Culmination of the fan dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCc799vuwKg

not the best video, but you can see we didnt do too badly. The audience was enthusiastic. Still working on getting the new pictures on here.

Slacking

The baubles on this guys' vest simply needed some more exposure.
fruity furniture

An example of the truly monstrous buildings that are going up everywhere in China. There must be thousands of people in this one. Hangzhou isn't all Zen-gardens.
Speaking of Zen, I found this outside the light-market where I went to buy my desk lamp and loved it. Real modern art!

So I have been very busy, the fan dancing has been upped to 3x a week in anticipation of the performance Wednesday. We are far from perfect, but when we rehearsed in front of a partially filled stadium yesterday, it was very encouraging. We had great applause; I think the chinese students just like the foreign students so much we could have been picking our noses and they would have applauded! Still it was really encouraging and made the whole thing much more fun. Chinese class is going well enough, and I have started giving drawing classes on weekends. I am also finishing my Teaching English as a Foreign Language Certification. If any of you are interested in traveling abroad, you can get certified online and its not so expensive, some companies will even provide you with a job abroad, plane ticket included.

On top of all this I have been working out and playing a lot of basketball with the chinese guys. I'm not that bad and they're pretty good, but I am definitely taller here!! Finally I have been hunting art supplies in various odd corners of Hangzhou. Efficiency goes out the window here, and its partly due to communication issues, and partly that things just work differently, but you have to budget half a day sometimes to accomplish a simple task.

I should have more pictures, but I have been bad about carrying my camera so you will miss the expression on my face as I pulled the chicken beak out of my mouth tonight and some of the funny Chinglish signs and Tshirts. I will try to get some more pictures of food, and some gallery pictures in Shanghai. I have been to many galleries here in Hangzhou, but for me it is disappointing that almost all of them have only calligraphy and traditional painting, which is very beautiful, but I think it becomes very repetitive.

Bad Internet

Apologies to those of you who are still reading this blog, I have been very busy and recently our internet has been infuriatingly spotty. I have been taking a course for TEFL certification (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). It is pretty much required by almost everyone (except in a private tutoring situation) these days, and I really need some extra money. So on top of that, and the infernal and never-ending character memorization, there is also the increasingly long kung-fu practises, leading up to our performance. I have already let you all know how I feel about being made to do this, so I am trying not to get revved up about it again. Here is the actual dance we have been learning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dID-dQpaLbc

Lin Yutang

The Golden Week is coming to a close. What a crazy week it was, it was nice to have a break from studying characters, but everything got so busy it was suffocating around here! My plans to do some travelling went by the wayside because it was so busy, you had to wait hours to get on the trains, so I just figured it might be best to explore Hangzhou some more and save the short trips for regular weekends when the whole rest of China isn't trying to pack itself onto the train for holiday. The weather is really nice right now, still warm enough for shorts but not the ridiulous sauna it was when I first arrived. My frustrations with the language are still palpable, but I am able to at least communicate very basic needs and wants now.
I am reading a book titled, "My Country and My People," by Lin Yutang (in English his name would be reversed- Yutang Lin). It was written mid-20th century, and was really lauded globally as the first book by a Chinese author, but written in English, to really attempt to explain the people and culture here. It is truly fascinating, and beautifully written. While the times have certainly changed, the book really explains a lot about how and why things are this way here, and comes from a man who also has a superb understanding of Western culture. Highly recommend.

Friends Exhibtions:

Congratulations to my great friend Rachel, this promises to be an awesome exhibtion that anyone in the area should try to see:

Rachel Fainter MFA exhibition: "Psychobabble: Regression and the Cognitive Transcendence of Time"October 10th, 7:00-10:00B. Matthews, Savannah, GA

http://rachelfainter.com/home.html

I also highly recommend my friend Susan's exhibition in Portland:

Susan Murrell, "Indication of Oversight"Susan Murrell is exhibiting Instinctive Inquiry, installations and works on paper, at Gallery Homeland. Using "the visual vernacular associated with textbooks and the sciences in order to parody the measurement of creative output," Murrell explores the active, self-reflexive process of creating knowledge.Opening reception • 6-9pm • October 3

http://www.galleryhomeland.org/index.php

and Gregory Forstner, my French buddy, we met in NYC, showing at Triangle and in Munich :

http://www.galeriezink.de/fileadmin/zink/press_releases/forstner_pressrelease_en.pdf
http://hragvartanian.com/2008/09/24/triangle-open-studios/