Last night, about 25 of the kids in my program went out for a night of revelry and American extravagant partying. We went to a club called Song and rented out a VIP room above the dance floor where we could look out over the rest of the club. The whole place was finished in curved wood paneling and trippy videos with naked ladies were projected on the walls. http://www.songbeijing.cn/ 
The music was mostly electronic house music with some Michael Jackson and popular funk thrown in. It was pretty fun, but expensive. We had a free cover with the VIP room, but each beer was 38 kuai and altogether, we had to spend 3000 kuai. The lame part was that everyone started to get tired around 2am. Me and two friends named Alex and Lindsey decided to find another place to keep dancing, though Alex wasn’t so into the dancing. We asked a few people and ended up at a place called Angel that had motion sensing flashbulbs when you approach the door so that you feel like a celeb, haha. Anyway, a lot of rap music and poorly dancing Chinese people greeted us, but we had a good time being the only white people in sight. Got back to the dorm at around 430.
Woke up at 8 o’clock to go to the Temple of Heaven with Peggy. This was the first ancient Chinese history tourist stuff that I have done, and it was really cool going with a native. The park was full of Old people doing Tai Chi, singing, playing instruments, and painting. I was really impressed with the intricate painting and architecture of all the pavilions and the actual temple. It was some 30 meters high and 15 meters around of interwoven wooden beams and pillars of decreasing size as you look further out and up. The majority of the description plates told about an intricate ceremony of worshiping the ancestors. There was this one door that was called the “70 year old Gate.” Some 500 years ago one of the emperors became old enough that he didn’t want to have to walk around the wall, so he ordered this gate built. After the ceremony, he decreed that no future emperor should use this gate until he reached 70 because that would just be lazy. Interestingly enough, he died the next year, and no future emperors ever got to 70, so the gate was only used once. There aren’t any barriers around it or anything. We don’t have very many things in America that are older than 500 years that are still used or in this case not used in this way.
On the way out I stopped to talk to an old man, through Peggy, about is calligraphy. He was using water and a very large brush to draw Chinese characters and poetry on the sidewalk. For being friendly, he gave me one of his paintings for free! and I emailed him the picture of the two of us.
Had KFC for lunch. It was tasty.
Decide not to teach Koreans. I tried to call them back a few times and the assistant kept telling me to call back because the boss was busy. I’m not sure why he didn’t just tell her the details and let me get started. I eventually just didn’t call back. Might teach young Chinese kids on weekends at a school where Peggy teaches. At this one, I go to speak with the boss, and they ask me to show them my teaching in Peggy’s class! I had no idea about their language skills or about what I wanted to say! There were 30 kids! So I stumbled through trying to teach them “Hello, how are you, I am fine” for 15 minutes, and they hired me … sort of. Communication skills here in China are srsly different.
Tags: art, china blog, nightlife, song, Teaching, temple of heaven, tourism