clothes driers are a luxury most places outside the u.s. so here i've needed to get used to hang drying clothes on a wire on our balconies. it's fun, but it totally robs me of that wonderful "warm, right out of the drier" feeling that makes clothing fun to wear and linens fun to wrap yourself in.
i've also included pics of the construction happening on the block perpendicular to mine and across the street. it's a common sight all over the city, this just happens to be in my backyard so to speak.
as a bonus for all you armando fans out there, here he is dancing the "le corsaire" male variation (one of the most famous in classical ballet). he tells me he's doing well and very happy in the new company, learning a whole lot and getting along spectacularly with the director of the company.
the chinese have a strange sense of design and lack crucial skills in photoshop, making ads here just a little off. apparently all you need to have a succesful campaign is ridiculously smiley people, very fake backgrounds, and quite often as much chinese red as possible.
my favorite bottled tea, made from chrysanthemum. i like the weirdo fake gazebo and background dude with a saxophone. you see fake-o skies and landscapes like this a lot in advertisements, pollution obviously doesn't let this happen in real life.
i don't even know what this dude sponsors, but notice the couple dressed the same next to him. that's a totally normal supposedly cute coupley thing to do here, i see at least one couple do that every day.
i just thought this was funny and a little tragic.
i loooove these girls! they actually gave me the idea for this post. it's from a kfc ad all over the city. coming soon: ross will make a painting of these two :)
these chicks come from a dentist office ad, they kinda crack me up they look so happy and maybe a little lost and confused?
hello again, here is the long overdue video tour of ross and my apartment. Again, we live on the 10th floor of a white building just a half block from the dongzhimen subway station on the northeast corner of the second ring road. it's a really nice walk in every direction. we're across the street from ginza mall which has a grocery store named Olé where we do most of our shopping. to the east is a whole bunch of hot pot restaurants leading to a hutong which is an old style neighborhood (basically what you think of when you think of china), many such hutongs are scattered across the city. they're made up of seemingly aimless ancient, meandering, narrow walkways with stone and plaster walls topped with those tiled, arched, eaved roofs sometimes lined with dragons and other figures. on the west and a little to the north there's a whole lot of shopping and the northernmost point of the embassy district. we're nearest the russian, german, canadian, and australian embassies. the american, french, and other embassies are nearby and just to the south. my neighborhood is always filled with pedestrains, and buses, and taxis. because of all the money and commerce in the area, it's well kept, clean, and tree lined and of course illuminated with hundreds and hundreds of red lit paper lanterns.
the green door is the front door. this is the living room, where we spend most of our time
this video starts with balcony number one, which we use as our studio and art stuff storage. the small purple area is where our washer is. then there's our funny bathroom, notice that we don't really have a bathtub, just a hand shower head.
the kitchen, complete with live-in chef
this video starts in the small hallway connecting every part of the house, then our bedroom and the second balcony which is where we keep our plants. we just bought a small green apple tree and that plant in the corner is a purple grape plant. and our view.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
just a quick hello and some pics of ross, silvia, and i. had some fun work last week doing dialog recordings for learning english. the company loved me and my voice and said they'd call again for more work, let's hope so.
i also started painting again, this is my first finished painting in china. i like this cake kick i've been on the last few months, they're on my myspace photo album art stuff.
I'm finally connected to the internet at my new place! meaning that i'll have skype available to me all the time and communication will be even easier. in case you don't know what skype is it's the best FREE comunication tool in the world, and it uses the internet as your phone line. my username is TUDELOOP so look me up if you have it, otherwise here's a link to more info and where to get it skype aqui!
with the olympics coming soon to beijing, you can't go anywhere in the city without seeing blatant advertising with chinese athletes or the cute little olympic mascots, they're on banners, posters, flyers, and there's also all sorts of bootleg goods available on probably every single street i've walked along. they're super excited over here and it's a little contagious. i've driven by the olympic stadium twice since i've been here and it's pretty spectacular looking. it's unofficially called the bird's nest stadium and bubble building(where water events will take place), designed by the same guys who will build the new miami art museum facilities by the bay in the coming years. i've included a few very future-y computer generated photos of what it will look like when completed and a link to some more information. the stadium is almost complete and really is breath-taking even though the thick pollution packed air here.
the building is asymmetrical and HUGE! a side view
this is the entire complex, it lays just north of the center of the city
Ross and i went to the very edge of beijing today hoping to see this group of temples with intact ming dynasty murals which for the work's safety's sake can only be seen with a provided flashlight. unfortunately like most of the city it was under construction and restoration and we weren't allowed to enter. the city is actually the spot in the world with the most construction going up by far and you can tell. it's sometimes uncomfortable when it affects things like subways or pedestrian traffic, but interesting none the less to see a city completely re-invent and revamp itself. imagine all the construction going on in brickell in the last 4 or 5 years spread out for 50 miles in every direction. it's something like that, and some of these buildings going up are quite modern and beautiful. the chinese sometimes go about things the wrong way, recently destroying the oldest opera house in beijing (around 800 years old) to put up a bank or some shit. the rule seems to be that if it makes money it can stay, otherwise it's out and something that'll stimulate the economy will go up in it's place. a few days ago marked the one moth anniversary of my being here, it already feels like a small lifetime though. i'm learning a few words of chinese at a time, i can count (awkwardly but i can still do it), and am really beginning to know how to get around the city. one month after i first arrived, china is still very much a mystery wrapped in an enigma (thanks oscar wilde). no pics this time, but more to come. love you all :) by the way, the chinese ADORE kfc, there's one every single block, no lie. and they have slight differences like NO BISCUITS :( but on an up note mcdonalds has a huge variety of dipping sauces for chicken macnuggets like malay satay, french honey mustard, chinese sweet and sour, and some super delicious tamarind one. there are absolutely no wendy's though. my biggest complaint by far of the chinese fast food status quo.
So, not to dissuade anyone from coming to see me in china, but there are a few funny things i noticed that some may need preparation for. Chinese public bathrooms are a little crazy, we affectionately call them "squatters" here. I made a diagram to show the basic mechanics...
Maybe 99% of public restrooms in China look like this, a little nightmare-ish, a leg work out when you really don't need one, and initially at least an inhibitor of those functions you're there to relieve yourself of. but it's something everyone faces here. i still get the willies a little every time i use one but i just be careful to avoid them, and to keep a small amount of t.p. on me ALWAYS! Private homes all have toilets, as do a select few western clientèle orientated businesses. even the maconalds and kfc's have squatters, but they always include t.p. They aren't always the cleanest or best smelling, but i definitely understand why they're more sanitary. and public bathrooms like this exist all over, so it's not really super weird. showers on the other hand are some crazy shit! the chinese just kinda shower in the middle of their bathroom with the shower head pointing to whatever the open space in your bathroom is, wetting almost everything else in the room. simply put they don't really have a tub, and that's harder to wrap my head around. here i need to squeegee the floor after a shower to get all the water out, it ends up going through a drain somewhere on the floor. i don't really see the logic in that placement...i guess it's a space saver but it's not my favorite thing about china by a long shot.
ON A NICER NOTE... you can still find lots of beautiful things all over beijing, this video is the view from one of the balconies at my new place on the 10th floor. ross and i face ginza mall, the first building on the corner, then the tree lined street marks the beginning of a several block stretch which is one of beijing's premiere restaurant districts, lucky me. one block east i have a mcdonalds,and half a block west i have a 7 11. sometimes i feel like every single thing in my life has changed except for like 15 really random things.
This is the view from my balcony by day
and this is the kind of hidden treasure you'll find quite unexpectedly between the big buildings, crappy and crazy traffic, and light polltuion-y haze you see cast over the city
Saturday, September 1, 2007
So the art area in Beijing is called 798, ross and i made our way here this typically muggy and overcast afternoon. The art is surprisingly good here, there's lame stuff like any other art scene anywhere but i can't wait to see more soon :) Of course i didn't bring my camera with me today, so instead i'm posting pictures from other museum things we did in the city these last few weeks. The National Museum of Fine Arts has this pretty neat show running, a "greatest hits" of sorts of the Prado Museum in Madrid including El Greco, Poussin, Goya, and Velazquez. Also in the Capital Museum there's a nice but very crudely put together show from the Louvre's Ancient Greek collections. Notice how close you can get to the marble portraits of Alexander the Great, Homer, and other important works
