Water Colour Challenge!

A while back we were asked by Sandy if we wanted to have a few lessons in traditional Chinese painting. We thought that this was a strange offer-especially seeing as we had yet to receive one single chinese language lesson in the time we'd been here- but seeing as we had nothing better to do we thought we'd go along with it.

The lessons were quite good fun. The teacher assigned to us a famous chinese drawing out of his book and then we set about copying them. Dave was given the task of drawing a peice of cabbage with some chili's - quite apt as that is actually one of Dave's favourite chinese dishes - and I was alloted a basket of peaches. We quite happily spent our weeks wasting time drawing.

After two weeks of lessons we finally learnt the reason for us having these lessons.The school had entered us into a province wide talent contest-where foreigners had to demonstrate any skills that they had learnt in China. Our performance would be Kristina singing a traditional Chinese song whilst Becky, Meredith, Dave and I did our painting in the back ground. Fine, I hear you saym but what you don't understand is that usually Dave and I had spent about 15-20 minutes on each of our little masterpieces; Kristina's performance of two songs was scheduled to last about 8 minutes!

Still nervous on the day and not sure how we were going to manage it, we went on stage and managed quite admirably, and I'm sure it must have been fixed as somehow we managed to come 2nd out of about 40 Entries-some of them were pretty terrible but I think Kristina's excellent singing- she was a professional singer in America- carried us all through!

The next day we were supposed to repeat our performance at a special christmas meal that was attended by all of Shijiazhuang's big wigs- but Sandy who had managed quite amazingly the day before sent us along to a event where we would be painting without any paint brushes or paper. So it was up to Kristina to sing by herself whilst the rest of us sat by watching, enjoying the excellent food and getting drunk!