Weekend

My first week back in Beijing has been a bit challenging at times. I wonder a little bit about why I am here, and I miss Scott and my family, all of which sometimes makes it difficult to feel at home here. In order to counteract these feelings, I have been keeping very busy, so this weekend was actually kind of tiring, but that's better than having spent the time sitting in my room feeling down. It was definitely nice to see some snow during the week.

On Friday Zoe introduced me to her friends Colin and Ella, two Canadians who are living in Tongzhou, an area outside of Beijing (near Songzhuang, the place where I went for a film festival last semester). I unfortunately didn't take any pictures for most of the night. We went for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, and then we went to see a band called Pet Conspiracy. I took one terrible picture near the end of the show when I remembered I had brought my camera.

On Saturday I had lunch with my old roommate, and then at 3pm I met up with a film prof, Ruihua, I had met at a film festival last November. Zoe came along (thankfully, since I was nervous about having to handle hours of Chinese by myself) and we met Ruihua's husband, as well as the subject of their first documentary film. They screened their film for us. It was really interesting, but it took a huge amount of concentration for me to follow it as it was entirely in Chinese (luckily it had chinese subtitles which made things a bit easier). It was a bit strange watching a film with both directors AND the subject of the film watching it along with you. 

After we finished, they were obviously wanting feedback, and I felt so exhausted from watching and thinking so hard that my mind went pretty much entirely blank. Zoe is much quicker on her feet than me, and made some very good comments and observations that I think they were very glad to hear. 

Anyway, we told them we could help them translate the film, so that will be our project for the next month. 

On Sunday Zoe, Colin, Ella and I went to the Agricultural Exhibition Hall for a free show on Chinese traditional arts and crafts. Because it was free and the weekend, the line-up snaked around in a gigantic swirl in front of the Hall.




Colin and Ella used our obvious status as foreigners to our advantage and managed to get us to the front of the line. It was rather unfair, but it was also nice to be able to get inside faster. 

Once inside, there were lots of neat things going on, but the place was so insanely packed that it was a battle to get close to anything. This lady was doing some paper-cutting:

Here are some of the results:
This old man must have also been involved in paper-cutting in some manner, but he was just chatting with people when we went by. Zoe bought a very beautiful paper-cut from another artist there. Hopefully she'll post her own pictures from the day at some point.
There was a stand with two ethnic Tibetan women from Sichuan province. They were selling these scrolls, but they couldn't really speak Mandarin. All these people kept coming up and asking, "How much for each one? What are these things?" And then the ladies only seemed to know enough Mandarin to say they were 5 rmb each. It was a bit strange....they were block prints....must be prayers of some kind?
Here are the two ladies:

There was a section on Chinese medicine. I took some pictures of the various tools and materials of the craft.
These were "Dragon Teeth" from the Yuan Dynasty. I'm not sure what animal they are actually from, but they were huge.
Here are "Dragon Bones" which are actually turtle pieces:
I think these were stones for placing on different parts of the body.
Here's a mud sculpture being made by a guy from Guangdong province:
And here's the artist:
Here's a member of the Miao minority making silver ornaments:
And here's an old fashioned refrigerator:
And finally, here's the reason why I was utterly exhausted after only about 20 minutes....every time I wanted to see anything I had to fight through several layers of humans just to get even a tiny glimpse. I guess it's normal when you're living in a city that's half the population of Canada or larger.
I found out this morning that Leonard Cohen will be playing shows in Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle in mid to late April. I am seriously thinking about flying back to Canada in time for one of the shows. That would, of course, mean ending my trip to Beijing about a month earlier than planned...but at the moment I think that might be ok. It would give me more time to prepare for our wedding, to work on my thesis and also to work a bit to save some money. It would also allow me to attend many of my friend's upcoming weddings (for some reason 2009 is turning out to be the year when everyone gets hitched...I guess it's just the age I'm at). Anyway, it's something I am considering. If anyone reading this has seen Leonard Cohen's recent tour (Gina or Graeme?), was it fabulous enough to make it worth cutting my trip a bit short? Haha.