Teahouse

I just got back from having dinner with my roommate and her parents. I could understand most of what her dad said (well, for the most part!), but her mom's Chinese was very fast and I had no idea :( Even so I don't speak fast enough for conversational Chinese.

Last night CET took us to a famous teahouse in Beijing, The Laoshe Teahouse. We had tea and Chinese snacks and saw performances, some of which were really cool. One was called "Face Changing Sichuan Opera" which at first we were worried about, because opera in China... well, its different than our opera - its a lot of high screaching notes. But it was just a performance of the opera masks which are pretty famous. The guy danced and then would "magically" change his mask - it was really neat. Its hard to explain in writing...

Here's one!

We also saw the long-handled tea pouring performance. The tea kettle (?) has a really long nozzle (?) (I obviously don't know tea terms... :( ) and they perform by dancing around and pouring the tea into tea cups... again, I'm not very good at explaining this..

There was also a performance by five men doing Kung Fu which might have been the best.

I have a Chinese test tomorrow. sad :(