Catching Up

Wow. Well this week was the one month anniversary of arriving in China! And I can't believe this is only my third post. Don’t worry, everything is still great here! Lets see, I guess to catch everyone up, I need to start at Friday the 8^th. That was the day we did the Peking Opera face painting! For those of you who don’t know, the Peking Opera is a very traditional and very old Chinese art. It is, obviously, an opera but there are only 4 characters, each distinguished by the different color/style of face paint they have on. We did the blue character, which I think is the clownish character in whatever story is being told. But first, our teacher taught us a Peking Opera martial arts move, which included a sword (don’t worry, the one we used was wood). Here’s our teacher and a couple friends “performing”:

Then came the face painting! We had partners and we each painted the other person’s face. The teacher would come around and do one step for us, then we would repeat on the other side.

 Before

My canvas, Anna

First were the eyebrows.

Then the eyes and cheeks. The pattern on the cheek is supposed to be a lotus flower and on the eyes it’s a lotus leaf.

The mouth came next. It was supposed to look like a handlebar mustache (that’s not what the teacher told us. I came up with that one myself). A lotus leaf on the forehead and then time to start filling in!

Black around the eyes.

Red in the mouth, gold in the cheeks, pink on the forehead lotus leaf, blue everywhere else, and voila! You’re done!

The walk back to the dorm was the BEST. I was totally living it up, staring people down and scaring the pants off of them. So much fun! When I got back, I pressed my face into a piece of paper and made this:

Pretty sure I can pass it off as modern art. Anyway, getting the paint off was a pain in the butt. I literally scrubbed for about 10 minutes before it all came off. Totally worth it!

The next day, we woke up early and headed out to volunteer at the autism institute. A little background on mental disorders in China: most Chinese refuse to believe they exist. To them, anyone that is not healthy and perfect in every way is a burden on society. Therefore, the institute that we visited was on the outskirts of Beijing because that was the only place they could find land that would allow them to do their work. Even then, the community still has been very unsupportive of them. The government as well has not given them any money or any rights either. The director has had a really hard time acquiring and maintaining his permit. Every year it’s a struggle for them to stay afloat. Considering all of that, it was quite the experience! We were working with the 8-15 year olds, of which there where about 40. For being so poor, their set up was actually pretty nice. They had a trampoline, a stage, some playground equipment and a few porch swings. My friend Hannah and I found this one kid who was kind of off in the corner with his fingers stuck in his ears. We took him to the other room because it was quieter and then sat with him and tried to get him to open up. We tried to do art with him, but the only way he would draw anything was if I put the pen in his hand and then, with his fingers still in his ears, I would hold the piece of paper up and he would jab at it with the pen. He seemed to like that, but he finally took his fingers out of his ears and realized he like drumming on the floor with the pens even better. After lunch I kind of lost track of him, but found him again before we left and he had done this amazing pattern on a piece of paper! I told him that if was very very pretty and he should be very proud of himself. That got a smile out him. Overall it was a very enriching, enlightening and enjoyable experience.

Last week was pretty uneventful. Just a typical week of school here in China. Friday night was interesting though. We decided that we wanted to explore the bar scene in Beijing a bit more than we had so far, so we decided to take the Subway to this area called Suanlingtar and go to a salsa-dancing club they apparently have there. Except when we got off the subway, we couldn’t find this place for the life of us! So we ended up at a German restaurant where I had the most delicious beer I’ve ever tasted (which isn’t saying much). Like Mom said, we were in China looking for a salsa-dancing club and ended up at a German restaurant. How very international of us! On Saturday we celebrated one of the girls on the program’s birthday by going to KTV. For those of you who don’t know, KTV is karaoke. Yes, I did karaoke. I was actually really impressed with the place we went. Each group of people gets an individual room, and we paid to get ours for 2 hours. The room had a nice leather couch, a huge table and a flat screen TV with a karaoke set. It was pretty cool! We’re planning on doing it again sometime.

The rest of the weekend was pretty typical and so was the week up until Wednesday when we woke up to 3 inches of snow! We were totally not expecting that. I took these pictures on my way to class:

After class and on our way to lunch, my New Zealand friend and I had a snowball fight. She’s pretty good at those for coming from New Zealand. That night, Hannah and I met up with my roommate for dinner. Kate (my roommate) has a friend who is a native Beijinger, so we went to dinner with the two of them. Afterwards, we went to a Hong-kong chain restaurant that only sells traditional, Chinese dessert.

Uncle Lenny, you where right, I wasn’t too sure about it.

Starting on the left and going clockwise we had red bean soup with vanilla ice cream, some coconut custard thing with black sticky rice and mango, some kind of tart and a mango and grapefruit soup. It was all pretty good, but I especially like the coconut stuff (and the vanilla ice cream, of course).

On Thursday, my New Zealand friend (Davina) and I went to the optometrist on campus and bought glasses! Yes, I know it sounds weird, but they where having a sale so I got new frames and new lenses for only about 16 US dollars. Quite the steal! I pick those on Monday and I’m so excited!

I think that just about catches everybody up on my life here. We’re leaving for a weekend excursion to Nanjing in about 3 hours, so I’m really looking forward to that! We’re taking an overnight train and everything! I’ll make a specific post just for this little side trip. If anybody has any questions about anything, for example, the Chinese people, what classes are like, my daily life, the food, anything like that, feel free to send them to me at melaniergoebel@yahoo.com and I’ll answer them on here. That’s all for now! Lots of love being sent home from China!