think of it: The Obnoxious).  Around 1:00 am I happened to look at the TV above the bar and noticed the closed captioning had degenerated from "hurry canes have been spotted in the yeast" to "dfas fgrw ga assfagrrt."  I assume the closed captioner was pounding on the keyboard with one fist while pounding back a beer with the other.

Subtitling in Thailand has a bit more finesse than a drunk on New Year's Eve, but is still more misleading than helpful.  During movies, I write down just a few of the mis-transcriptions so that I wouldn't forget them:

Movie: Tropic Thunder

Spoken Line: Back in '98

Subtitle: Recognize deal.

Movie: Pineapple Express

Spoken Line:  You didn't think of that.

Subtitle: Your bigger ass.

Movie: Get Smart

Spoken Line:  Oh, a pocket knife.

Subtitle:  Oh, punk.  Nice.

Spoken Line:  Sorry, sir.

Subtitle: Send it to the entrance.

Spoken Line:  Unusual but effective.

Subtitle: A loser or a fat boy.

Spoken Line:  Why Los Angeles?

Subtitle: Violence angels.

Spoken Line:  Chief!

Subtitle: Jesus.

Random Thai Stuff - These are the brands I know I know*...

*The title is set to the tune of These Are The Daves I Know by The Kids in the Hall.  

Just because.

Photo credits: D, D

Days 44 and 45 - Tue Dec 16 and Wed Dec 17 - To Phukhet and beyond

There's not much to say about Phuket since it was a one-night stopover for us (although I should probably mention again that the town's name is pronounced "poo KET" and not the way your phonetic instincts want to say it.)   We hunt down a meal at a restaurant near our hotel, then head over to the night market for dessert.  

I decide to sneak in one last Thai massage (which turn out to rate only a 6 out of 10) to erase the memory of a terrible one I got in Railay (a 3 out of 10, truly the limp-handshake of Thai massages.) Pierre takes the opportunity to get out and take a few photos of the local architecture, which the guidebook categorizes as "Sino-Portugese":

A mellow end to our trip to Thailand.  The next morning, we split costs on a taxi to the airport with a couple of English tourists and catch a flight to Hong Kong.

Photo credits: all P  

Days 42 and 43 - Sun Dec 15 and Mon Dec 16 - (Life of) Railay

Railay is another southern Thailand stop that's hard not to love.  Just a short boat ride from Krabi, Railay (rhymes with "wryly") is not actually an island, but it's not reachable by land.  The guidebook labels Railay an "isthmus", but my instincts call it a peninsula.  It's cut off from the mainland by cliffs - there are no roads in Railay, only walking routes that are sometimes sandy, sometimes paved.  

I visited Railay around 2002 during the Chinese New Year, and I was determined to make it back again on this trip to share it with Pierre, even if just for a day.  One day is all we can afford to spend here, as it turns out, because we have to be in Phukhet for our flight on Wednesday (Day 45) morning.  I was afraid that the peninsula would be grossly overdeveloped compared to 6 or 7 years ago, but although it's definitely more developed, it hasn't been deformed by it and Railay remains small and charming. 

The beach on the east side of the peninsula where we are staying (cheaper) is not much more than a mud flat when the tide is out, but the we$t side has several gorgeous beaches which are only a short walk away from us.  On Day 42, we check out the main beach:

The next morning, we hike over to a lagoon located in the south end.  This requires a steep climb up a hill, and then a climb straight down a series of short cliffs (around 10 to 15 feet high) to the lagoon below.  The trip to the lagoon is well-worn and popular, with a series of ropes to help when going up and down, and the ropes are stained with the area's red mud, worked in by the hands of every person who works their way up and down to this:  

Along the path is yet another enormous Thai tree with roots as big and wide as boat sails, and people stop to leave a muddy hand print on its base from time to time:

A lookout lets us see the peninsula from up high - looking towards the west:

...and then down towards our side on the east:

Back at the bottom of the hill where the trail to the lagoon began, we take a left and head to Phra Nang beach, which wins our award for most beautiful and cozy beach in Thailand:

Long-tail boats line the shore, hired by tourists from other islands and towns for the day to make the trip here.  Some of them have English names painted on the sides next to their numbers, making it easier for the tourists to remember which boat is theirs.  (Personal favourites include "Rambo" and "99 Gretzsky"):

There are a few vendors walking around, selling the usual mish-mash of sarongs and beach mats, and a few of the boats double as food kiosks:

Our bungalow in Railay is not very sturdy, and to avoid losing any of our valuables, especially our camera, we carry our important stuff around with us at all times.  This makes going for a swim together difficult since we can't leave our bags alone on the beach.  On Day 43, Pierre joins the other tourists for a swim before sundown - I sit that swim out because I'm still in a foul mood from hitting the crown of my head against a low-hanging stalactite when I was quarter past hungry (low blood sugar + head trauma = time out).  But on Day 44,  we each take a turn running down to the beach while the other packs up, and we each have one last/first (Pierre/Dianna) chance to float beneath the the limestone cliffs before we run off and catch the ferry to Phukhet.

Photo credits: all P

Day 41 - Sat Dec 14 - Khao Phanom Bencha National Park

We scheduled our longest drive for day 40 so that Day 41, our final day in Krabi, would be an easy one.  Khao Phanom Bencha (pronounced "COW pa-NOM BEN-chuh," I believe) is only 20 km drive from our hotel, so our late start doesn't seem like a big deal until vague directions from the guidebook ("just follow the sign-posted turn off from Hwy 4") takes us 15 km in the wrong direction up the wrong highway. By the time we do find the correct turn off, we're pretty cranky.  The turn off from the highway leads to a beautiful, quiet road that winds past fields, forests, karsts and mountains, and by the time we reach the gate, we're starting to feel better. The hike up the waterfall seals the deal - were we cranky? Lost?  Feels like days ago.  It's hard to stay upset when faced with this:

It's Saturday so the waterfalls are a bit busier, mostly with Thai schoolchildren cooling off from the heat of the day.  A group of girls practice their hellos and goodbyes on us and their giggling mixes with the sound of the waterfall.  After the calm and quiet of yesterday's work-day waterfalls, today's noisiness makes me think that a waterfall without children is like a garden without birds.

The hike up the mountain is a lot more challenging than we expect (a pleasant surprise) and the path leads straight up the steep mountain, along the waterfall and its pools, and offers some great views, both on the way up the right-hand side :

...and down the left.

On our way down, we keep an eye out for millipede houses on the trail, like this one so that we don't step on them:

We notice one that's really oddly made and joke that the the milliped must've been doped up on something that day.  The joke reminds me of a story (urban legend?) I heard once about scientists giving LSD to spiders in the 60s and all the crazy webs that came out of it, and I mention it to Pierre.   He's quiet for a moment, then offers up our Deep Thought for the day: "I wonder what spiders see when they're tripping?" He stops walking and channels a tripping spider, clawing at his arms.  "Oh my god, there are people everywhere! Get them away from me, get them off..."  

Our walk continues around and through some vines and trees:

...and when we reach the bottom of the trail, we take a right and take a short walk to another waterfall.  This waterfall is petite, more like a series of low shelves, and it seems even smaller next to the trees that tower up around it. (I'm dwarfed by it in this picture):

The tree is so tall that Pierre can't fit the whole tree into one shot.  It towers so high and the roots are so wide that once we've hung around the base for awhile we start to find the tree a bit creepy, like it could lift up one leg and squash us flat with its foot.  

Photo credits: all P except for the second one