The First Great Adventure of my Life.

Again I found my self making good friends with my bathroom this week, I'm not sure what the culprit was this week but I have a feeling it was a package of Chinese beef jerky I ate the night before the days of solitude. 3 days I lied in bed with my lap top, luckily I'd just bought a new copy of “war craft 3” that more than sufficiently occupied my time for the duration. And in fact it seems to be occupying a great deal of time in the present as well. But for those of you who think I'm just wasting my time, I'll mention that everything is written in Chinese, I don't know whats going on half the time, but every once in a while I learn something new, like the Chinese characters for manna potion, or night elf, that must come in handy sooner or later.

Otherwise it's been mostly just classes, I took a test to get put in a higher level class, worried I wouldn't learn all I could in the class I'm in now. My teachers said I had scored well enough on the test to advance but it would be really hard for me. So I decided that I would rather stay in the class I'm in now. I've been learning quite a bit, especially since I need to do all the make up for the days I was sick.

Last week me and my friends returned to the little shop where the little old lady gave me the painting of the little bird in the grass. The second we walked in she started pointing at me and talking really fast in Chinese, not that I could understand her anyway. But what my friends were able to gather, she had given me the wrong painting, I think she only sold copies of her work, and that I had taken the original, and she wanted it back. Despite this she was still very kind and said she would replace it with another painting when I came back. We were scheduled to come back next week anyway because my one Australian friend, Wei, had bought a painting of a goddess, that needed to be put on a scroll that wouldn't be ready 'till then.

After that we walked around to some of the other shops filled with Chinese antiques and art, and as it turns out there was a whole other half to the market that we hadn't even seen yet. It's becoming one of my favorite places in china so far. As we left though, a man came up to us speaking broken English, “hello hello” he shouted as he ran from the other end of the hall. “hello” we said back politely. When he reached us and started talking to us he pointed to one of the shops we were standing by and said “this place has all real things, all the other places here are not good” we kept the smiles plastered on our faces and tried to escape the clutches of his verbal kungfu grip.

Another week of classes passed and again it was Saturday, and time for my friend to pick up her painting, but before we went strait to her shop we stopped by the underground market place, a tremendous little place filled with nothing but row after row of little booths and shoppes selling clothes, food and some things that don't really fit into any preconceived categories, such as a hamster playing a traditional Chinese stringed instrument.

I took a few pictures of scary looking mannequins as the girls regularly stopped at each hand bag shop to buy their 6th or 7th of the trip. But I did find one thing I'd been wanting for a while now. A mattress for my mattress. The mattress in my room now is currently as hard as a solid block of wood, and not only that but you can feel each individual spring digging into your back as you lay there, trying to sleep. So I bought this mattress, a thin pad to put over the top of my bed. I talked it down from 80 to 60 kuai and sleeping has gotten much better ever since, though I'm still in the market for some industrial strength ear plugs.

After reaching the end of the mile long spelunking expedition we came out into the light and pulled out our map to find the old lady again. We got our bearings and set off. On the way we passed a little restaurant called “millionaires” and their symbol was a blatant knock off of the McDonnalds arches, I thought it was worth taking a picture of. I clicked off my camera and my friends took out their's to do the same. But just as Wei was redying her trigger finger a man came out, very very angry and started yelling at us in Chinese I'd heard that taking pictures of counterfeit stuff is likely to get you in trouble, but I had no idea the same applied to a huge restaurant on a busy street. After he went back inside, a few more pictures were taken and we walked away.

We got to the building and walked up to the 5th floor where the old woman was waiting for us. She already had a big smile when she heard us coming before she had even looked up to see us. We talked a little while and she told my friend that she could have any one of the paintings done of the goddess she had wanted, and she would throw in a painting of tigers for free if we wanted to wait around. So we waited a round, for a very long time. We sat outside the shop in the hall while Wei was inside talking with the woman.

In the shop are a number of awards hanging around mixed with the hundreds of paintings that paper the walls and floors, and sit in piles in the corners. She is also very nice and willing to take time to help us understand her, even though she has a thick accent and we don't speak very good Chinese at all. She really has taken a liking to Wei, she is the only Asian in our group, and even though her parents are Taiwanese she doesn't speak very good mandarin either, though when ever we're out everyone assumes she is our translator. As she was sitting with the old lady in her shop she was offered the chance to learn how to paint for free. A chance I would have jumped on right away, but Wei, seemed uninterested.

As this was going on though that man from last week who spoke English walked by and again started talking with us very enthusiastically. He was wearing a track suit and a watch that he made us guess the price of, which was apparently 16,000 kuai. He really liked to talk about himself, and after a while started asking what we were doing here. We told him we were buying some paintings and showed him what were were getting, upon looking at the paintings he immediately told us we were being riped off and that this lady was a bad artist. He then took my friend Ryan off to look at some subosedly very nice porcelain, but Ryan returned reporting some rather unpleasant lower back hand placement by the man, so though he sat with us and talked with us a while, mostly insulting the other artists we were talking with right in front of them because they couldn't speak English, we generally tried to avoid any in depth conversation. He had no problem telling me that he thought a religious studies major was a bad idea.

When we finally had our paintings he followed us out, giving Ryan his number and promising him a painting if he wanted to get together some time. We turned down invitations to show us more art and got out of there quickly.

We hopped a cab home and unloaded our goods in our rooms, then went out to dinner. We went to a nice Taiwanese restaurant. Then we went to another market place some other people had been to before. I ended up buying a really nice Chinese suit coat. I like to wear it around my room and just feel generally pimpin. The other thing I bought is generally the coolest thing ever. A belt with a huge buckle in the shape of the Transformers symbol, and when I wear the two things together I feel like the coolest nerd on the planet.

Well thats it for now, I'll have more to write next time in a week or so.