A few notes

I guess I went a little overboard in my previous entry. What started out as a trailer mention became a book review and then morphed into something larger than I expected. It's a hard issue to tackle, this race-and-prejudice business, especially when there's a lot passing between both sides in both directions.

Better that I stick to the news-in-note-form entries that I'm so fond of:

- My grandfather is moving home today! He's finally done with rehab but will probably need a walking stick for a while. At least he comes home in time for his birthday.

- I got back from Chengdu and Jiuzhaigou late last week. Had a bit of a viral infection on the last day of the trip but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm one bit. I had a great time in China, or Sichuan to be precise. I ate plenty, hiked, took too many photos (my memory card has been kidnapped by my father who wants to prettify everything; read - photoshop), made friends with a Chinese girl who acutally said my Mandarin was spoken well (what little of it I know), admired the ruggedness of Tibetan men (they look very well in robes and blue jeans and cowboy hats), watched Sichuan opera (the changing mask act was astounding), braved the public toilets, bought TCM products (a cream for my eczema, but whose instructions I can't read), paid my respects to Zhu Geliang and Liu Bei at their respective temples, and did a little bit more but this particular note is getting too long. More in another entry.

- I love Jiuzhaigou. The lakes were surreal - so many shades of blue. Aquamarine, turqoise, prussian blue, cobalt blue, cornflower blue, bluebell blue, bluebottle blue, the blue of a robin's egg. Lake after lake, I never tired of them. There were mountains too, rows of them, laid out like marbled slabs of grey, silver, black, white, red, brown and green. I kept thinking, someone should make a movie here. And someone already has - Zhang Yimou filmed part of Hero at Arrow-Bamboo Lake.

- By sheer fate, I met an old friend, YH (formerly of Michigan and now of Shanghai), at Jiuzhaigou. Of all the days I should be at the park, his company sends him on a holiday to the same place on the same day. That I should come off the bus, wonder if I would see him somewhere in the acres of tourists, turn my head and find him walking four meters away from me is one of the strangest coincidences in my life.

- Have left behind racial reading material for musical history. Clara by Janice Galloway is about Clara Schumann, usually known more as Robert Schumann's wife than as piano virtuoso. Rather poetic stuff, but all very, very good.

Posted by Monoceros at October 25, 2005 7:22 AM