Photos from June

Back again

Weeks and weeks later, I'm back on Blogger. I haven't been able to access my account for weeks and weeks, which was especially weird after one of my posts disappeared from the page. Lots of water under the bridge.

John and I are sitting in Time Zone 8, a cafe in Dashanzi, working and typing this morning. Our program finished officially on the 22nd, and then we spent a few days in Beijing and then went to Xian for the weekend with my sister and her family, which was fun. We arrived back here on a sleeper train on Monday and have been floating around here so far this week, gearing up to leave for a trip to Yunnan Province tomorrow.

Its strange to be here - by which I mean to say that this is a strange place. I remember that every now and again - we were walking up through the back entrance to 798 a few weeks ago to get some dinner...I think it was a Sunday...we had to walk through the back entrance because the side entrances closest to our apartment are often closed (on Sundays, after 7 PM). We were walking past a factory and there's a spot in the road where there is a chimney giving off steam really loudly, so much so that for the twenty or thirty feet that we were walking near it we couldn't hear anything. In this moment of no sound a boy rode by on his bike - I recognized him as one of the people that works at the restaurant near base and we waved at each other...the steam and the noise made the whole thing seem like it was in slow motion.

Another one of my favorite things happened when we rode our bikes to Vanguard, a big grocery store nearby, one afternoon. I had left an empty water bottle in my bike basket and accidentally left a cardigan there too. When I came out of the store, the bottle was gone, probably taken by one of the pensioners who collect them around here, and the sweater was neatly folded. It was a little bit funny to have had someone inside of the basket but mostly it felt really nice - it was so nice of whoever that was to fold the sweater it made the rest of the day a bit brighter.

If Blogspot continues to work, I will post pictures soon of where we've been and what we've been working on - we've been working on a Rhino model of a house for a lot next to John's parents' house in Presque Isle that we're both really excited about.

Cat

Yesterday when we were at the site that we've been observing, near the third ring road, our roommate, Melanie, scooped up a kitten that we'd seen on previous visits. After asking the people nearby if we could take it, the cat was quickly in the taxi with us, squirming a little bit as we sped towards our new apartment near the fifth ring road. The kitty was dirty, with mites in his little ears, but once we got Chairman Meow home and started to clean him up he started to look much better. We checked CDC rules about bringing cats back into the U.S. and they are surprisingly lax, so hopefully Melanie won't have too many problems bringing him back home. There's something funny about his back, so he can't jump quite as high as most cats, but he doesn't seem to be in any pain and is very cute.

One more for today

I went to a great vegetarian restaurant a few times this week where we were served lotus flower tea. I thought it was so lovely it deserved a photo as well. Off to bed now - we have a 6 am appointment to measure and document an apartment building tomorrow. A presto.

Urs Meile

We visited this gallery last week - it was designed by Ai Wei Wei and is located in Cao Chang Di, the village next to B.A.S.E. which has become an "art village." A really beautiful space.

It's back!

I'm so happy blogspot is back...I had tried to access it over the past several days without success...I think the government might periodically block access to the site. Things are moving fast here, with a few minor calamities along the way. John came down with a fever on Thursday, which was a little bit scary, and then I lost my wallet, passport, credit cards, everything on Saturday night. It's been tricky so far, but I think a major hurdle was jumped today when a girl from my program who speaks Mandarin agreed to come with me to the central police station to report the loss of the passport. I didn't really hear that much English being spoken around me, so her assistance was invaluable. The best part: when the report was finally composed (in Mandarin) about the lost passport, the place where I had to sign my name was translated as "loser." So fitting.

798 continued

Yesterday we went to other galleries in 798 as well. This one was my favorite, like most of the other spaces converted warehouses. It was amazing, in section a series of quarter-circles with windows on the north side so that viewing it from the north it was completely opaque and from the south all glazing. They had also kept the original East German fuse boxes from the factory, which sprang up at intervals throughout the space.

First post: today is day five in Beijing. It's been a busy week so far here, waking up around five or six, getting breakfast and then heading in a taxi towards BASE, our studio space this summer near the fifth ring road, and working there during the day to get things in order as the building is still decidedly under construction. During slow times, we've taken some nice excursions, especially to the village near BASE and 798, an art district that is about a twenty-minute walk from where we are. I took a video inside one of the galleries - its still a little bit jumpy and I had just learned how to use the zoom button.