798 District

On Saturday morning, my program took us to 798 District on the east side of Beijing. The 798 Art District used to be a cluster of state-run factories that ceased production in the 1980's. The Chinese government was going to demolish all the buildings, build by German architects and of significant architectural importance, when the artistic community in Beijing asked to take it over. Now, the 798 Art District (798 is the name of the original factory) is filled with beautiful modern art galleries. The artists who run the galleries also kept a lot of the original architecture and an old train in tact and in the area. It is a really neat place, with cafes and galleries continuing on for about a square mile.

Upon getting on the bus, I was greeted by a graduate student at Beijing University named Donnie. Our professors had thought it a good idea for us to meet language partners so that we could practice our Chinese while the Beida students practiced their English. Donnie was very patient with my broken Chinese, and very excited to tell me places to visit while I'm in China. When we reached 798, our new Chinese friends followed us around the district, admiring artwork with us and telling us about the area and its history. In our group of international students, there were six of us Westerners and three Chinese students. Donnie was a molecular biology major, and I don't think he got as much out of the art exhibits as I did, but he did a good job pretending.

Out of the exhibits I saw, the ones I thought were the most interesting were the "Gods of Destruction" exhibit, the thermometer exhibit, and an exhibit where the artist made huge piles of bubbles and photographed scenes through the bubbles. The Gods of Destruction exhibit are sculptures of four Olympians from the Athens Olympics who were purportedly on steroids. They are all Americans, and they are nude, massive, and in animal form. Marion Jones looks like a bat out of hell, literally. They are in cages and shown above, as is a picture of one of the pieces from the thermometer exhibit.

And of course Saturday was, you guessed it - Valentine's Day. A depressing day for most us, but we decided that all us girls would get dressed up and go for a night on the town. We told the guys that they weren't invited, went out for dinner together, and danced the night away! The boys, it turned out, were not too upset that they weren't invited: two of them went on a date with each other, had a candlelit dinner together at a restaurant with Wifi and skyped their girlfriends while they ate. When we got home, we found red roses on each of our pillows. The boys had went out and bought us all a rose to say Happy Valentine's Day.