Wang Ba Dan

Instead of an essay, this weekend the fourth years are making movies. Originally, the assignment was to make a movie about what happens to the characters in Zhang Yimou's worst failure, "Keep Cool," which was this week's movie lesson. But C. got Mao laoshi to change the requirements, and so now we're just making a movie where we act crazy and see what people do.

Really.

Our movie is called Wang Ba Dan, which means "bastard," and was one of last week's vocab words (movie classes often have a lot of rude vocab, which is what I like about them). Me, C, and B dress up in traditional Chinese outfits (the boys' have more or less the same one, only they also have little beanies) and wander around Chaoyang causing trouble. So far I haven't done too much gangstering (which in Chinese is a verb!), but merely worked the camera. However, there is much left to do - yesterday the boys fought over corn by the subway station, then when we had everyone's attention began to ask people about Mencius and Confucius. Tomorrow we are going to take a small paper cup of spare change we gathered from our classmates (somehow asking classmates for money is not so embarrassing if you are wearing a qipao) and scatter it in a public place. We have other plans as well, with greater or lesser potential to get us arrested, so I think it's quite likely our group will have the best movie.

Today we had a fairly pleasant field trip to a reservoir two hours from Beijing. The amount of time travelling to and fro greatly exceeded the amount of time actually there, but it was nonetheless nice to get out of the city and climb a mountain. The weather was not so good though; it's dreadfully sticky out, and the boys I was with both took off their shirts, which I suppose is their perogative.