Skype pictures

Skype is a strange thing. When both parties have their webcams hooked up, the conversation is so much more about looking at each other's videos than actually having a conversation. When I'm Skyping, I find myself showing people neat things that I have lying around my house or newly found youtube videos. Sometimes we have a beer together. When I was back in Miami, my brother Vince, who lives out of town, once attended a family function using Skype. His wife and him would sit down in front of the camera and invite people towards the laptop. My brother said they had a few successful conversations.
Skype has had a huge impact on the health of long-distance relationships. Let's keep Skyping, people!

西游记 Journey to the West

Journey to the West (or The Monkey King) is one of the four classic novels in Chinese literary history. If you ever ask a Chinese person about Chinese literature they will bring up these four classics, Journey to the West being one of them.
The story is about how the Monkey King, the Pig and Friar Sand protect the Monk Tripitaka on his journey to find the Buddhist scriptures.
The book is written like a comic book with no pictures. Each chapter ends with, "Listen to the next installment to hear how he was dealt with the following morning," or "If you don't know what happened to Monkey King's life, then listen to the next installment," which makes reading it a bit awkward, but overall Chinesely pleasant.

In the 80s a TV show was made which plays out the novel, chapter by chapter using amazing special effects and lots of smoke machines. You can turn on Chinese TV at ANYTIME and this show will be on. Every Chinese person living in China today knows and loves this TV series. I just bought the entire show and am also reading the book. Reading the book helps me understand just what, pray tell, is going on during the show. It seems the producers had a low budget to make this highly fantastic novel and so some of the scenes are hard to understand without any previous knowledge of the story.

Here is a clip from the show...
In this clip, a very fancy party is going on in one part of heaven while the devious monkey king is causing ruckus in another part. He's gotten drunk off heavenly jade liquor, downed a bunch of golden pills of refined elixir and stolen a plethora of heavenly treats to take to his monkey friends down on earth. Now, he's trying to escape the floating ladies with lanterns.

ENJOY!

a new blog

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been making my house my home which takes a lot of work. I am well on my way. Cleaning is quite fun when you move furniture around. Moving furniture around makes me feel like staying in my house and cooking and drawing. I've started drawing again. Something that was long overdue and so will have some pictures up soon.
For now, I have another project that you can look at. I have started a blog called strawberry face. It was named by my dear friend Kristy. I will post one Paint drawing a day.
Enjoy and I promise more pictures in the near future!

the last few days 几天以前

These are some pictures from last week...




a fish we ate soon after taking this picture.. delicious



My landlords daughter and her cousin took us to this street fair near the temple of heaven the first day of the new year.




at these fairs I am always extremely impressed with these
pinwheel bouquets


frenchies



An impressive new year's light display in Shanghai's Yuyuan

more here at my flickr

shanghai 上海

I have finally left the city of Beijing! Kristy, Ariel and I came back from Shanghai yesterday. We got there by plane and came back on the most comfortable Z train.
I learned how to say thank you in Shanghainese. It is sia-ya-nong! or 下牙农！呵呵：）

here are some pictures...


huge rat lanterns in a place called Yuyuan near old Shanghai street （上海老街）






one of many small drawings of insects at the shanghai art museum 上海美术馆


us 3


The Chinese use the peace sign when taking pictures, but they mean it as a 'V' for victory!

more soon../.

mmuah bbong

So, I've been teaching at a 7day English camp which is called 洋爸洋妈 (yang2ba4yang2ma1) which means 'foreign father, foreign mother'. Fred (洋爸), who's in the video and I(洋妈) are teaching these kids from 8am-6pm. We teach English, play games and improve our Chinese.

In this video, Yelly, who I am sure misspelled 'Kelly' when writing her name tag, is playing against Jenny in a game of Mmuah Bbong. In the very beginning of the video, Jenny adorably forgets what a 'letter' is, but remembers in an equally adorable way when another student screams out, "A! B! C!"



Enjoy!

more

This is from a Beijing Olympic game show that I happened to catch where many people
in animal costumes were racing running on spinning platforms collecting cheese and running from real bulls.




This is a piece of my neighborhood.




my place has small windows but lots of light and high ceilings!



I'm teaching at a 7day English camp for the winter break.
These are the kids pretending to be dead flies. Soon, I will
put an extremely cute movie on you tube.




Ana, this is the print from my cock chair. Oh and I was wrong in my last post
when I said the other chair had a duck pattern. It has a crane pattern.


Thanks for all your comments on the last post. I'm really enjoying my new place. Mom, I want to buy a piece of furniture to put my mess of shoes in and my keys on. Thanks Scott, my Chinese refrigerator is a great 70s avocado green and it's one of my favorite pieces which came with this place.

Kristy is coming on Monday!! Kristy, have fun on the trip! I'll see you soon!!