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.