Weekend, Part 1!

The weekend! It ended up being pretty awesome, though through no real fault of my own.

Starting with Saturday, I woke up around 10 with no real plans, a little nervous about being bored all day. But then I got a call from my English teacher friend, who said that some young friends of hers were interested in going to the movies with me! I assumed that she meant the teenager who went to the park with us last time, but I got to the entrance of the university with my bike and found two people waving back at me who I recognized not at all.

But we had a great time! They were both highschoolers, and led me downtown while talking about school, Kunming, my plans, etc. Then we went to the Brothers Jiang for lunch, which is a chain of guoqiao mixian restaurants. Yum yum. After that, a run to the grocery store for beer (China = no drinking age), and then to the movie theater, where we saw Painted Skin. It’s a movie based on an old legend about this demon who stays in a house disguised as a beautiful woman in the hope of coming between a general and his wife. She causes tons of trouble and lots of deaths, but in the end even though he loves her he is faithful to his real wife, and in the end she give up and turns into a cat and brings all the main characters back to life. It was advertised as a horror movie, and when I saw the posters I was not excited at all (most of it was taken up by this woman who was entirely white and crying blood out of her eyes), but it turned out to be more about action and jokes than terror. Good deal.

So that was one really fun positive experience out of the blue. Another one, slightly less unforeseen, came a couple hours later. I got a call from my Macalester friend, asking if I wanted to get dinner so I could give him back his movie and waterbottle. We ended up going to a Muslim place (there are lots of Hui, Chinese Muslims, here), where we got a dish called Hui Mian, “Muslim Noodle.” That what it is, and the singular is correct. It’s basically a tomato soup with some veggies and beef and other things at a good level of spiciness, and one long, long homemade noodle (my guess would be it was 5 feet by half an inch). It was cool: we could see them making the noodles at the table in front of us, and they were probably the best I’ve ever had (that’s not saying a ton coming from me, but they (it, I suppose) were excellent).

We got talking to a guy who was sharing our table (friends with really really good Chinese skills!) and ended up hanging out with him afterward. He took us to an arcade! This was my first experience with Chinese arcades, and I’d say it was pretty positive. Mostly, it was a lot like American arcades, with lots of videogame machines spread around a room. Even a lot of the same ones: they had House of the Dead, which I think was pretty much required for an arcade license (if such things exist) at one point. Then a lot of the late 80’s/early 90’s 2D fighting and shooter ones. The one major difference that I noticed, though, was that EVERYTHING WAS FREE. I’m still not sure how that worked, but we went in looking for where to get tokens etc, and our friend told us that they don’t cost money, and in fact none of them did. A pretty nice deal.

After that, we went back to the movies and saw the beginning of Wanted, which a lot of friends at Caltech loved this summer. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was about a Fraternity of Assassins (they saw it while I was watching WALL-E). I was impressed, though we had to leave early bc someone wasn’t feeling well.

Thoughts on Chinese movie theaters, since I didn’t say that above: mostly, lots of variation, if the two I saw were any sample. The first one, downtown, was pretty much what I expected from the US, the only difference being that it had six floors and that we had assigned seats. But the second one was a little different. The room was tiny, with seats maybe for 20 people. The seats were basically just cushy chairs covered in red fabric, arranged in rows. One thing I thought was pretty clever: in addition to normal, one-person seats, they also had two person love seats, perfect for snuggling up close to someone. And they thoughtfully put those in the back rows, with singles up closer to the screen ;-).

That was Saturday. I’m going to pause now and read some (big excitement of the past week was finding all these used book stores) plus maybe study a bit. I’ll fill in about Sunday, hopefully with pictures, in the somewhat near future I hope, and I also still owe you the second half of Shangri-La…..