This style of painting is done on the inside of a clear glass bottle, one that is traditionally filled with snuff tobacco for disgusting snorting up the nose. The glass bottles are small, most of them fit in the palm of the hand. The artist reaches a tiny brush into the bottle and paints a completely mirror image to the one that shows up on the outside of the glass. The paintings are mostly traditionally Chinese in style and subject-matter (with an exception I will describe below). Many were of scenes of small, peach-fuzzy kittens with fat heads and birds on branches. In my opinion the most impressive ones involved a lot of little black lettering, the Chinese characters have to be painted backwards, as if you written in a fogged window to be read from the other side. I can't even remember which way my 'e' and 'r' are supposed to face when writing backwards, let alone take care of characters like these:
(Oh, btw, the bottom-most character on the left is literally the symbol for day and the symbol for entrance or opening. Nice.)
The inside painting museum had a bunch of unusual and beautiful bottles displayed upstairs, as well as a collection of snuff-snorting tools. I got a tour of the museum with my very own personal English-speaking tour guide. He hovered, following me around the fairly small showroom. It only took about fifteen minutes, but he was eager to tell me all about the everything, so I was relieved when I ducked into the alcove in the middle of the room and he only half followed. It was also there that I discovered The Presidents. A set of glass bottles on a slowly spinning pyramid showed presidents one through forty-one (that is, Washington to Bush, Sr.) slowly swiveling under a bright light. The little presidential portraits were finely detailed, but they weren't quite right. Even Theodore Roosevelt looked just a little fishy, as though they'd been copied from a copy or a copy. They didn't look like the expected portrait, exactly. They were so odd and delightful.
After the museum we had to track down some internet so that we could make hostel bookings for Tianjin the following day. We tried to use the dim, hot internet cafe near our hotel, but they refused to let us because we were foreign (at least that was what our mimed conversation and the repeated use of the word 'passport' led us to believe.) Everybody in the internet cafe was playing World of Warcraft. It was spooky and smoky and dark.
For internet use, Bryan's uncle swept us off to his apartment once again, to use his computer. He uncovered it (another electronics-hiding doily!) and we booked up at the only hostel in Tianjin. While we made our plans for the following day the uncle and his wife brought us nuts and seeds and dried fruit and tea, continuing to press us with fierce hospitality. Max made some joking comment about wanting some lychee fruits, and then repeated with as best a Mandarin intonation as possible, "Lychee?" The aunt and uncle both nodded vigorously. A short while later, they filed out, leaving us in their apartment with Granddad. Bryan was back at the hotel, so we couldn't really make conversation, but filled the silence and the time by playing what felt like Pictionary. Granddad would draw a picture, and then draw a Chinese character, letting us know what he was drawing. We went through the numbers, then drew some maps and some names of countries. The most useful ones that he showed us were the cardinal directions, bei (north), dong (east), nan (south), xi (west).
Granddad also tried to write our names with Chinese characters. He managed to write out "Chesley" just fine, but when I showed him how I spell my last name he kind of squinted and frowned at me, and underlined it, as if to say "That whole thing??" Yes, that whole thing. Hyphen and all. So the Digges-Elliott sparks cross cultural confusion, nice.
At this point, Uncle and Aunt came back completely laden with fruit. They gave us tiny nectarines, fresh slices of melon and whole branches of lychees with white-grey flesh and pupil-glossy black pits. There was again, so much food that plates and bowls had to be stacked on top of each other on the coffee table to fit everything.
We slept at the hotel that night, and then woke up early, fresh for a train ride. Bryan's family took us out for breakfast, a salty boiled egg that had been soaked in soy sauce and a bunch of tasty meat wrapped in bread. I looked at the paper wrapping the whole thing came in when I was done eating and it had a few words written in English. Looks like my tasty meat wrap was made out of donkey. Noms.
The whole family, both Bryan's and the family of the bride waited with us at the train station. The women in the family admired my knitting when I pulled it out. I showed them the pictures of the finished sock from my pattern so they knew what I was making. I got approving looks.
We finally boarded the train bound for Tianjin, looking forward to several hours of travel. Our seats were not all together, so I ended up sitting with Brennan across from a two year old boy and his mom.
The boy was thoroughly engrossed in eating his hot ramen noodles and stretching his feet out towards me, poking me in the leg with his hot little toes. The little boy eventually got into a poking match with Brennan, especially delighted when Brennan made great "woobwoobwoobwoob!" noises and bugging his eyes out in surprise when the kid poked him. This occupied our next hour, easily, until the kid pulled out his finger gun and started shooting us, "pop pop pop!" We faked our deaths valiantly, which excited him. so that he hopped up and down and up and down and up and down and vomited his noodles into his mom's purse. She took it in stride and cleaned him up, and he was completely and utterly unphased.
As a nice, calm sit-down game Brennan made him a little origami hop frog out of a one yuan bill. The kid lit up at the frog, he made it hop all over the place, including (sometimes) through the goal post that Brennan made of his hands. When he finally tired of the hop frog he gutted it, unfolding and yelling "gwah! gwah! gwah!" which is a damn sight closer to a bullfrog noise than "ribbit."
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