Sunday, June 30, 2013

藝術 (art)


Today was a pretty chill day; we were all still recovering from the monstrous hike and walking all day yesterday haha. So we went to the Ceramics Museum! My senior year of high school, half of my classes were ceramic classes so I was excited to see some cool art!! I felt like a real tourist because we were given those headsets that you see people wear to listen to facts about the exhibits. But, we followed our tour guide throughout the museum to see the evolution of the ceramic styles. 
At the end of our tour, we had a few minutes to wonder around the gift shop and grabbed some icecream (it seems that we get icecream any time we see some; it's almost an everyday occurrence haha). But after that, we got to make our own ceramic plate and bowls! I thought we would be throwing a pot (because we watched some videos in the museum of artists changing a lump of clay into a tall beautiful vase), but we used a mold and pounded the clay into it to create the shape. It was simple, but still fun to play arts and crafts again :) Although I couldn't take it back to the states (the firing process wouldn't be done in time) I will end up giving it to Jack, or one of the NTU students. 
 
The entrance of the museum!


Ms. Husar (my ceramics teacher in highschool) would love this place!
Inside a "kin"
Making our own plates!
 
After the museum, we headed back to NTU to have some dinner on our own and get ready for a calligraphy class! Some of us went to the student restaurant area, where there are a number of places to choose and eat at. Jess, Jiling, and I all had some potstickers/dumplings for dinner.. but we all saved our appetite for these gigantic icecream crepes that caught our eyes when we were looking at all of the choices. So our dessert was larger than our actual dinner haha! But it was so good! Cheap (as most of the stuff here in Taiwan) and delicious! Perfect!
So the calligraphy class was super interesting! I've never done calligraphy, or even written a Chinese character before, so it was a whole new experience. I was sitting next to Richard, and he has done it before, so his strokes and characters looked perfect compared to my scribbles haha! But I started to get the hang of it: when to push down on the brush, the order of strokes, and how to hold the brush perpendicular to the paper. So many things you had to remember! But it was very intriguing! I want to go buy a brush and ink to bring back to America so I can work on it!


 
Huge crepe with mango icecream and mango chunks! YUM!

Calligraphy class was so fun! I want to try this more when I get back home!
My attempt! Writing Chinese characters first time! Oh, and some of these characters spell out my Chinese name ("an chi ya")

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