Chinese Calligraphy was our lesson today. We each received a paint brush and
paper. Our teacher has been working on
her calligraphy since she was 7 years old.
She demonstrated the proper technique in which each segment of the character was completed in one stroke of the
brush. I loved watching her careful
movements. The paintbrush seemed to
dance across the paper.
It came time for us to copy her movements and I’ll admit, I
cheated. One of the teachers walked by
my desk and laughed to see me using several brush strokes, “You need to use
only 1 stroke.” I replied,
“Impossible.” In response she sat down
and completed the character in 1 stroke.
Towards the end of the class a calligraphy master used rapid
strokes on a huge paper. He wrote, “The
scent of the flower will be smelled around the world.” I was given the paper
along with my Chinese name meaning, Grace.
Emilie set up a trip downtown with 3 girls from English
Corner. We 1st went to a park
with random statues, which the girls were very proud to show us. Then we climbed into a mini mini van to down
town.
The mini vans are so tiny they
look like clown cars. Downtown consists
of many upper end clothing stores, a few department stores, restaurants, and
some street vendors. We spent the
afternoon trying many types of food and in typical Chinese fashion all of it
was paid for by our three tour guides.
We had sugar cane and a candy that was almost impossible to swallow it
was so dry and turned my mouth into a cotton ball. At one point Emilie and I were standing on a
corner waiting for our girls eating our Sugar Cane. I looked around to see crowds of people (over
50 people) standing still staring at us.
We have gotten used to many greetings of, “Hello!” and double takes, but
it was crazy to be receiving so much attention at one time.
