This week was a busy week. On monday, the plan was to have a look around St Joseph's Church, but it was closed, so we wandered down Wangfujing and ended up outside the Theatre Museum of Beijing People's Art Theatre. We weren't sure exactly what it was, but it looked interesting, so we headed inside.
It turns out that it's not just a theatre museum, it is also a theatre. We'd headed into the box office, where the staff offered us a choice of plays to buy tickets for. After we'd established we were looking for a museum, they made some phone calls and we found our way to the museum.
It was a museum in the traditional style, with display cabinets and little descriptions. Most of the descriptions were in chinese, but there were some english ones. For the most part, the exhibits were clear even without a description.
Continuing down Wangfujing, just as we were about to get on the metro we spotted a long queue, and there's only one thing to do when you see a long queue: join it. (I said the same thing when talking about this the next day, and was told that joining the queue isn't the one thing to do, the one thing to do in to leave. That's incorrect). Well we queued for a good while, but as we neared the front i noticed that there was a large sign saying that due to demand we needed to have booked in advance. Of course we hadn't, we'd only just realised what we were queuing for---the National Art Museum Of China. But we were stepped in so deep and so we continued to queue, and eventually fumbled our way through stumbling inside.
I'm very glad we did stick with it, as the current exhibition was about small art. All the paintings and sculptures were about the size of A3 paper or less, and there was a wide variety of styles around.
We finished off that day by heading to a Pakistani restaurant and then catching the bus home. By that time it was freezing and the wind had really picked up, so i was glad to get back inside.
The next day, me and a classmate visited our teacher's home where she cooked for us. Also there was her cousin and her three year old daughter who was adorable and precocious. After playing pretend eating and then real eating, we made dumplings, wrappers and all, and then ate them. It was lots of fun :)
On thursday, i went skiing with the same family. I'd never been skiing before, but it was a good time. I sort of got the hang of it, but it really made me ache. After the slopes closed, we headed back into Beijing and ate hotpot.
Friday was the last day of chinese new year so we went to Yuanmingyuan Park where there was a bit of a celebration going on. Unfortunately we missed the ice skating shows, but we could still wander through the food stalls. I ate stinky tofu, seitan, durian, and various types of potato. My teacher bought me a dancing shadow puppet of the Monkey King. The park was very beautiful, despite it being winter; some of the trees had artificial blossom tied to them. I'm looking forward to visiting again in the spring.
There were no particular plans on saturday, so i went for a walk around Haidian. The most exciting thing was seeing the Bytedance offices. I don't know why, but it felt kind of cool.
That's all for this week! Stay wonderful~
