“I want to run like a horse pulling a pine tree.”

“I’m sorry, you want to what?”

“I want to run like a horse pulling a pine tree.”

“What are you talking about?”

This is how I imagined the conversation. Even though my boss speaks English I thought I might get extra points if I asked for time off to run the Pyongyang half Marathon in Chinese, but thought I’d probably mess it up. I looked up the Chinese word for “marathon,” which is made of three words: horse (ma), pull (la), pine tree (song