TRAVEL: Xi'an

FASHION & TRAVEL: Halloweeeeen! Shanghai style

monday - Thursday 27-30th october
spent sunday night studying as i had another unit test exam on tuesday for comprehensive class. it was harder, with more chinese characters and the listening part was different. still have to write some pinyin though which im poor at, but the other teacher says pin yin isnt as important as "hanzi" in the real HSK. been mainly learning directions which came in handy for work as i was tracing pattern and trying to decipher whether it was front (qianbian) 前边 or back (houbian) 后边
I was also sent to the accessories market, pricing some bra strap fasteners for a client. I got some cards for myself, finding i could buy awesome studs for .5 quai (i'll be stocking up!) and buying some beautiful embroidered lace pieces.
After class on Tuesday was the international chinese culture fair at univeristy. the opening ceremony had some chinese dancers with fans and then a class traditional costumed girls beating drums, not only with a powerful drum beat but with amazing choreography. there were loads of games to try, such as tai chi with fans, characters matching etc. free street food samples (mainly cake like things so tasty!) and chinese culture activities such as calligraphy, shadow puppet play, mask painting, sugar animal making, moon cake making (a sticky mess but edible straight away and very tasty!) I also got to dress up in chinese opera costume where i stumbled upon some of the guys already getting stuck into the fancy dress by getting their faces painted! would have loved to stay longer but I had to go to work, but it was very fun and interesting.

wednesday in work was spent practising on creating an oragami headpiece from scratch from silk, however it needed to be altered as the other material doesnt go too well with it.
went down a bit in the exam, 74%, due to my pinyin and a couple missing characters, yet i was getting the majority of the rest fo it correct, whereas some of the other students werent, but of course many were getting higher still. Laoshi Xie got pretty angry at Bai Fu ( the french speaking coloured guy in front of me) as he doesnt studying or understand much and messes around and was cheating in his dictation exam. I researched the hsk 3 and its all in characters apart from one section were they give you the pinyin and you have to use it to complete a sentence. not sure about the speaking and listening part of the exam, I'm sure Pan Laohi will be more forthcoming. Linda met me about my Taobao the sewing machine was sent but the message got sent to my mobile which cant read chinese so its getting sent out again and to her phone. the contacts I ordered were also not sent as I never checked the mail and answered the questions abut whether i wanted one or 2. oops!

Friday 31st October - Sunday 2ND November Halloween!

Halloween isnt really celebrated in China, they have a ghost day in July or August, a bit similar to the day of the dead as its ghosts of ancestors.so therefore its mainly internationals who celebrate and the odd chinese student. but because it's a Friday more people were out. I was able to get 100 days mainly black contacts just outside the university for 80rmb. which is cheaper than at home for a one day pair!
everyone came to my room for me to help them with makeup and to get. I did Rebeka's face as half a sugar skull, the white face paint was very good.
using some watered ink i created black tears and also discovered a wet brush and eyeshadow goes darker and spreads better than just normal eyeshadow and a dry brush or applicator. topping off my look with my dark contacts and white face was black eyes, black glitter lips and tears and "blood" dripping in black from my face and neck, along which huge back-combed hair i quite looked freaky. Lots of chinese loved it.

unfortunately most chinese and westerners didnt really dress up, just fake blood and slutty outfits mainly (of course, similar to the West I guess)
Linda came out with us, wearing contacts for the first time and a red riding hood cape, just looked cute and Kat went as a very green witch (hair and face!) we went to Perrys and got a free halloween drink for happy hour (zombie: creme de menthe and milk, delicious!) the place was packed, I had never seen anything like it before! we were signing and dancing and having a great time. nobody went to mansion, some went to Hollywood and we briefly went next door to a chinese place called "Maya" it was awful, packed and all chinese, though outside decor was halloween, inside was far from it, the final straw was when we went to the toilets, unisex and the bathroom doors (inside and out) were not only squat toilets but covered in a large picture of a skimpily clad woman, disgusting. we went back to perrys. there was less there. got a drink and dance and chatted the night away. it was great fun. from winding Linda up and getting halloween photos (finding random flashing devil horns and capes) adding spider webs to liven up the costumes and trying to explain the concept of the breakfast bar to linda. we stayed until closing. exhauted, but worth it. a fun night! exhausted for work the next morning of course. but halloween only once comes once a year!


Sunday was spent with Kat. we tried the Muslim canteen finding it less greasy, visited M18/M on the Bund to see the Yves Saint Laurent Photography exhibit and found the designer a strange man (always smoking, in love with his bulldog and wearing a strange lab coat in the early days)

from here we went to the art place near Hongqiao, full of strange statues outside and the grass and plants slightly overground for a strange free artistic look. there was even a building sloped into and covered in grass. we paid into the "halloween exhibit" there were cute Halloween sugared pieces. but the rest of it was not an exhibit, we paid 25 into a market! thrift and craft! it was interesting but not worth the price. they had exotic pets for sale. crabs in shells. lizards, frogs, a scorpion and tarantulas. very strange! along with odd music. we also got slightly ripped off outside getting some nice smelling cake like things and getting too much and paying 46 in total. we ate that for dinner and didnt even finish it there was so much. we weren't even sure what i was. not sweet nor savory, dry or wet, not very sticky, and we werent at all sure what it was made from. however it tasted ok, and was addictive to eat and not greasy. so a success.
horribly sore dry eye today for no reason which made my squint and gave me a headache along with a huge bite on my arm which is swollen, sore and itchy!

Monday 3rd - Wednesday 5th November
learnt extra vocab over the weekend, which is always a drag but means im prepared for when i seem to get double dictation! so annoying! Monday's are so bad for attendance, at least half the class is missing. one of the black students behind me only went for a total of 2 days, and the other who also sits at the back appears sporadically and gets a telling off from Xie Laoshi, lots of people think they enroll just to get the Visa, however I dont know what good a visa would be, its not like the pay is anything special here? I had the afternoon of work so went shopping in Qipu Lu (the cheap chinese fashion area) getting some clothes and new shoes and trainers (similar to Docs and only £8.50!)
we had our class photo on Tuesday, outside, i had lipstick on, and therefore being a white girl with makeup i was but in the front middle beside the teacher and they kept telling me I was beautiful..

Wednesday in class was horrid, for some reason in Comprehensive chinese we had some listening exercises with tones and picking correct answers, I was terrible, got like 2 right. however not everyone was amazing. i must practice more. thankfully Kat was able to send me the book's cd tracks via dropbox so I can start listening to that to practice and I also found a site with listening for HSK on it.
Was ready for punching chinese ladies the past 2 days trying to get the tickets for Xi'an. Kat and I have been 3 times before this and we kept being told to come back, eventually we asked Shaodi to come help us, and resulted in getting one return ticket and being told to return later/tomorrow for the other. When Kat went that evening after 5 they wouldnt serve her as it was too late? when we went on Wednesday, the woman glanced at the paper with the details and just started saying no, even after we said where in chinese. seeing red we were able to thankfully got Shaodi to help us, our tickets were sold out, she wouldnt look at the sheet at all , he had to translate all in chinese, we had to get a different train and the lazy B***h didnt even put our names on the tickets instead just typing the Initial, eugh! Some people make my blood boil, clearly a racist who didnt want to serve/help white people. not cool at all!!!
thankfully work was much better, doing more patterns, organising stuff for a press shoot and separating toiles. turns out the chinese recycled just about everything, materials, raw materials, papers, plastics etc. A lot of the elderly and poor hoke in bins etc and gather it as they get money for it. explains why so many people just drop their rubbish at their feet as they know someone will always pick it up. if only the west would do something like this, would help the environment immensely, but no-one wants to get their hands dirty and bin hoke, its should be community service for sure! and apparently the chinese work a lot with Africa now, mainly using landfills there. explains why there's so many Africans in my class and the school.

Thursday 6th - Tuesday 11th November
thankfully had a nice last lesson on friday were we watched a chinese video on chinese food, although in chinese it was very interesting seeing how they made noodles from scratch, oil from seeds etc. so much effort and the outcome is so inexpensive, not really fair i guess.
got shown how to set up crepe chiffon for cutting, steaming it flat. I was to cut strips for the sample cape i made a pattern for, being shown by the male sewer, he made it look so easy to cut yet when i did it it was a mess! i would most likely use a rotary blade to cut and not try to cut 14 layers at once!
On saturday I got soaked and frozen in the rain which resulted in a cold. not cool! did however try banana milk tea, very tasty, Haohe! 好喝
felt rotten when i got back on Saturday, but was happy to discover that the sewing machine i ordered off Taobao works perfectly, albeit a bit noisy and plastic'y.
didnt want to waste my Sunday and didnt feel too awful, finally tried vegetable baozi, very tasty! went to K11 art mall, so nice! very beautiful with lots of amazing shops including a Vivienne Westwood store! (unfortunately the Asian workers were following us so close they may as well been breathing down our necks literally as they were that close)
they had some strange art pieces there, including a video of Andy Warhol pop art of Monroe and Jackson but a moving version of them smoking.

The interwoven watch floor piece I will never disappear/forever i will be here : Heidi Violet is made to show the interpretation of everyday objects like cheap digital watches , its a reminder to the audience that although time has an impact of everyone it is also a concept invented for the convenience of human activities. every hour they chime simultaneously making an orchestra fo digital chimes outside

 they also had a huge golden pig with wings that moved up and down like it was going to take into flight. The majority of stuff was weird and modern and didnt seem to have much reason behind them? downstairs was the Nordic fashion exhibition on innovative fabrics and designs that were environmentally friendly. they were mainly fashionable and wearable.

from here we headed to the Bund. unfortunately the exhibition I thought we were going to was not at 3 at the bund, A lovely building but it was spookily empty inside, the exhibit was modern art: red, black and white lines, the centre pieces being suspended painting strips of wood. however near the window in clear plastic had been written a story which was only readable in certain lights. it was quite interesting. A warehouse type space, it would have been perfect for halloween, especially as we were completely alone, no one was even on the door to the entrance!
we tried to go to the graffiti exhibition at M18 however it was still not ready, looking in, it looks fantastic, very earthy and urban, will be exciting to visit once complete.
our last stop was Tianzefeng. originally a crafts area it was now really a tourist place, full of shops and not really any form of crafts, full of cute hip bars and lit up with small lamps and fairy lights it had a great laid back atmosphere. we did find an art gallery with works for sale, some of which was fantastic, one old man (the artist painted in their gallery/shop areas) was unbelievably talented, his knack for light, clothes and facial expressions was perfect, raw and emotional. i was sad to be unable to get a sneaky photograph!
I died a slow death on Monday, skipping first class, i felt horrific and discovered i was very low on painkillers. thankfully it was just characters [practise sheet in class as there's to be a test on friday, however Kat and I will not be there as our train to Xian is on Thursday. we were also informed of an oral test next week. however afterwards we had a baozi making class with the other beginners which should be fun! i forced myself into work being made to wear a mask, I finished the strips and left early. the rest did me good and I felt 100 times better on the tuesday I also reckon the orange and vit c powder I got from tesco may have helped (a juice powder you add to hot water, annoyingly they do not sell any form of medicine in local shops!!) we began the second book in Comprehensive class. so apparently we now know 150 characters from that first book alone, pretty impressive! today is 11/11 which means the massive online sales! needless to say i've got a huge basket and plan on spoiling myself!

wednesday 12th-thursday 13th November
unfortunately for me, due to my increased and foreign spending, along with the proper online banking checking procedures coming up, the police (apparently) reported my bank card as stolen/compromised and i've been labeled with fraud. i was rang at 2am, had to ring back and after a very annoying conversationalist with some Scottish guy my bank card will be left active for 2 weeks before being fully cancelled, one will be sent to my house and then sent to me. so annoying!!! but was able to grab some cash with it from the ATM and pay for some more on my taobao account. I only spent about £150!
did more patterns in work, making them from scratch for a head piece from eye. thankfully feeling a lot better! missing out on my test on Friday, however Xie Laoshi when we told her we were going to Xi'an showed us her blog pictures and told us it was her favorite place and that we should in fact be going longer(she's a funny individual!) after class on thusday I studied a while before Kat and I briefly checked out the fashion and textile museum in the school grounds, unfortunately it was closely in 15 minute but we did look at the exhibit from London that is on until December. photography pieces on futuristic designs and royal styles. the royal styles were my favorite. the models were the most attractive, the main one had a scrawny face and sticky out ears? we then went for a stroll around the school, getting very annoyed wen a chinese lady refused to acknowledge our question in chinese as she was either not bothered talking to westerners or because she knew we didnt really want to buy anything (all we asked was if some green thing was a vegetable or fruit, simple question with a simple answer!) had some dinner before heading for the train and our long journey on hard seat to Xi'an.