July 14th

The start of the second weekend. Both mornings of the second weekend the camp split into two parts that went and did different activities in the morning. Saturday’s options were to go dragon boating or to go to the Presidential Palace. I decided to go see the Presidential Palace because that is a unique location, and there is dragon boating in the greater Seattle area.

The Presidential Palace is the site that held the chief government offices when Nanjing was the capitol of China during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850’s and during the Nationalist Era of the early 1900’s. The palace was “divided” into buildings of the two different eras. The buildings from the Taiping Era were all one story, traditional Chinese buildings built around courtyards, where as the Nationalist buildings were built very much in a Western style. Around all the buildings and in the courtyards were lots of gardens that were really pretty.

My favorite part of the gardens was the paths in them. They were made with lots of little stones cemented together, but all the stones were on end so that you could really feel the stones as you walked on them. The stones had been placed in geometric patterns so that stones of similar shades of gray would be together in one shape, and then stones of a different shade would be together in a another shape. The paths and plants were in and around the courtyards and a few lakes/ponds in the main area of the garden. The gardens also had these interesting rock sculptures in them that some how (and I don’t know how) had lots of holes in them. It looked like there could have been some sort of erosion going through these rocks, but I’m not sure how that would quite result in holes like the rocks had. It just didn’t look like something that could have resulted from being carved by a person.

In the Taiping buildings there were lots of really pretty pieces of furniture and art. My favorite pieces in there were a big golden tapestry with a crane and a big red sun on it, and a set of shelves displaying a bunch of different vases. I liked the shelves and vases because each little shelf was just the right size to display whatever vase was right there. However vases were all different sizes, shapes, and colors which made for a nice array of pieces. Something that made me laugh in this part of the Palace was a pair of tiny little lion statues on either side of a doorway. They were only about 6 inches high, but quite intricately carved.

In the Western buildings there was mostly a bunch of offices and sitting rooms from when the building had held Chaing Kai-Shek’s government. These offices were mostly not very interesting to look at, although some very important events in Chinese history took place in some of them. The differences between each offices and sitting rooms really only seemed to be the color of the upholstery on the identical styled armchairs and couches. One thing in the rooms that I did enjoy seeing was a pair Nationalist flags that were hanging in one of the rooms. The Nationalist flag is divided into five horizontal stripes; red, yellow, blue, white, black. The stripes represented different races in China, representing (in order) the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Muslim, and Tibetan.

Out in front of the Nationalist building there are two tall pine trees. One died a few years ago, but is still standing. Our guide told us that some people say the dead tree represents the Nationalist government which moved to Taiwan, and the living tree represents the Communist government. None of us Americans quite believed what she was saying about Taiwan being dead.

For lunch we loaded back up into the buses to go to another hotel. When we got on the buses they had us at that point divided into girls on one bus and guys on the other bus. We were normally divided by RA groups, but because of the dragon boating every RA group was in two pieces. Before we left the Presidential Palace we were all sitting on the buses for about ten minutes, and they were parked on opposite sides of the walkway out of the Palace. We were having a fun time having various conversations in sign language and mime through the bus windows, and at one point there were at least three games of rock-paper-scissors going on between the buses. It was very funny to watch all the games of rock-paper-scissors happening all at the same time.

The group of us who had gone to the Presidential Palace got to the hotel for lunch about 45 minutes before the dragon boaters arrived…needless to say they were a bit jealous when they arrived to find us having already eaten. One thing that made everyone really happy was that the hotel had salad at it, and as it was a fancy hotel they don’t serve food that you can’t eat.

After lunch we went to the Folk Art Museum. It’s a museum tucked into an old compound house place near a fairly poor neighborhood. Inside there were a bunch of little rooms and courtyards. They had different pieces of folk art in them, and there were also some folk artists selling their art. There were painters, sculptures, our diabolo teacher (he makes the diabolos himself out of wood), and other types of artists that I’m not remembering. In there, there was also a shadow puppet show and a small Buddhist temple/altar. At the space our diabolo teacher had set up to sell the diabolos he also had a paper that had a biography of him on it. It turns out that he is actually a very famous diabolo performer, as in the sort who performs of the Prime Minister. I guess it’s not surprising that at CTY we don’t get just anybody to come in and teach us.

Around the rooms were a lot of little courtyards, and most things were fairly open to the weather. In the courtyards there were lots of plants in pots. Some of the little shrubs had pretty flowers and leaves on them. One of the courtyards had a sculpture in it of four children covering their ears and setting off fireworks. I guess children all around the world are fascinated by pyrotechnics.

The Folk Art Museum is also where it really got to be that my close group of friends was James, Melissa, Megan, Danny, and Ian. Ian was also sometimes known as Alaska because he is from Anchorage, AK. I’m not really sure why at first Ian ended up hanging out with us, he just did. But certainly by that afternoon he had become a regular part of our group.

One of the things I saw in the museum was a model of a silk loom like the one I had seen the previous weekend at the Provincial Museum. It was only about a foot tall, but even still you could see just how huge it is in real life because there were little model people placed on it. There was also a really pretty piece of silk in the same room. It had a really intricate pattern of all sorts of dragons and clouds in a bunch of different colors on it. In a nearby room they had a set of pieces of gold foil of different pieces that were different concentrations of gold in them. They even had one piece that was 99.99% gold. Another thing was a little statue of this thing that sort of looked like a pig, and sort of looked like a mouse. It had a pig nose, but a mouse’s ears. Although as it was dressed in clothes and standing on a slice of watermelon, who knows what sort of creature it was intended to be. Another funny thing that was at this museum was a carved stone bust of Shakespeare at a sculptor’s booth.

As we left the Folk Art Museum we walked down an alley in the surrounding neighborhood to meet our buses. When we reached the end of the alley I looked up across the street in front of us and there was a sign that said, in English, Special Agent Shop. Does that mean that’s where you can go to buy Special Agents, or is it where the Special Agents doing their shopping? A myriad of funny possibilities.

After we saw the Folk Art Museum we went to an old castle that is part of the city wall. As it’s part of the city wall it was built in the mid 1300’s, during the Ming Dynasty. The walls of the castle are covered in vines. They had these little orange-red trumpet shaped flowers on them. The flowers were about two inches long, and really pretty, especially against the greens of the leaves. Up along the green of the vines there would just be these little flecks of bright orangey color. There was one wall where I realized that all the vines on it were coming out of one single small crack in the wall. It makes you wonder if the castle would still be standing without all the vines on it. Along with the vines, the walls also had some pretty red lanterns on posts standing along the edges of them. It must be cool to see them turned on at night (we checked, they are electric).

The castle had these series of walls tuck together so that it was almost like there were three courtyards in a row that made up the castle. Like if you laid a rectangle on its side, and then divided it into upright thirds. At the far end of the castle from where we entered it there was a big high stone open area platform place. Apparently at one time there had been a large wooden building built on that high stone place, but a century or so ago it burnt down and was never replaced. However on each of the walls between the courtyards and on top of the front wall there is a large building built on top of each of those buildings. They appear to be made out of blue stone bricks. It’s a really pretty blue gray color, and each brick is slightly a different color.

It was fun walking along the walls because you could look down the other side on to the roads around the castle and the surrounding neighborhoods. It was interesting to look over the edge and see an old set of stone houses right next to a medium sized apartment building a few decades old, to the skyscrapers in the distance. Just an interesting view of how a country develops. The road would go straight through the castle if it was allowed to go straight, but at least at this point in history it curves and goes right around the outside of the castle walls.

On top of the big open space there were plenty of people scattered around the edges looking down around, and there was some person out in the middle who was flying a kite. The stairs up to the walls and open space were really annoying to climb because each step was really wide (or maybe that should be deep), but really short. So for the step you took it felt like you should have gone up twice as high. A point when all my friends and I were together on the open space area we got Banderson to take a picture of the six of us. It turned out really nice, and I enjoy that I do have one picture of the six of us together. Banderson, known by most people as Brian Anderson was the Assistant Director of camp. But a lot of the kids started calling him Banderson because his email address is banderson@....

While walking along the walls was fun, it was also fun to see what there was in the courtyards. A few of them were just open grass, but in two there was a bonsai garden. The bonsai garden must be really old, because it had some really huge, old bonsai in it. There were a few that while they were only about 5 feet tall had trunks a foot or two in diameter. Some of those trees seemed to have a big trunk almost like a stump, and then another smaller “branch” that was like the trunk.

One of the other courtyards had a tiny museum/gift shop in it. One of the few objects it had on display was some very old Chinese money. It was about 4x6 inches, white paper with blue ink. There were also some big stone balls, like cannonballs, for dropping on invaders.

We finished up our long, but very fun, Saturday with another visit to the bazaar. It was lots of fun this time because it was wonderful weather, so you could go explore down the different little side streets and alleyways. The camp administrators let us get dinner at the bazaar, so we could go eat wherever we wanted (although they told us to be wary of street vendor food because you have no clue where it’s been).

After my friends and I grabbed a bit of food we decided to go wandering around a bit, because the previous time had had such inclement weather. Six people was really too many to try to get to move all together through the bazaar, so James and I split off, and went wandering by ourselves. The only rule on wandering was that you had to have a buddy at all times or be with an RA, who were stationed at different areas around the bazaar in case we got lost, or just to mark the boundaries of where we could go.

It was really fun to wander around the bazaar with James, seeing all sorts of things I had missed the previous weekend. He had done a bit more exploring the previous weekend, so he had more of a handle on what the layout of the streets and alleys were. There were all sorts of shops in the bazaar. Lots of them sold clothes, jewelry, various little trinkets, swords, shoes, etc. One side street was full of pet shops. At the bazaar I got a “silk” blouse. I know it’s not really silk, but it makes me happy which is really what’s important. It’s sort of a burgundy color with flowers on it.

At one point we were walking down a street somewhere in the bazaar and happened to see our other four friends. Danny and Alaska had somehow ended up buying, and wearing, these insane tiaras. Danny had a purple one, and Alaska had a pink one. They were the sort of thing that usually you only ever see on the heads of 4 year old girls…shiny, sparkly, fake fur/feather stuff that sheds all over the place, pompoms, fake jewels, and so on all over shiny silver plastic. They looked absolutely ridiculous, but it was hilarious to see them wearing the tiaras.