Today was an odd one. Really started in kind around 2pm when I got home from lunch and discovered some random lady in my kitchen. Always good, right? Turns out that either my roommate never told me we had maid service or i just completely forgot, but regardless it was a pretty awkward exchange because she took 20 or 30 seconds to make it clear what she was here to do. So that was fun. Thankfully we at some point had a housecleaning chapter in chinese, which equipped me with some pretty helpful vocab and i was able to straighten stuff out. I then did what i do when the maids come to my house back at home, namely got the hell out of the way because i feel like if i stay i’ll just actively create more of a mess as they’re trying to clean.

So following Jakob’s comment on last post, I went to that Beijing attractions site and poked around a little. Turns out I live about a ten-minute bike ride away from the National Art Museum of China. Used my wildcard to get a 10 kuai student ticket (though the booth lady made it clear she wasn’t happy to give me one) and spent two and a half hours wandering around the museum, which was gigantic. Will be putting up a photoblog on this as soon as possible. Anyway I eventually found this big gallery of a single painter’s work, which was unusual because most of the other galleries had one piece per painter tops. Space is at a premium in China, even in museums, so with as many painters as there are… yeah, everybody gets one. Except this guy 陈作丁 (Chen Zuoding). I think he probably got the whole room to himself because he died in late 2010 so it mighta been in memorial but I think I enjoyed his paintings the most of all, so it worked out well. Google him or just wait for the photoblog to see ’em yourself.

Anyway what was even cooler is that he had an apprentice who came all the way from Sichuan just to hang out in the gallery and talk about his teacher’s paintings with people. Problematically for him, and highly fortunately for me, there were almost no Chinese people in the gallery at all. I had no idea who either of them were but displayed some interest in the art so he came over, gave me a little magazine thing full of copies of the paintings in front of me, and started talking to me about the art itself. Which was great, except that a) the guy was from rural sichuan and had one hell of an accent, b) he was attempting to discuss some pretty advanced artistic concepts and c) my dictionary is broken.

However, I had one thing going for me — I had absolutely nowhere to be. I felt bad after a while; for the first half hour or so I was only understanding maybe 30% of what he was saying but instead of giving up on me the guy just kept trying to explain, slowing down his speech and using simpler vocab and pantomime until I was finally able to understand (我终于明白！） his points about brush pressure, stroke direction, yin/yang influence, color usage, AND inspiration for the painting coming from a combination of nature (自然　booya) and teacher’s own ideas & creative spirit (精神) on the various pieces he was showing me. Granted, understanding just that much took me damn near one solid hour but I hammered through it and by god neither of us had anything better to do than to try to communicate. The reason i know i understood it properly was that in the last ten minutes before the museum closed, an old chinese guy who worked for xinhua knews and spoke solid if somewhat british english came over and translated some of the words i had to guess from context for me, and with the exception of “degree of incline (even the old guy had trouble translating this)” and “pursuit” i was pretty much good to go. Was exhausting but rewarding; if my Chinese is actually going to improve here, exchanges like that are going to be what do it.

So I came home to blog about it, and was all excited to write and put up the pictures but then my key broke off in the lock. You ever have one of those moments? Where you realize — it’s 5:30pm on a Sunday and you have already been speaking nonstop Mandarin for the last hour and are tired and hungry and don’t even sorta kinda know how to approach getting access to a Chinese yellowpages so that you may attempt to communicate your needs to a locksmith, particularly granted that short of the street name you don’t even know your actual address?

They’re fun, let me tell you.

Anywho I cluelessly knocked on some doors for a while until I found this very nice lady who spoke english, french, and chinese, and moreover knew the number of some maintenance dude. He in turn called a locksmith company but deemed them too expensive so he instead asked me if he could take my bike to go fetch his friend, who he claimed was a locksmith but who I kinda suspect is just a burglar but either way had lockpicking tools so really who’s counting, right? I decided to bike to go see this dude with him, which means i had to use Rayco’s bike, which doesn’t have breaks but that’s another story entirely. So yeah we end up going to fetch the ‘locksmith’ from the meat and fruit market, which I find more than a little strange. But he ends up changing my lock, giving me eight new keys because that’s standard policy and apparently can’t not give me eight keys, and charging me an arm and a leg. Gah. Hate getting ripped off like that, but I was desperate.

So I cook dinner really quick and then get a call from one of my coworkers, inviting me out to go to a bar with her husband and friends which is nice of her; it’s an ok place except that it’s really cold and smells like smoke and the owner has a penchant for taking in stray cats, animals to which i am highly allergic. So now i’m all headachey and sneezy but i also got to meet a buncha new people (including a guy from the states! woo) so i can’t really complain.

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