Photos of the week.

Here are a few interesting photos from this week:

Our city is going through quite a transformation. There are 20 story apartment buildings in places where they were tearing down old buildings when we left 10 months ago.

The picture below is of a doomed building. The character on the side is 拆 which means "to be destroyed". Most of the old buildings in the city have this character stamped on the side of them.
















You don't know how relieved I was to see that our local grocery store was finally carrying corn juice again!
























And finally, I made tortillas for the first time this week and this one ended up looking just like me! Do you see the side profile there? Weird.

2 base hits and a double.

I have been watching a lot of movies these days, and one I would recommend to all would be Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. This film seems to raise a lot of interesting discussions. The way the film itself is shot is made to look as though it was shot in one take. That is, its one 80 minute scene, which is very unique in film. Actually, I don't think that there are any other films made this way. Click on the link to see a very unique trailer as well. Do yourself a favor and watch the film, too!

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After watching Terminator 2 for the millionth time I noticed something new; John Conner, the future leader of the human resistance, is wearing a "Public Enemy" t-shirt for the entire film. Seems to be a pretty significant wardrobe piece. Good job, Mr. Cameron.

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Another public display of embarrassment this week on the bus. First of all, it costs 0.6 RMB to ride the bus, which is literally pennies. Anyways, a lady came on and "beeped" her card on the scanner and sat down. The driver, another lady, told the lady that it did not "beep" and that she should scan it again. Well, that was enough to send the passenger into quite a raging pout. She went to the front to argue with the driver while the bus was cruising down the road. Her screaming and arguing grew into a lash of her purse to the drivers shoulder. She kept calling the driver a "swindler", which everyone else knew was absurd considering the driver would not "swindle" the lady out of a few pennies. But by this time the rage was quite embarrassing and the women knew that she needed to keep arguing in order to save face.

So the screaming and whining continued for about 5 more minutes until something else happened that I have never seen before in these kind of arguments. The other passengers got sick of the screaming and told the lady to drop it and to, in a way, "shut up". After that, she was quiet and I got off at my stop a few minutes later.

It was refreshing to see those passengers get fed up with this kind of scene as I originally thought that us foreigners were the only ones.

Bird

Andrew Bird plays Shanghai this week. I asked his people if he could come over to Xining for a day and play for us here. I offered the price of a plane ticket and an unlimited amount of coffee. His people were very nice in the response, yet his schedule takes him to Tokyo the following day so they had to turn down my generous offer. Thanks anyways, Mr. Bird. Maybe next time.

Click here for a video of one of my favorite cover songs of all time.