Got up at 7, forgetting that there wasn’t class this morning. (tuesdays are afternoon class.)
Realized as soon as I got to the classroom, and headed over to the cafeterias for breakfast. Got a fried egg and some baozi, and then came back and wrote out the characters for tomorrow.
Spent the morning doing math homework for tomorrow, and studying through tomorrow’s homework. Ended up being fairly productive overall.
Went to class from 2 to 4, class was the normal with nothing particularly out of the ordinary.
Afterwards, came back to the dorm for a bit, spent a bit of time studying characters to get them more firmly into my head and then went out to dinner.
Had boiled hot peppers with meat and scrambled eggs which were quite good, just a little bit of bite left in them. Came back and headed over to the theater to see the play.
It was long, a bit over 3 hours. and was quite interesting. The dialog was not Shakespearean english, but rather a form of english that people who’d studied for 2 or 3 years got follow along with.
There were two vertical bars on the two sides of the stage with subtitles, although they often lagged behind, and there were a couple scenes where they accidentally got turned off.
The acting wasn’t bad, a combination of american and chinese actors. The chinese actors seemed to be students at the college, I don’t know where the americans/britons were from.
The set wasn’t bad, the stage is clearly well funded, the background was a full movie screen, as it had been in the orchestra, so they were able to take advantage of that. The other main set piece were curtains that were cut into vertical strips. They could be pulled by the actors seemingly to any point on the stage, since sometimes they would be clumped to form trees, and other times spread out to separate the stage into pieces.
Lighting and sound were also done fairly well, although the sound cues were a bit overwhelming sometimes.
The audience seemed to have mixed feelings. A bunch of people left at the intermission, probably mostly due to the poor subtitle tracking that had been going on leading up to that. I guess if you’ve spent the last hour not really understanding what was going on, it’s not really worth staying for another two.
Came back, have been busy for the last hour finishing up remaining bits and pieces, and figuring out what’s going on this weekend. We’ll be gone friday through sunday, and they want us to come up with a topic to do research into while we’re there. I’ll be working with matt and rebecca to look at the differences in propaganda and media consumption between rural and urban china.
Getting up early tomorrow, Need to do some work on my disp tomorrow especially, and also get prepared for the weekend.
new apple laptops should come out sometime tonight. From the rumors that have popped up this afternoon, they look like really nice machines. The dual Graphics could be a real boon, as will having a sturdy case on a small machine again (apparantly the 13″ will end up with an aluminum case rather than a plastic one.)