PICTURES WITHOUT PEOPLE.

死花 on my windowsill

sewing

Gallerie urs Meile (located in a hutong)

The actual reality surrounding Galerie Urs Meile (burning trash pile a couple steps outside)

deer

Things we would do together:

* 清华美术学院 (Tsinghua Art school) I just saw this place yesterday yet it's a 10 minute walk from my house. It's tremendous, housed in a very attractive, very new building with giant wooden panels and red ropes running across the center of the atrium. You can see Chinese students studying surprisingly Soviet-realist oil painting, or mixtures of saluting Mao statues, dragons, and giant red fiberglass contemporary-ness all mixed together in the sculpture garden. Very pleasant with a cheap cafe on site.

* 胡同 (hutong neighborhoods) Crumbling ancient buildings with slope-eaved roofs together with cheap construction efforts and white titled supply stores, noodle carts selling jiangbing pancakes, old men walking their cages birds, questionable massage parlors, Xinjiang men with wool caps grilling skewered mutton while shirtless construction workers drink qingdao beer and smoke strong cigarettes. The soul of north China.

* 草场地 (Caochangdi) This really goes along with 七九八 (798 Art district) and is the darling of the contemporary art scene in China. 草场地 is the more serious of the two, with a recently moved in Dutch gallery with fortress like walls right inside a rather serious hutong. 798 is more drama and cafes, lots more tourists and 10x the size.

* 饭！ (food!) This is countless and beyond description, and the food scene here is incomparable and very cheap, even for high-end restaurants.

* 七彩大世界 (Embassy market) Not sure of the English name of this place, but it's near 女人街 (Women's street) This market has an impossibly random assortment of revolutionary grenade launchers and espresso machines, cell phones and counterfeit dresses, used furniture and old records. The whole area around it is terribly strange with a kosher and African themed restaurant on the same street.

* 钟鼓楼 (Drum and Bell tower area) A solid strip of nice restaurants, DVD　and anime shops, traditional candy and toy stores, Yunnan bars, mellow music coming from cafes, incredibly real hutong, etc. surrounded by the most beautiful setting in the entire city, with the ancient bell towers visible from everywhere in the area, trained pigeons with whistles attached buzzing overhead and enough places to see and walk around to occupy the whole night.

* Besides this, there are more obvious tourist sites in and around Beijing (great wall, ming tombs, Tiananmen, Forbidden City...) plus dozens of smaller or unnoted places. I'll keep up with the posting, and everything is fine with me here! A little homesick still, but managing to do well here.

Today I had a great day at 七九八 (798) or the 大山子 (Dashanzi) area, which is Beijing's major art space. Saw a few decent shows, particularly interesting photography, met and had tea with one of Masa's gallery owner friends, witnessed the throngs of imported 外国人 (foreigners) entering via tremendous buses, heard incredibly terrible Chinese from a group of Italians that helped improve my self-esteem, bought little gifties, etc. etc...

Small victory story: I went with Saul to eat dumplings in a tiny place near the Beijing language school amidst flower-printed aluminum mugs and extension cords and I struck up a conversation with an older Korean lady. She told me her husband works in Beijing University in some computer field, she's lived here for the same amount of time that I have, she had a giant birthday and an equally giant cake the week before with lots of her friends, (of which come from all over), and she talked a bit about Korea and her family. The small victory part is that she didn't speak English at all, so we used our Chinese, which is poor on both ends, but we managed to actually communicate and somehow I knew nearly everything she told me and somehow she knew nearly everything I told her.

Sometimes it feels just so impossible that I'm here.

Pictures below.

International Children's Day

Work of a Dutch photographer at 七九八

Incredibly faint projection at 七九八.

天安门

鸟

Near the embassy district

fashion at 女人街

我今晚吃了Vietnamese菜

Hey all, I'm not dead, just still without the Internet. It actually works for Saul, but not for Silvia, so the two of us just haven't had it. I'm working a lot, lot more, painting, studying, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to Tianjin, a city right outside of Beijing, with some friends to see an Austrian, who I don't know, perform something before he flies back to his homeland. Vague. I'll try to be more regular, but Silvy and I have no idea how to fix our internet.

We changed our visas, which are now six month F visas, which is a business visa. It's much smaller and faker looking than the visas you get outside of China.

My new job is wonderful. I've been working for the past three weeks with a company that makes online video games called "A Perfect World." My students are all management at the company, and I really enjoy all of them. My lessons are all centered around very American cultural things like garage sales, fast food, road trips, barbecues, etc. but add lots of new sentence structure and vocabulary. The students seems to love it, but I'm worried about losing momentum. Any ideas?

Tragedy: We bought a kitten off the street, all orange and yellow. He got sick in only a few days, and when we took him to a vet with all our Chinese books, we struggled with our bad Chinese and her bad English just to get the information that he had worms and will die. We gave him medicine three times a day, and really tried, but he died yesterday in a heap near Silvia's shoe nook and we buried him with his new green turtle cat toy. I'm very sad about this. Pets don't last in Beijing.

Other highlights of the last few weeks: eating enormously delicious piles of meat, bread, tomato and potato at our fav Xinjiang place, (Arabic Chinese) watching movies, scary police stuff, hutong Chinese lessons, oatmeal with guava, local, completely exotic, fruit sold in carts around our place, skewered quail eggs with "stinky" sauce, working 9 to 5, tofu soaked in duck's blood, some improvement with my painting skill, wildflowers, Masa, surprise visits, Beijing duck, a steady subway commute, teaching fairly well behaved little monsters on Thursdays, dinner at dazhongsi, etc., etc., etc...

I'm thinking of everyone.

I'm sitting in a nearby cafe with the unfortunate name "Hump," finishing a plate of creamy pasta with bacon, sipping Silvia's leftover, cold coffee, and checking e-mails since the internet is down at our place. Behind me are a pack of blonde girls and a black girl, all study buddies and chatting in very basic Chinese, to the left are a group of Korean guys smoking lots of cigarettes and directly in front of me are three Chinese businessmen talking about me and the aforementioned girls, thinking that we cannot understand what they're saying about us. (which is partly true.)

I'm starting to work a lot more, maybe too much, but once I get paid it'll feel incredibly worth it. When I'm not teaching, I'm painting, not making enough progress with Chinese, planning lessons, grading papers (reading essays is actually very entertaining) spending all my time between Silvia and Masa...

Saturday I went with Silvia, Masa and Saul to the strange, seedy bar area of the embassy district where they have a tremendous market selling phones, electronics, used furniture, clothing, junk, records and CDs, shoes... nearly everything. Saul found a few hard to find records, and Silvia haggled over but ended up passing up tiny, bright red apple mp3 player. Nearby there is a giant African themed club, one of the few Kosher restaurants in Beijing, American style eateries, slightly scary, abandoned nightclubs, and African drug dealers and prostitution after dark. The embassy areas and it's surroundings, like sunlituan, are always the most sketchy, most hedonistic areas of the city.

Oh, I sent out mother's day packages and letters, so please e-mail or post if you've received them!

I've been painting.

Got back today from yet another trip, this time to 司马台 (Simatai) and 金山岭 (Jinshanling) two parts of the Great Wall that are nearly connected, but are interrupted by a narrow river. It was just me and my girl Silvy this time, communicating in broken Chinese with the locals, sliding/falling down hills, sweating, climbing a billion steps. The trip was brief, difficult, immensely beautiful. 长城很好看。

Silvia has a blog entry that goes into much more loving detail.

Overlooking 金山岭.


冰棍儿
Ice cream break. We climbed very, very high up.

好听
Blind musician outside of the circus-like entrance to 司马台.

Lots of corn stalk in a nearly abandoned village.


金山岭