Some rain today, among other things...

8/29

I woke up on my own this morning at about 6:45 and I started working on these blogs. We’ve been so busy lately I haven’t been able to have time to do them till now. The internet has been a pain to work with so I will post these as soon as possible.

Same start, a huge breakfast down on floor two and then we were out to the museum. There was a ton of old Chinese bronzes, coinage, jades, etc. Lots of stuff that I’ve seen pictures of in my Chinese Art History class at home. After an hour there, (oh and by the way it’s pouring rain but a group of us took the opportunity to enjoy the warm rain and walked around from place to place) we went to an contemporary art museum to see some other artist paintings, photographs, etc. It was pretty cool.

We decided to go find some random place for lunch. Almost all the students and Edwin (our GTF and only other person besides Ying who speaks Chinese) went out and Joel tried to converse with a lady at a while we were waiting for Katie to try and get her ATM card out of the machine that stole it. Joel was hilarious, he was trying to find the word “chicken” in his small Chinese/English book and couldn’t find it. We told him he should play charades and he acted like a chicken. The people laughed and we laughed and the lady acted right back but still didn’t seem to know what he wanted. We left that stand and found a random restaurant and went in. We got our own room for free and free tea (one thing that is great about China is people really appreciate your business and they’ll try hard to impress so that you’ll come back again). They gave us the only English menu they had which was barely in English. It was very poorly written and there was even some made up words in it. Edwin just ordered up some stuff, it was fantastic, and we left. Once again the meal with drink was only about $4 per person and they never expect any tips. Time flew by and we barely had enough time to make it back to our hotel where our bus was waiting to take us into the, I guess art district where a lot of students studios and galleries were.

We walked around a lot of galleries with some really good, some really boring/bad artwork. After that we met up with a famous Chinese artist that Ying had arranged for us to meet. He owns studios in Shanghai and New York and spoke great English. We talked with him about his work and his life and then we left.

Afterwards we went to a tea house for refreshments. The rain had stopped and once again it was hot and extremely humid, like a rainforest humid. We had some drinks and food. I got some ice cream for 20 Yuan and when they brought it to meet it looked great. It looked so good that two other people ordered it. The ice cream was good, but once I got down to half the glass I found that the bottom half was ice cubes, odd.

We caught taxis to get home, which by the way are also dirt cheap. They’re 11 Yuan flat fare which will get you a mile or two, the most we’ve had to pay is 19 Yuan for a ride for four people, which is about $2.50.

When we got back we relaxed in the hotel for a bit and then had a group meeting about what we want to do for our projects. By now I’ve thought of a bunch of different stuff to do. A few of my ideas were: exploring the patterns and normalness of what appears to us as absolutely chaotic traffic. Another idea is researching more on the roles of the homeless, which are so much sadder here then back at home.

After the meeting we got ready and headed out to dinner. We tried to order some king snake but they said that we had to order it some time in advance. So we got some eel instead. Not to mention more dumplings, more fried noodles, etc.

Afterwards it was about 9-9:30 and we had to get up and be ready by 6:00 am the next morning… so naturally we went out to check out the night life and visited some bars. We went to the “bar district” which was where there were expensive tourist bars (lots of old white business guys with their beautiful young Chinese girls). We stopped by a bar where some live music was going on. The band was all right. We ordered a drink, which was about 80 Yuan each! None of us wanted to pay any more so after 45 to an hour we took off and walked back home. It was about 12:30 – 1 and most of us decided to go to bed.