Category: China Trip

This months elective being offered by the school is Chinese Painting. Nadia was sleeping and Mike was working, so I headed over to the school on Tuesday afternoon. The teacher is an art student at the local university and she was shy, but very good at the style of Chinese painting that she taught today. It’s the traditional black watercolor and I got to do mine like a tracing. She taught me how to hold the brush – this went against how I usually hold a pen, but I could see that over time it would become comfortable. You have to hold the brush straight up and be very, very precise. She told me that I moved too fast and it’s best to do this type of painting when your heart is still and you are very relaxed. I was laughing because I do everything fast and it was hard to force myself to slow down. Next week she is going to teach a different style of painting and how to do flowers. So far it seems pretty cool.

Both of my “paintings” were replicas from a famous painter during the Ming Dynasty.

And last a little Nadia cuteness for your day!

2 places I generally avoid at home are Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. I prefer almost any other burger place and do almost all my shopping at SuperTarget. And yet here, it’s just refreshing to be able to get a burger that tastes exactly like home (for way cheaper than at home) and to be able to just grab what you need at Wal-Mart. The area that we are living in is obviously an affluent area and the Lotus Center grocery store has prices that are much like America. And the rest of the Lotus Center is a fancy mall with stores like Nike.

We took the subway for the first time last night to go to Wal-Mart. On the way there we passed many stores that are just like America including a 3-4 story mall of places like ESPRIT. Walking down the street to the subway station I told Mike I felt like I was in Vegas with the smoke everywhere, neon lights and expensive clothing stores.

The subway system here has been revamped and all new lines have been added for the Olympics. I am confident now that with my handy map I could get all over Beijing with no trouble. It looks like we will have to take 3 different subway lines to get to the Silk Market for shopping, but I am ready! We are very close to the zoo and the aquarium and I hope to take Nadia there soon. The weather is supposed to get into the upper 60’s later in the week.

At Brandi’s request I took some shots of the apartment after my cleaning fest. Overall you can just envision the place as a narrow rectangle. You come in the front door and everything branches off the hallway.

Here is our room – notice the new blue quilts…..they are so soft and comfy.

Here is Nadia’s room.

The bathroom.

Each side of the kitchen.

The hallway and the balcony/clothes drying area. Lots of people around us use this area for storage and you can see the boxes stacked to the ceiling.

Once Nadia was up from her nap on Sunday we headed out to explore, but the biting wind was terrible and we didn’t want to keep Nadia out in it. We headed over to the school to check things out and it was open with some students in there doing martial arts and playing ping pong. The school is very nice and we saw Ethan and met his wife and son. They lived in America for 3 years and now he is the VP of the school. He told us that they are trying to cater mostly to western students.

We also made another run to the store for some odds and ends including a broom, mop and various cleaners. Then I went into super scrubber mode and cleaned the living room and kitchen like a maniac. Mike said these floors probably haven’t been this clean in months 🙂 But I was grossed out from all the dust and stuff caused by the pollution – it just gets all over everything here. And Nadia will be spending most of her waking hours in the living room and I wanted it to be clean. I am going to attack the rest of the apartment Monday after class.

I have included various shots from our area. On the bottom floor of the Microsoft building there is a Starbucks, no surprise there. In the school there is a Subway franchise – I wonder what sort of “interesting” meats they have to offer?

Here you can see Nadia has taken over the living room.

Blue skies in Beijing. Shocking!

The entrance to our apartment building.

Our building. Number 9.

A couple more shots from the balcony.

The pizza place and some very hard workers carrying all kinds of items from pineapples to recylables.

2 views from our balcony at sunset.