Hacky-sack meets Shuttle-Cock

This is a retrospective entry about the first project I undertook in China. All throughout my travels in SE Asia, I interacted with local children playing "kick-kick". Kick-shuttle-cock is the national sport of Vietnam, a favorite pass-time of Cambodia, and very popular in China as well. The local players were invariably surprised and quite pleased that I was able to play with them. My experience with hack-sack gave me the skills to keep up with most of the people I found playing "kick-kick". Very few activities got me smiling with the locals as quickly as kick-shuttle-cock.
I brought with me to Asia, five of my own hacky sacks to share with people I met along the way. I had no idea that they would have their own sport so similar to hacky sack. A kick shuttle-cock looks very different from a hacky-sack (or foot bag) but functions much the same. A feather, or group of feathers, attached to a washer shaped base is the basic form of a kick shuttle-cock. because of the feathers it flies a bit slower than a hacky sack, and has more directionality, but is otherwise almost identical in function.
In response to the mixing of cultures that I experienced I thought it would be very appropriate to make a new toy that is a hybrid of the hacky-sack and kick shuttle-cock. Using scrap material from a local tailor, small peas from the grocery store and feathers from a feather duster, I fashioned my own "hacky-cock" if you will.
Here is a photo of the two prototype designs, as displayed at the exhibition in Jinan.
P.S. They worked fabulously!

Red, white and black

Red is an important color in China. According to Wikipedia, in Chinese culture "it carries a largely positive connotation, being associated with courage, loyalty, honor, success, fortune, fertility, happiness, passion, and summer." Even with all of these positive inferences, red is also a symbol of blood, death and danger. Red is found all over Shanghai - on the Chinese flag, on shop signs, automobiles and traffic signs, on banners and clothing... if green is the color of the Pacific Northwest, then red is the color of Shanghai (and maybe all of China).
Red is also strongly associated with communism. Russia was the beginning of this association with the red star of communism. Now, China and Vietnam also use the red star to symbolize their tie to communism. While Brooke and I were traveling in SE Asia before coming to China, Brooke had a strong reaction to the red star, particularly in Vietnam, where it is prominently visible all over the country. I also was aware of it, but on a less conscious level. As Brooke stopped to take pictures I became more and more aware of how frequently the red star, and the color red, are used in Vietnam and China.
It wasn't until Shanghai, when I tried to make a photographic composition using Christian's bright red pants, that I remembered about the chromatic filter on my digital camera. Canon has a clever function built into most of their cameras, called "color accent" that allows the user to pick any color in the frame and isolate it by turning all other colors to grayscale. I took a reading off of Christian's pants and snapped a photo one afternoon on the Bund. Reviewing the photo brought to my attention something else that was almost identical in hue to Christian's pants - the red flag of China. For the rest of our stay in Shanghai I left the red filter active on my camera and snapped hundreds of shots - finding bits of red in every nook and corner of Shanghai.
Many of the photos stand on their own, but I am still striving to find a way to use them all as an installation for our final exhibition in the Laverne Krause gallery. One idea suggested to me was to use a bag from from my travels and have the photos spilling out. If we end up using Ryan's idea of the "Chinese street theme", I could post my photos throughout the gallery, as most of them were taken while walking through the streets of Shanghai.

Shanghai Museum

People's Square, only about five blocks from our Hotel, was the hub of today's activities. The Shanghai Museum on the south end of People's Square, houses four floors of Chinese art and artifacts. I was particularly taken by the exhibit of cast bronze on the ground floor. The level of craft and detail present in pieces that are 3ooo years old is humbling. I think most of the pieces were from the Zhou, Qin and Hahn dynasties - roughly 1100 BC to 200 AD.
What artifacts will remain of our contemporary culture, 3000 years from now? It seems like today's artifacts for the future may not have a physical manifestation, and are not of any particular nation or culture. While there is still a richness of cultural individuality in this world, the great accomplishments of the information era have no durable artifact.
Will we leave behind a trail of computers? I can't fathom how our world will be remembered 3000 years from now. I look at the Bronze pieces of ancient China with a certain awe and respect. Will today's accomplishments be viewed the same way? The pessimist in me doubts that future generations will have much respect for the artifacts we leave behind.

Soft Sleeper

From Jinan to Shanghai we traveled in style. Jackie, the director of International Affairs at SUAD, managed to get a us a free upgrade on the train to the soft sleeper class. I'm not a seasoned rail traveler (thanks to the US for having the worst passenger rail system of any developed nation), but I thought our four person private sleeper compartment was awesome. It beats every plane and bus I've been on hands down. The steady quiet rhythm put me right to sleep. No honking, no swerving, no ear popping, no turbulence, no pooping babies, no barfing ladies... the only casualty was a lost paperback book. I left my book on my bunk, stepped off the train and turned right around to get it. In the 60 seconds it took me to get back to my bunk, someone had already snagged the book. Who would want an English book? It's a small loss, but I was really enjoying Kingsolver's commentary on American food culture.
We arrived in Shanghai to the find ourselves booked in a super modern, western style high rise hotel suite. I have no idea how we can afford to stay here, but I'm not complaining. We must be getting an amazing group discount.
The cityscape is remarkable, and we have an excellent view of it from our 14th floor suite. I wouldn't call it beautiful, but that's just my aesthetic. It is a strange patchwork of old two story, tile roofed houses and giant glass and steel sky scrapers. Some of the architecture is very bizarre. You can expect to see some photos and hopefully a few sketches posted soon.

Hungry Man

Here it is. My partner art project with Jared (Yu Zhaorun). This was the first time doing stop motion animation for both of us. Considering the challenges, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Looking back, my only regret is not finding a way to make it a bit less gloomy. I hope you enjoy it.

Crackers

The morning started with a two hour musical performance, showing an eclectic mix of contemporary and traditional styles. We roasted a bit sitting in the sun, but our host was kind enough to buy us all white baseball caps to wear. A lot of the performers were lip-syncing, and most of the music was pre-recorded. The live drummers, however, rocked the audience without any help from a PA system. There was dancing, martial arts, comedy, pop-rock, and more. For a "cultural festival" there was a more modern pop culture than I expected. Something about "cultural festival" made me think traditional folk culture.
After the concert we got a quick tour of some of the older streets. Tucked down these back alleys are mostly tourist shops, but many of the original structures and architectural styles are still present.
The cracker factory was awesome! This is a video of a lady making sesame crackers. We ate some of them fresh off the griddle, and they were delicious - hao chi! (Good eats!) When we got back to the old campus later that night we discovered that the local government had bought us each an entire bag of crackers, something like 3 kilos of crackers for each of us! I'm going to have to buy another duffle just to get my crackers home.

How to Find Your Mate

As we stroll through a park with the SUAD students, one of them says "Who wants a new girlfriend, or new boyfriend?" Li Li, Brooke's partner, beckons to Brooke and laughs. She says, "Come on, let's find a new boyfriend." Brooke asks why, and says she's happy with one she's got (Awwww). It turns out, there's an entire section of the park set up for personal ads. I don't know if this is a once a year thing, or every day. Either way, it was full of people browsing the ads. Li Li said that it's mostly parents looking for a match for their kids.
Jared (Yu Zhaorun, whose name I keep mis-spelling) and I ended up lost for a little while. So we just sat on the side of the small mountain, looked out over Jinan, drank iced tea and smoked a cigarette. I pulled out my Chinese phrase book and we perused it, finding ways to make small talk.
On the way down we stopped to shoot a bow and arrow - sort of like at an amusement park. I won a rabbit tail keychain.
After the park we went to KTV, which stands for Karaoke Television. It's the classiest karaoke place I've ever seen. We rented an entire private room, and spent most of the afternoon singing karaoke with the reverb turned all the way up. The chinese students, on the whole, were definitely better at karaoke than us americans were, but we put on a pretty good show too.

Pounding Out Art

Day three of three. Considering the challenges we've faced trying to produce a stop motion animation project in such a short amount of time, I'm very pleased to announce that we have something to show for it! There's still a few details to wrap up, but the meat of it is finished. I wanted to post the video of it today, but ran out of time at the last minute and had to catch our bus back to the hotel. I promise to post it by Monday.
the video is about as far from polished as animation gets, but it makes me laugh, and we had fun creating it. I got to try using a home made blue screen for the first time. That was tough. I also got to try making wire figure that could be easily animated and stay standing on his own. That was tough. I also got to do it all with as much hand flailing communication as with words. Yu Zhouren was a great sport, and kept a positive attitude the whole time. He's generous, artistically talented and has a sense of humor. I wish we had picked a project that took more advantage of his talents. Part of me wants to speak chinese and have more academic conversations with him. Another part of me is happy that we clumsily and eagerly try to share ideas even though most of what we say doesn't make any sense to the other person.
Just before we left the new campus, Yu Zhouren gave me an awesome pair of woven straw slippers and a simple wooden model to build because he remembered that I like working with wood. Now, if I could just come up with something as thoughtfull to give him.

Partner Projects

With only three work days to devlop our partner projects, every minute counts. Today was our second day at SUAD working with our partners, and everyone is feeling the pressure. Yu Zhouren (Jared) and were hoping to get all the still photos shot for our stop-motion animation. We spent most of the morning trying to set up a stage. The wire figure was almost completely lost in the busy background paintings I made. We decided to shoot the wire figure on a blue-screen and superimpose the backgrounds so we could control the relative size, lightness and darkness of foreground and background. Of course, with more flexibility comes more complexity. By the time we got the lighting and backdrop worked out it was after lunch. With the bus leaving at 5pm I was only able to shoot a couple of actions.
The other big chalenge was working with computers when all the menus are in Chinese. It took me a while but I finally figured out how to change the menus from Chinese to English on the macintosh towers. The computer lab had an impressive selection of hardware - mostly Mac Pro towers with dual xeon processors. Final Cut Pro moved along at a healthy clip.
The animation studio and photography room were also impressive, offering some very nice equipment. The big hurdle was not being familiar with any of it, and overcoming the language barrier. Edwin and Ying helped out a lot, as well as several of the Chinese students who spoke English. Without them we would have worked it out, but gathering all the equipment we needed was much easier with their help.
At times I fealt foolish trying to form long winded sentences through an translator, when a few quick hand gestures would have sufficed. Oh well.
The online translator was interesting. More than half the time it screwed up grammar and verb conjugations, but at least it was entertaining.
At lunch I busted out my new fountain pen and asked for help filling it with ink. Being the ignorant american that I am, I had no idea how a fountain pen works. Evidently, every chinese student knows how to use one, so there was no shortage of assistance. Initially, I used the ink I had for brush painting to fuill my pen and apparently that was a bad idea. Now I've got the rigth ink, but the damage may be irreversible. Se la vie. For three bucks, I think I can afford another one. Tomorrow is another big work day. If everything goes perfectly, we might actually finish our project in time!

Getting to Know SUAD

Morning was spent planning our partner project. Yu Zhouren and I get along great, and although neither of us speak much of the other's language, communication is more entertaining than frustrating.
Lunch with the chinese students fealt like our first opportunity to have a 'normal' meal. The cafeteria serves all variety of Chinese dishes, and since none of it is spelled out for us in english, it's pretty much up to our partners to pick for us. I found their choices to be well within the range of 'normal' food. Nothing they ordered was too weird to handle.
After lunch we toured the school gallery - a remarkable collection of ancient and contemporary chinese art and artifacts. My favorite was the wood working tools. for the most part, not much has changed in the last thousand years ( or more). Sure, we've got electrical power tools now, but everything on display is still used today. This is a picture of ink lines, the precursor of todays chalk lines.
After the gallery, we received a crash course in chinese calligraphy. They made us both write "I love you" in chinese and pose with our teachers. The three character sounds are "Wo ai ni", each one translating directly in sequence. The reason they look different, as you may have guessed, is that one is an ancient style, the other modern. Sadly, I don't remember which is which. I'll say that mine, being the more beautiful, was also probably more ancient.

Confuscious and 6666 Steps to Heaven

Qufu, the birthplace of Confuscious. Also a tourist hot spot. I think it's important to mention that "tourist" in China doesn't mean the same thing it did in most of SE Asia. Tourists here are mostly Chinese - not European, Australian or American.
The tour guide had a tiny loudspeaker attached to her hip, which at first seemed silly, but later proved necessary to be heard over the other tour guides who also had tiny loudspeakers on their hips. As part of our ongoing artistic expression in China, Brooke and I did a short photo commentary on the foolilsh and awkward ways that westerners try to use everyday chinese objects. On many occasions throughout China and southeast Asia, locals have had to patiently (or not so patiently) explain to us how to eat food, catch a bus, use a bathroom, etc. For example, we went to a hotpot restaurant, with a menu partially in english, and proudly ordered a giant bowl of broth, and a small dessert plate.

The woman looked at me inquisitively, waiting for me to finish my order... Then she fired off a few sentences in Chinese, pointed at a bunch of pictures of meat and vegetables, and waited again, pen in hand. So it was that I learned how to order a hot pot - start with a broth and order each ingredient seperately. Oops. The small stools at Qufu are not difficult to understand and use, but just to make a point, Brooke and I behaved as awkwardly as possible. We both think those stools are awesome, and we might have to bring a couple home since they're sold at nearly every tiny hardware store. Speaking of tiny hardware stores, as far as I know, there are only tiny hardware stores. And they are packed to the brim with miscelaneous parts and tools. Browsing is hugely entertaining and also futile if there is something in particular you're looking for.

Getting back to Confuscious, I opted out of seeing the Kong family cemetary (that's Confuscious' family name), and instead saw a display of women's shoes from the era of feet binding. I have one word - brutal! I read somewhere that the last shoe manufacturer specializing in shoes for bound feet went out of business sometime in the last few years. That time has past... we have entirely new forms of bizarre body modification. According to our tour guide, the reason for feet binding was simply that one Emperor had a fetish for small feet.

Lunch was huge - nuf said.

The afternoon took us up a mountain, which I think is called Tian Shan (literally "heavenly mountain"). We went most of the way up via an impressive cable gondola. If we'd had more time we might have walked up the 6666 steps (why 6666? because 9 is Confuscious' favorite number) I was amazed to see the amount of concrete work done at the top of a mountain where there appears to be no roads, only stairs and a gondola. There's a full fledged hotel, several large communication towers with antennas galore, four heavenly gates facing in the four cardinal directions, a temple to make offerings, and gift shop after ridiculous gift shop for your shopping pleasure.

For a short time we were clear of the smog, but that only lasted about twenty minutes. The sun is so dark and red most of the time, it feels very ominous.

Perhaps the most intriguing site was the huge piles of locks with chinese characters engraved on them. We later learned that these locks are placed here by couples wanting to immortalize their devotion to eachother. Strange, but very adorable.

A Warm and Hearty Welcome

Our Jinan hosts from the Shandong University of Art and Design (SUAD) herded us off the train and onto their comfortable, air conditioned bus... but not before a group shot of all of us holding a UO and SUAD banner. Dinner was amazing. With all of us seated around a table fit for King Arthur, we were served a meal fit for a king. The plates kept coming - whole roast chicken, pork foot, beef noodle soup, egg soup, yam, peanuts, shredded potato, bok choy, whole fried fish, beer, rice wine, mushrooms, fruit platter... and that was probably about half of what was served TO EACH OF US!
We met several of the professors and department heads. A couple of students were shooting video and still photos, there were two translators, and many of them took time to toast to us and welcome us warmly to Jinan.
After two hours of food and drink we wrapped up with some Chinese Karaoke performed for us by our hosts, and we sent a couple of our own up for a little a-capela.

We retired to our new home - the SUAD "Mansion" for visiting students and professors. It's not what I would call a "Mansion" but rather a hotel, directly adjacent to the student dorms.

In the morning we were fed another feast, with meats and vegetables I havge never seem before, let alone considered eating for breakfast. There were some western standards such as sliced bread and jam, scrambled eggs with zuchini, fried bread, boiled eggs and ham... then there were some stranger things, warm milk, salty sausage, unidentifiable vegetables, corn meal broth, tang, a few more REALLy salty things... It's going to take some getting used to.

To meet our partner students we traveled 45 minutes by bus to the edge of town where the new SUAD campus is located. They welcomed us with a standing ovation and were eager to get to know us. We each were intorduced to our partners, and spent a short time getting to know a little about eachother. Yu Zhouren is my partner, he is 21 years old, and specializes in flash animation. His english is better than my Chinese, but we can barely hold a conversation - so we use an online translator sitting side by side on computers. He said I am like his big brother because I'm seven years older than him. Then he asked me for an American name. I though for a bit and with some encouragement from Brooke decided to name him Jared, in honor of my own little brother, and because "Zhouren" sounds almost like "Jared". For those of you who don't normally read pinyin chinese, "Zh" sounds like a cross between "Ch" and "J". "N" doesn't sound anything like "d", so you have to use a little imagination. Oh, and of course "Yu" isn't a given name, it's his family name.

For four hours we shared samples of all of our individual art. I was dually impressed by both the SUAD students and our own class.

After another feast of a lunch, we got a tour of campus. The "bookstore" is small, but usefull. I browsed for a minute and decided to buy some pencils and a brush and ink. Before I realized what happened, Jared had paid for my stuff anf bought me an iced tea. I walked out feeling gracious and a little dazed. Then Brooke's partner, LiLi, handed me an ice cream bar she had bought when I wasn't watching. We're totally spoiled.

Dinner was on our host students as well. It was everything we could do just to pay for a one way cab ride back from the restaurant. I feel bad letting them pay for everything, but I think it would be worse for me to refuse their hospitality. Someday I hope I can return the favor.

Beijing to Jinan

Goodbye Baru! We left Beijing behind, and said farewell to our favorite tiny kitty, who we named "Baru". In Malay, Baru means "new". We saw it written on a bag of chips and thought it was a good name. A light drizzle cleared some pollution out of the air. We all piled into taxi cabs and headed for the Baijing South Rail Station. More than 20 sets of tracks converge here. This place is on the scale of an airport. When will we see such devotion to mass transit in the US?
245 kilometers per hour! That's about 150 mph. That's how fast I was moving on my way from Beijing to Jinan. Amtrak, you suck! The high speed rail system here is cheap, easy, comfortable and on time. All of western Europe does it, China does it, Japan and Korea too! WTF!? I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I really wish the US would "get on the train".
Edwin and I were discussing the differences between China and the US, and he pointed out the huge disparity in infrstructure funding. I don't know how much money China spends on pension plans, health care, and education. But according to Edwin, China is more capitalist than the United States in those regards. China seems to be setting aside a lot of public services in order to push forward with infrastructure. Is it more important to develop roads and rails, or pay for education and healthcare? I'm going to wait to see what happens in the next twenty years before I decide for c ertain. Nevertheless, I have a good guess which way will prove best in the long run.

The Great Wall at Simitai

Before leaving Beijing we had to make a proper visit to the Great Wall. Driving for a little over two hours brought us to a popular hiking portion of the wall. With Simatai as our final destination, we hiked past thirty towers, along bricks and stones, some ancient and some newly placed. The wall at Simatai is roughly 1500 years old! Much of it was rebuilt more recently - but there is still plenty of the original wall to hint at it's wise old age.
We made quick work of the hike, barreling through in about three hours. We got a bit fuddled up in the beginning, Ying stayed back to help with a badly swollen ankle, and Edwin had to play catch up with us for the rest of the day, only to finally catch us at the very end. Brooke and I had a small adventure trying to talk our way past a guard when we turned back to find Edwin. Because we had a group ticket, which was with Edwin, there was nothing we could show to the guard to prove that we hadn't sneaked onto the wall. And speaking a grand total of about twenty words in Chinese, we were hard pressed to explain our situation. Eventually, and miraculously, we flailed our arms in just the right way, and the guard seemed to understand. We didn't find Edwin, but we found Ying's cousin, who also spoke only Chinese. More hand waving ensued and we deduced that Edwin, Megan and Steven had taken a shortcut - avoiding a significant part of the wall. So we kept on truckin'.
The hike was amazing, I only wish I had budgeted my time better to spend some time relaxing on the wall and taking in the scenery.
Getting into Simatai proper from the wall involved a zip line that I couldn't turn down. I think that all but three of us ended up on the zip line. Yeah, it's sort of cheezy, but worth it!

Heavenly Temple

Dutifully, we followed up a vist to the Forbidden city with a visit to the Temple of Heaven. Picking up where we'd left off the day before, we walked from Qianmen (just south of Tienanmen square) through an awkwardly deserted and very recently remodeled street of shop-fronts. At Ying's suggestion I tried to imagine that I was part of an Emperors regal parade from the Forbidden city to the Temple of Heaven. This is in part where an emperor went to make prayers for his kingdom - asking for a bumper harvest or giving thanks for a battle won. It was our task to each find our own prayer for humanity and make an offering at the Temple of Heaven.
As we sat huddled in the shade of a short rock wall, thinking about our wishes for humanity, I plucked at the grass growing stubornly up through cracks in the stone pavers. Ihad four stems in my hand, each branching out into three seed heads. With four seasons and twelve signs of the zodiak, I decided that the grass seed was a very suitable offering. I asked Brooke and Steven to help me make the offering - so we linked our hands together, holding the grass seed. My wish for humanity is world-wide cooperation in nurturing the diversity of plant life that we need to sustain ourselves and our children.

The Forbidden City

The Forbidden city seems to have outgrown its name. The place is crawling with tourists and vendors. Walking throught the complex from north to south was a fluctuating feeling of complete ignorance, frustration and awe. I was trying to imagine a thousand years past, who would be stepping over these tall thresholds. What hands carved painstaking detail into hundreds of tons of solid stone? Then I would just keep walking, past ancient relics made possible by an ancient emperors reign over countless human lives. The gravity is a bit hard to experience with the buzz of a thousand tourists at your back.

Before leaving the city, Brooke and I tucked through a side gate and around a corner where we found a little quiet respite. We were in dire need of a snack but took a few minutes to sketch our surroundings.
The afternoon was comprised of first finding a restauraunt for some lunch. What we found had no english menu, but at least there were pictures...
Note the chinese characters below each of these two dishes, and imagine that you are at a restaurant starving for lunch, speak little to no Chinese, and your waiter speaks zero english. Now imagine that you order the one on the right but get served the one on the left. The "meat" is more skin and fat on cartilage and tendon than it is meat. So you send it back and demand the one that you ordered. It takes five minutes to explain this with hand gestures but finally you succeed. The new dish is much more palatable but still completely unidentifiable.It turns out, when you show these pictures to a translator that you first ate duck tongue and followed it up, convincingly, with duck heart! Welcome to Beijing.

Art districts tour

We toured several of Beijing's art districts, as well as CAFA (Central Acadamy of Fine Arts). The empty architecture studios of CAFA looked just like our studios at the UO after the end of a quarter. From the outside CAFA is just another gray brick building amongst a sea of new construction on the outskirts of Beijing. Exploring the campus further unveils a remarkable museum which is now exhibiting a variety of designs proposed for the 2008 Olympics. The building is clad in heavy slate tiles which look like scales on the back of a dragon. It looks so heavy, how did they fasten those tiles!? Inside the gallery no photos are allowed, the entry displays bizarre clothing designs for the opening ceremony. It looks like something from a recent Star Trek set. They have a sea of promotional posters and an impressive collection of art made for or about the Olympics. The curvacious interior remains true to it's domed shell of massive slate tile. Very impressive!
Also at CAFA we met the much less conspicuous but equally impressive man behind the team of students who designed the Olympic medals!
Earlier in the day Brooke gave Mao a high five. Strange for so many reasons...
Pekin Art Studios was a bizarre and disorienting collection of cubic gray brick buildings housing much more intriguing artwork. The bottom floor of each studio exhibits the artist's work while the top floor is a work area. I was struck by the decision to use the same gray tile on the roads between buildings as on the walls themselves. The neutral background and monotonous pattern brought the natural wood grain of fences and doors out into the spotlight. This is a characteristic that I also noticed at the Commune. We use so much wood in the northwest, the beauty of it is often lost.
Our final stop before returning to the hostel is the private studio of a couple of young men who work for the CAFA professor mentioned earlier. I'm sorry we waited unti ldark to see this studio. It was easily the most intersting work space we toured. Two grids offset by about 30 degrees distinguish the two floors. A gargantuan smoke stack towers immediately adjacent and visible through a wall of glass - in fact a partial ceiling of glass affords a full view of the tower from within the studio. Out back there is a fish pond underfoot - yes, you actually walk over it thinking it's a strange place to use plexiglass tiles before it becomes aparent that there are fish in the shallow trough. The only part that really didn't appeal to me was the bathroom which is separated from the main work area by a hanging sheet. Not a lot of sound privacy there.

The Commune at the Great Wall

At Ying's suggestion, Brooke, Ariel and I booked a tour of the "Commune by the Great Wall". This is not quite what it sounds like. There is no one actually living at the commune, it is jsut a collection of modern style residences which are rented out to rich diplomats and business men for conferences and such. They also double as a "museum" of modern architecture - exhibiting award winning work by some of Asia's finest architects.

The houses are indeed "modern" and the architecture is intriguing. If I were to guess at their age I would say maybe 30 or 40 years. Not right. In fact the oldest was build only seven years ago. They are in reasonable condition but not well maintained. The style is mostly of an era past. While it was well worth visiting, and several of the houses were truly inspiring in their design, I was less than blown away by the innovation or care exhibited in the details of these buildings.

Our favorite room was the living room of one of the more post-modern looking houses. Buried below a living roof that blended almost seamlessly with it's environment was a cool, stone-clad haven that looked out over the valley through a continuos wall of northwest facing glass. The acoustics were delightfull with BB King playing in the background, and the simple layout flowed from kitchen to dining area to living space with just enough enclosure between to create a hint of separation.
To finish our tour we relaxed at the hotel with a mediocre $6 iced coffee (note that a typical iced coffee in Beijing costs less than a dollar).
We arrived back at our Hostel in time to greet the rest of our Art in China class and go out for a dumpling feast.

Bangkok to Beijing

Beijing seems to me stuck between a real, functioning city, and a Disneyland theme park. The theme being Olympic city.
Streets are full but not overly congested as I had expected. Sidewalks and gutters were relatively clean. And most impressive of all was the blue sky for our first two days!

The flight from Bangkok was a mere six hours delayed. Thankfully the Bangkok airport is not a bad place to spend your morning. Sri Lanka air gave us a free meal in the airport thanks to Brooke's friendly and persuasive manner.
During our free meal I was "blessed" by a mouthfull of cappucino after cracking a joke at an untimely moment.
The flight itself was mostly pleasant. I got free whiskey, watched Iron Man, and was just far enough away from the woman hurling her breakfast that I could ignore her and enjoy my movie. Brooke was quick to discover that a cup of coffee hovering just below the nose could mostly drowned out the smell of stomach bile.

As bad as it sounds, the flight was actually fine. We arrived in Beijing only about 4 hours late (they hauled ass), got some help from a chinese woman who spoke perfect english, and caught a bus into town.

Once in the right neighborhood we figured it would be easy to ask anyone for directions to the hotel. We had the address written down. How hard could it be?

Three hours later, Brooke and I were about ready to bite eachothers heads off. The map we had was useless, the oh so eager to help locals had no idea where our hotel was, and almost no one we met spoke English!

After being confidetly placed on a local bus by some friendly twenty somethings, we found ourselves no where near our destination only to ultimately discover that we had literaly walked right past the alley to our Hotel about an hour earlier.

Argh!

We recovered, and spent the next day poking around the perimeter of the Olympic village. We couldn't get very close. They were preparing for the paralympic games and kept us a good half mile away from the birds nest and aquatic center. We took a couple of token photos and left.