Back in Kunming

I'm back in Kunming after 10 days of traveling around Yunnan Province, staying in villages and accompanying my sister in law while she took pictures and studied the lifestyles of minorities.
It was quite the adventure.
I'll post a ton of pictures soon when we return to Beijing.

On the trip I realized how much having contact with family and friends means to me. I was really starting to feel isolated, but at the same time truly enjoying the time out there.


I'll write in the next few days...

to mom

hey,
I can't get gmail to work so I can't reply to your e-mail.

No worries about losing connection, I went to bed anyway.
And everything is fine now. I really shouldn't have mentioned anything anyway.

Wish us luck on our journey!

Talk to you soon,
love

farewell to blog

This is silly because I've already posted today, and only a little while ago...but I've been thinking and realizing what this trip is really going to entail.
The majority of our time will be spent in villages, sleeping in hostels, hotels or whatever we can find, and walking or busing to our destinations carrying what we've brought on our backs.
I probably won't use a computer for most of the time and probably won't have coffee to drink most of the time.
There won't be downloaded tv shows and movies to watch at night or music to listen to.
The only thing that will be familiar is Sebrina and Madison.

I've become addicted to this blogging business. Sadly it feels like a conversation I'm having with a friend who is a great listener. I'll miss it. Maybe I'll write my thoughts on paper with a writing utensil or something weird like that...

Blah.

So I didn't end up going to see the exhibit.
I turned out to have a big headache for the majority of the day and didn't want to go see art in that state, so I'll wait until we get back from the trip to see the show.

That's really all.
No news.

I'll post whenever I can.

Preview to our Journey

Starting Monday Sebrina, Madison, Shan Shan, and I are headed on an expedition.
It is literally a Journey to the West.

We're flying to Kunming, then traveling to a series of cities and villages. The projected stay in each location is 3 days. The trip will take approximately 20 days.
Sebrina is currently working on a Fulbright project where she is studying the housing styles of Chinese ethnic minorities. She already has students all around Yunnan province (where Kunming city is) who are collecting information, and this trip is so that she can get a firsthand perspective. She'll be taking architectural photos and meeting the people who live in some of the houses she's doing research on.
What's great about the trip is the ridiculous number of people going. Baby needs to go because she's still nursing. Shan Shan is going because she helps with baby, and she's a native Chinese speaker. I'm going because Sebrina is gracious and hopefully I can be of some help. Sebrina asked me to sketch the houses while we're there, so I'll give that a go. Anyway, that's four people, all needing places to stay, food to eat, and seats on buses.

Parts of the trip are going to be miserable, I'm sure, but I would hate to miss the adventure.

I don't know if I'll have internet access. If I don't I'll post when we get back to Beijing. If I do, well, I'll post pictures earlier than three weeks from now.

Also, before our trip I really want to get over to the 798 art district again because there's a show that just opened yesterday. In the description of the exhibition it said it has been designed in a 'playful' manner, with tunnels. I'll take pictures.

Alisha

I woke up this morning to an e-mail sent by my sister titled 'News.'
A title like that from her means it's something big.
And it was.

She and her boyfriend of several years are getting married. I'm stoked. They're two outgoing, fun people and they're going to be a dynamic duo, that's for sure.

Our family keeps getting bigger and bigger with new babies and marriages...when will it stop? nobody knows.

afternoon dreaming

Today I took an afternoon nap, a rare thing for me to do...
and had an interesting dream, maybe I should do it more.

As I fell asleep I listened to Bjork's album Selmasongs, which are all songs from the movie 'Dancer in the Dark.' For a large portion of that movie, Bjork is playing the role of a factory worker. It's a musical, so she breaks out in song while working a few times.

Anyway, I dreamt that I was asleep beside a large machine in a factory. The machine had a screen with lines made up of numbers moving both vertically and horizontally. Where my head rest there was an input to the machine. My head nearly was on the conveyor belt that ran through the machine. The machine also had something to do with Andy Warhol. I'm wondering if I was living in his factory.
In the dream I woke up and came to the realization that my dreams were being affected by my head's proximity to the large machine.
I woke up having one of those which world am i living in moments...Am I in the dream I'm having sleeping in the factory, am I in the factory, am I in the dream dreaming about the dream in the factory, or am I just sleeping?


I also saw Andy Warhol walking around in sunglasses with thick white borders.


Right after waking we went out to pay for the airplane tickets to Kunming. On our walk through an alleyway to hail a taxi we came to a road where there were two clusters of bikes lying abandoned in the middle of the street. A lot like a scene you might find in The Happening. It was a nice complementary continuation of the surreal.

Jemaine

Last night I had another dream about Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.
In the previous dream he was in Bellingham with me in a tree house on N. Garden St. We were dating.
Between then and now apparently in my subconscious our relationship progressed, because last night we were planning to be married.

:P

Jia You

Okay, I asked Sebrina what my shirt says under the I Heart China.
It says China! jia you! Chinese! jia you!
Jia You literally means add gas/oil, and the colloquial meaning is sort of Keep Going or maybe even work 'harder, bester, faster, stronger' like the trendy song...

Cookies and Michael Jackson

Today I woke up at about 11, just in time to prepare to eat lunch. :)
After lunch, and Sebrina dealing with Madison wailing for half-an-hour until she finally fell asleep, Sebrina and I went for coffee.
We hung out at the cafe for a while, then went to the store for the final ingredients necessary to make our planned cookies. We decided to make cookies to give to the neighbors so we could meet them and make them think we're really weird...apparently Chinese people really don't do that sort of thing, but being foreigners we've got the leeway to do whatever. We wanted some type of chocolate to replace chocolate chips since they don't sell those here. M&Ms made the most sense.

We walked around the store. I bought a sweet nonsensical metal water bottle that's got bold Chinese characters, an image of a mid-roar bear, and the English words "North Island Product Institute Compass." It's one of those phrases that seems like it should make sense, but no matter how hard you think about it, it never does. [if you like this, check out http://www.engrish.com]

We walked around the store some more and ended up buying snack packs of seaweed, these strange dried prunes that taste salty and sour, and a shirt I was really excited to find that says "I (heart-with the Chinese flag symbol filling it) China". Under that it urges China on to success with a popular Chinese phrase that I do not know.

We came back home and got started on those cookies. With the aid of Michael Jackson, we were pumped up and cranked them out 6 by 6 using their little toaster oven.

At dinner we were still listening to Michael Jackson, and wanting to share our enjoyment of his music with Shan Shan (the ayi), we sang the lyrics to "Bad" in Chinese...
"Wo shi huai de ren. Wo shi huai de ren. Ni ji dao le. (hen hen bu hao!)"
"I'm bad. I'm bad. You know it (really really bad)"
That was probably the highlight of my day. It was soooo funny. In Chinese it just sounds one hundred times cheesier.

Shanghai

Looks like I'll have a chance to go to Shanghai in August!

Shanghai is the most populated city in China with over 20 million people.
It's the modern hot-spot of the country.

an Exciting day

Today was a BIG day.
For me it started off with drowsiness, having only slept about 5 hours, but the day quickly got better. We had a scheduled meeting to attend, so we had to run out the door soon after waking. It was the first real Baha'i meeting I've been to in China, and actually is the first one I've been to in months. It was so refreshing. All the people there were really cool and the atmosphere was comfortable and exciting. The Baha'is here are starting their first IPG ever.
The meeting made me excited to come back to China in about a year or so on my own.

After that we went to lunch at a Korean place with stove tops embedded in the center of each table. Then we went to Starbucks, and then off to Summer Palace. Our venture to Summer Palace was intended to be in celebration of Madison's first birthday. She can't be around other foreign babies because she could get them sick, and she can't have sweet things because mom says no, so the park was the best thing we could come up with in place of a gathering of babies, or a big cake.

Summer Palace is an enormous complex built for the royalty so they could have a place to cool down in the summers. That's really all I know. We actually didn't enter the palace, but we walked around the outside for three hours, following the path of the longest corridor in the world.
It was a fun time full of beautiful architecture, interesting foreignors from all around, and a whole lot of practicing my poor Chinese walking with the ayi, arm in arm.

I took so many pictures today, it's difficult to choose which ones to post, so I might post some more tomorrow from today's journey.


You could rent those little toy boats to ride around the lake in.



Paintings everywhere!


The entrance to the longest corridor in the world, and family-Justin, Sebrina with the silly gestures, baby in the carriage, and Shan Shan (the ayi)'s back.


Colorful underside of a rooftop.


Detail of a stone carved lion.


At the entrance to the Summer Palace are these hefty doors painted red with golden knobs.


This was also at the Summer Palace. Finally I was able to capture one of my favorite things about China so far. The men are expected to carry their girlfriends' or wives' purses. What makes it so great is that a lot of the women like to buy bags just like that one, that simply could never pass for a man-purse. It makes me wonder if they buy the most feminine bags on purpose...

Gelato

I forgot to post this after taking it, but here it is now. We were walking around the electronics center and there was a man squatting on the sidewalk holding a caution sign taut, so we looked up and there were all of these men hanging off the building.



Today we went to buy some bigger crochet hooks for a project I'm going to start, and nearby was a nice air-conditioned mall they go to sometimes. We went for gelato and it was delicious, as gelato never fails to be. I was happy to see the flavors I always mix-chocolate and hazelnut-had been premixed and named 'kiss.' :)




That's about all for today.
I'm working on the baby book still. Justin is pushing the idea of the evolution of computers so I'm trying that out...using references to an old programming language called Cobol, and showing computers in their successive styles of the 70s, 80s, 90s, today, and the future.

hanging out in my room today

Tension is running a little high today in the house.
It's like Big Brother, except without the cameras video taping our every move...i hope.

I plan to spend a few hours alone in my room, giving the air of our close quarters throughout the rest of the apartment some time to simmer down.

I'm working on a book for Madison, and other geek spawn alike. My brother is a big computer guy, and a while back my family was chatting about how Madison might turn out being brought up by him. We realized she is going to need a helping hand in understand her father. Our best idea was a baby book she could read through childhood that taught her the basics of computer technology.
I'm sketching the pages now and am trying to write some little rhymes so it's not just an image of a computer screen with the label 'computer screen' beneath it.
Eventually I guess we'll scan the images, print them, and paste them onto a thicker baby book like pages.
:)

If you've got title ideas I'd like to hear them.

Holy Day and bikes

Today we went to a Baha'i Holy day, the first I've been to in China.
There were probably about 80 or so people-all foreigners-from a variety of places.

I saw somebody my sister knew really well, named Jessyn. He's from Mauritius so it's unusual he's here. I also met someone who also lives in Washington, here for his brother's wedding. Also, during the social time a man came up to me and said he was from Olympia and commented on the difference in air quality between there and here...which are significant.

Afterwards we went to the Baha'i-after-holy-day hang-out, which is a Persian restaurant. It was delicious and I realized the truth of it's popularity when the place eventually was full of Baha'is.
We met a girl who recently graduated from university, working with a wind turbine company here. Justin and Sebrina are trying to work on getting Shaun (my other brother) over here to do the same, since it is an interest of his. I doubt that will happen though, with his dislike for crowds, and a wife with a germinating baby.

After lunch Justin and I went to the gym, and I had a long conversation with a few high-school girls that wanted to practice their English. That was fun, and unusual for me. When I'm at the gym here I sort of feel like I'm back in America, so to get all of that attention felt odd, but I tried running with it. The girl I talked to is in love with the idea of going to America and thinks Americans are beautiful. She wants to become a flight attendant so she can travel to America. It's frustrating when people you see as equal put you on a pedestal. They tell you you're beautiful and that your country is but when you reply with the same kind words they don't seem to believe it.

Next time at the gym if we're both there at the same time again I'm sure we'll have another conversation, bike by bike.

Dream and Matchmaking

Dream:
Last night I dreamt I was at the same house for a big party that I've been to before in dream land. It was the third party at that house actually.
I was with my friend Katie and everyone was pretty akward. The house was more like a mansion and the windows were enormous, looking out onto a scape of vast city. The path leading to the house was on a steep slope.
Towards the end of the evening everyone but Katie, a few other people and I left. They all crammed into the back of a semi-truck, sitting side by side on the floor of the truck. I have no clue where they were going, but the owner of the house entrusted me with his key...which was very heavy. I couldn't figure out how to lock the house without keeping the key so I handed it off to some random person at the party before I left with Katie.

The significant part of the dream to me is the fact that it's a place that exists in dream-land and the fact that I've revisited it twice.




Matchmaking follow-up:
Yesterday was odd.
The bachelor and his friend who know the ayi came over early, around 10 am, and they started working on making jiaozi (chinese dumplings.) They wouldn't let us help and the kitchen isn't big enough to force yourself into, so Justin, Sebrina and I sat in the living room chatting. Justin and I got in a bit of a heated discussion for the first time ever, and eventually resolved it before they were done chopping in the kitchen. They came out with the innards and we all made the dumplings together. While we were putting them together, the woman arrived.
There was a lot of small talk because of unfamiliarity and language barriers. When we sat down to eat the interesting stuff started coming up.
The woman told them she owns a cat and she calls it her baby. The friend of the man replied, so you are lonely...We talked about her loneliness for a good 10 minutes until the woman was able to change the subject elegantly.
Then they told us about how the man is very shy.
Then they went on to explain all of his good qualities, like sincerity, honesty, and so on.
Unfortunately, none of us were being the spokesperson for the woman, so it ended up a strange dynamic where most of the conversation revolved around talking up the man who sat there quietly.
Apparently, if a person expresses a desire to find a mate, someone who they would like to marry someday, then their family gets fully involved. They set up a meeting just like this with a meal and have lengthy conversations, going back and forth about the respective parties' good qualities.
The gathering ended up lasting a full 5 hours, probably partly due to the amount of time it took to express a thought, often needing the aid of dictionaries.

After they got one another's phone numbers as seemed required, the two of them left. The ayi walked them out both because it's polite, and because she needed to get the scoop on what he thought of her. Immediately after they left Justin and I jumped on the woman (not literally. she would probably die if we put that much weight on top of her at once...) and said 'So, tell us what you thought?!'
She said she didn't feel like he was interested in her. She felt it would be easier for him to find someone who could speak Chinese better and that it would too difficult. Justin made the point that there are plenty of chinese women who don't speak english dating foreign men who don't speak chinese, but somehow that's just different.
I feel like his shyness made her feel unwanted. That makes sense, I think no matter the culture that could happen.
She expressed that she'll have to keep doing this until she finds the right guy. Sebrina suggested talking to my father because he has been a successful matchmaker in the past, so hopefully he's reading this and gets a heads up. I might have to e-mail him with what I understand her qualities are and see if he knows anyone... :P

But, apparently, as we found out in the evening, he did indeed like her and was interested.
That's what the ayi said at least.
I don't think she is interested in entertaining the thought much longer, but we'll see.

The story continues.

Matchmaking

There will be no naming of names in this post, although I'm sure there is no threat of rumors spreading since you won't know either of these people.

So the story goes that there is a foreign lady who has lived in Beijing for years who is reaching her 40s. She would really like to find someone to date and eventually marry, but it's proved to be very difficult in China. Generally it seems that foreign men hook up with Chinese women, but the other way around is very uncommon.
She's asked her Chinese friends to help her unfortunately to no avail.
But...recently Sebrina mentioned her predicament to the ayi (house helper) and she got excited, with a friend in mind. He's around the same age and is Mongolian. The only catch, that might be quite a barrier, is that he works at a tobacco and alcohol store...and he doesn't speak English.
It's a funny situation to observe because the Ayi is excited about the potential. The foreign woman is doubtful, since she neither smokes nor drinks alcohol and hardly speaks any Chinese.

The woman was supposed to call and say whether or not she was interested in meeting him after the ayi told her about him. She hadn't called, because she wasn't interested...but the ayi told him all about her and apparently he bought new clothing to impress her with the prospect of meeting her.

The guilt of him purchasing new clothing has caused Sebrina and the ayi to set up a chance for them to meet. So, tomorrow the plan is to have lunch at Justin and Sebrina's place and they will both be invited.

Matchmaking is suprisingly exciting business. I don't think it will work out, but it will certainly fair to be an interesting lunch tomorrow!

Check this out

This is in the Netherlands. It's a delicious installation that will be in that square for 6 months. It was done by a Dutch artist named Henk Hofstra, he titled it 'Art Eggcident.'

I always wonder how artists get permission to do things like this.
"So, what are you thinking of putting in the square this year Henk?"
"I've been reflecting a lot for this project. This one really means a lot to me....I plan to place 10 giant sunny-side up eggs, filling the town square."
?

Don't get me wrong. I think it's awesome. Regular sized things made into ginormous replicas is always fun, especially if you get to walk on it.

Buildings and a Bubbling Blister

We went to the silk market the other day. It was intense in the badgering sense. I didn't enjoy most of the time-walking through aisles of vendors yelling nice things like 'lady I give you happy price!' in your ears. It was overwhelming and plain annoying. On the way there and back we saw these buildings. I'm not sure what the swiss cheese building is, but the contorted one is the national television broadcast's (CCTV) center.

Also, at the silk market, I bought a mahjong set from a lady I spent a good time bartering with. I feel the price was more fair, but I'm very reluctant to believe I could ever get a truly fair price.

In other news, I burnt myself badly the other day on the kettle. It's in a current state of bubbling and I'm hoping for a scar because it's not worth it to have a big blister, if you don't get to talk about your deformed skin later on. It's been fascinating watching the burnt skin change each day.



Today and yesterday have honestly been mostly boring with not much to blog about. This morning we went to breakfast at an American style restaurant and we attempted finding a place to play tennis, failed, came back home and sat around, then Justin and I just attempted the search again, succeeded and played tennis for an hour. It was my first time on the buses here and it wasn't at all stressful. I was expecting some discomfort, but the close quarters was totally fine.

Now I'm sitting around again, feeling apathetic, thinking I should be drawing or painting, but not feeling the energy enough to actually do it. Instead I'm writing this obnoxious blog.

NAMOC part I

Here's some more pictures from 'Synthetic Times':


This was titled the 'Beijing Accelerator' and it was a contraption you sit in and watch moving videos of Bejing streets, while spinning. It was fun to watch people do, but the line was too long to wait in to give it a spin....ha...ha.


This was a surreal room, the floor a fiberglass hill with 16 robotic legs, each of them subtly moving and twitching. It was eery the way they moved so slightly that it could be real, as opposed to a dramatic awkward gesture of a regular robot. Right before I was leaving the room, all of these legs began to lift up like the ones in the forefront of the photo. One by one their legs inflated and stretched out like that....all of their movements slow and seemingly deliberate.


This was a room of plastic curtain walls, a net ceiling, and a flying zepellin navigating around black punching bag shaped balloons floating at different heights. No idea what it means, but it was fun to walk around.


This was a big head that you could communicate with. You could ask questions of it using the keyboard and it would speak responses. One guy asked it 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' and he replied 'Because he was a robot.' When you ask it questions about his age he says it's confidential information. He told us he has two sisters. He was asked how he was bald and he replied it took a long time.



This was a wall installation that showed an image of the viewers being videotaped and displayed in ochre tones on the right. On the left was a blue screen showing one of the people in the crowd picked out at random, with a feeling assigned to it. I stood there until I was chosen. The word I got was 'captivated,' and it's funny because I really was...


I have no clue what this was, but the picture came out nice.


This is a poor, blurred image of a really cool theatrical piece. It was an arrangement of items that all looked like scraps of meaningless objects. They were mechanized and sort of interacted with one another. A lot of the show was in the cast shadows so it was like a shadow puppet show that you could watch the inter-workings of. There was music playing in accordance with the machine's movements. I dare say it was an emotional thing to watch. The 'characters' really appeared to have feeling and there was a moving climax that felt like their ultimate destruction.

NAMOC-part II

This was in an awesome room with a fiberglass hill for a floor. A crowd of us sat at the top of the hill watching this video playing on a wall opposite us. It was called 'The Subjectivity of Repitition' I'm not sure what the connection between the title and the video were, but it was really interesting to watch. There was a man character who interacted with a black version of himself, they cut each other up and made more of themselves with parts black, parts grey, then comprised a huge conglomeration of bodies in an odd shape, all partially black and grey. Then there was a orcas whale that the main character had some relationship with. Later we saw the conglomeration of them on the whale underwater. Other interesting things happened too, all seemingly unrelated. It was like a dreamscape, hard to relate to reality, but involving imagery that we can recognize. I took out of it the theme of uniting mankind, but that's just my perspective.

This was a room of lasers that we could walk through. It felt so strange to be in the middle of them because the room was pitch black except for the beams of light that felt 3d.

This was a 3d image that was all an illusion. It looked like a mound with babies crawling down it on all sides, crawling under the bottom lip of the shape. In the reflection on the floor where the babies were theoretically crawling, there were skeletons instead...



This was a seemingly 3-d image floating inside a large bubble. The images were changing constantly. Next to the bubbles on the floor was a machine blowing big wobbly bubbles that popped soon after filling with air.

This was an interactive piece on the wall. It was a sort of scanner. The man whose image is shown here had just stood there up against the surface. He stepped back and as the white vertical bar, that just 'scanned' his image completes it's cycle, he could view his own image on the wall in front of him. I did it too, but I can't find the picture I took of myself...I'll look for it and post it later maybe.

This was a huge screen at the end of a dark tunnel that showed the image of floating naked bodies. They didn't look like real people. They were floating in a water-like substance slowly, to an ethereal music playing in the room.

These three paintings are by Gerhard Richter, a German abstract painter. They're based on the theme of landscape.
One floor up from this modern exhibit of German art, there was a show of older German painters-their names I didn't recognize, so I don't remember them now, but they looked a lot like some of Picasso's work, and Franz Mark's work.

Actually, I was wrong

I knew I would make a mistake on...mom wrote me reminding me actually they were in Haifa last month.
Oops...

Today I'll probably head to the National Art Museum of China, in which case, I'll try to take photos. It looks like a sweet exhibit called 'Synthetic Times'- an entire exhibit of new-media installations, in addition to Gerhard Richter, a German abstract painter's work.