Saturday Night, 6/20

Well, the first week's finally over; by Thursday night, I managed to
get ahead of my work, and so things started to slow down a little
(even with Friday's exam). The limiting factor in learning Chinese
seems to be vocabulary; at least for now, the syntax/grammar isn't too
difficult to grasp, but the sheer volume of words we don't know is
ultimately what limits conversation (this view may change as I learn
more). For example, given a random object, I won't know several words
to describe its parts; for example, I know how to say "bicycle," but
not "wheel," "spoke," "handlebars," "chain," "gear," "brake," "rim,"
etc.
We just took a trip to the Beijing Opera. It was quite a spectacle.
There was a short opening play, which I think was a traditional style
opera scene between a woman and an old fisherman, but the next part,
"Monkey King Fights 18 Warriors" in English, was very fun to watch.
It featured heavily painted characters (many resembling animals)
acting out choreographed fights – very complex ones, including flips
over stick-swipes, lots of tossing back-and-forth of weapons
(including one move where the weapons of five actors were laid in a
pile, four scattered, and the lead pulled up the bottom weapon of the
pile so that each weapon flew to its owner), and the inverse-ninja law
(the fighting ability of a group of fighters is inversely proportional
to the number of fighters in the group; the Monkey King easily
defeated the 18).
For some bizarre reason, casterboards seem unusually popular here;
I've seen far more casterboards than standard skateboards. I have no
idea why.
I can't access my blog behind the Great Firewall, so I'm not sure if
my recent photos have made it up. I didn't bring my camera on the
trip to the Beijing Opera, but my friend (Chinese-named Lin Ke) took
some photos for me, which I will hopefully be able to upload soon.
It's my dad's birthday, so Happy Birthday! Sunday for me . . . I'm
going back to study.