Early morning is a sweet time for organizing thoughts and watching the gray light change texture. Still cloudy but not raining. We had petite dejeuner around 6 AM of sliced mango, Asian pear and peanut butter with strawberry jam on rolls. Sneaky of us, but quite wonderful to eat fresh things without oil. By 8 AM the ground crew of six men in gray uniforms was methodically moving in a vertical line down the sloping embankment, wielding short-handled curved blades and cutting the various greens. All of them fit, slender, wearing boots and slogging slowly, stopping to talk, to sharpen blades, to smoke cigarettes. Not the typical American with a weed wacker. By 9 AM they were mingling with security officers in black uniforms, sitting around at outside tables having a smoke. By then, Rob had also accomplished a lot, reorganizing his Day Two teaching to show fewer images that require explaining, and to direct attention as succinctly as possible to the physical idea of rectangles in relationship, and then get them to work rather than talk a lot about concepts. The uncertainty of the translating is helping to clarify thoughts.
Using a variation on an assignment by Roweena Reed Costello, today’s class introduced the rectilinear form and basic concepts of relationships between scale, placement, intersection and mass using a simple form. The students began forming 30 rectangles out of clay, which will be combined with thought given to dominant, subdominant and subservient placements. The students also brought in images that inspire them, which included a wide range of materials from fashion images to Disney film clips to specific artists’ works. Individuals seemed very interested in sharing these images with Rob, and it gave him quite a view into these young art students and what matters to them. It seemed rare that they had a chance to bring this much of themselves into the classroom.
Without rain, and with an occasional spot of sun, we started a walk up the hill behind the hotel in order to get a view of the new Museum being constructed there. Walking up the stairs was challenging as they are lower height and deeper than our usual steps. It surprised us how much effort it took to adjust to this stride. It seemed the same stride that I discovered helped me to walk on slippery stone walkways – a kind of prancing step that lifts the knee and drops the weight back into the heels. After walking along a path in the woods for a bit, we realized we couldn’t really see the structure from there anyway, and chose to walk off campus to see if we could retrace our steps back to the restaurant from Monday night, and scope out a place to eat dinner tonight. This was all in the dense shopping streets near the Tea Market area. We were successful at both tasks, and discovered a new part of the neighborhood, complete with some graffiti, some vegetable gardens, and the bus stop for the #4 bus that we will be taking to get downtown this weekend.
On the home front, we’ve learned where to hang our wash so that it dries faster, thanks to the housekeeping staff who actually moved our little hanging clothespin gizmo out of the shower and hung it on the decorative wall strips in line with the heat fan. So I did more laundry. This has become routine, keeping up with the few things that need washing each day so that laundry is not a problem. Even Rob’s jeans will dry eventually.
Class is falling into place, and we found a place we can eat a fairly wide variety of vegetable dishes for low cost. Tonight we had a sizzling tofu with onions and peppers in a curry-like seasoning, water chestnuts (or slices of starchy yam) with black fungi, and an edamame dish with dry bamboo. Delicious and all for 77 Yuan or about $13. We walked from the restaurant around the corner of campus to the huge Vanguard grocery mall complex and bought some cookies to share with the students on Friday. Beginning to connect the dots of the neighborhood.
