Boring, boring week. I like boring; it means I get to sleep. I can't believe so much of my summer is gone.. it's like.. one week of frantically running back and forth from school after exams, three weeks of dysfunctional family in Hong Kong, and now it's August. Blah. Strong urge to call up Alex and leave a message on his answering machine with my Carmina Burana mp3 playing in the background, while saying in a very deep voice something like, "The time is now... as the forces of evil converge on your answering machine, there is yet one hope for the world.." Or, I considered playing the T-Rex and raptor sound effects and yelling, "Alex, help me!!!! My house has been overrun with Puffy's genetic experiments gone wrong!!!!" I wouldn't have the guts to do it though.
Read "Interesting Times," with a special feature called "Rincewind being chased by enraged sumo wrestlers and a Peking opera-singing, kung fu fighting woman shouting Communist slogans." That's Terry Pratchett for you.
Lord Hong is so badass.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Back in the US of A, and jetlagged like crazy. 12 hour difference, man. The blogger ate my last post, so let me tell you..
I went to the Hong Kong history museum, which involved me looking at lots of Neolithic pottery shards. Admission is free on Wednesday, so it was incredibly crowded, with loads of stupid elementary school kids. It was really interesting though, because they put a lot effort into the reconstructions. There were facade reconstructions of a theater and a brothel, and then there were reconstructions that you could actually go inside of. I got to go into a junk, a shrine, a Tang (I think) dynasty tomb complete with vaulted ceilings, a tram, and a reconstructed street from the colonial era inside the museum. And it wasn't just a facade of a street; it included reconstructions of a tea parlor, a pharmacy, a bank, a printing press (the building with the press inside it), a store, a post office, and an alley with market stalls and clothes hanging out to dry overhead. The icing on the realism cake was the recorded sound effects, so at the junk, you would hear the creaking of the ships, the slosh of water and the cries of the seagulls, and in the tea parlor you'd hear the clinking of eating utensils and gentle conversation, in the alley you'd hear the vendors' cries, so it was like you were actually there. Not actually part of the street was a reconstruction of a British boat (which was unexciting, looking like every other boat in Annapolis harbor), a colonial collunade, and large boxes marked "Opium." Some breech loaded cannons, a rickshaw. For realism, of course. There was some video on the Opium War which had a portrait of Lord Palmerston in it at some point (I was like, woo! It's him!), the rest of which I didn't bother to watch because it looked uninteresting. In the folk culture section there was a mountain of steamed buns from a folk festival or something, a wedding panaquin and historical wedding clothes, ceremonial dancing lions, dummies posed to do the ceremonial rowing dance (an ethnic version of the Dragon Boat Race- maybe they were too ghetto to afford boats). There was an exhibititon on the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the 18 Day's War, which basically had never-before-published photos of the war from journalists intended for Japanese newspapers, and a Japanese propaganda film about the victory in Hong Kong. And there was an exhibition on modern Hong Kong, which is just MMC... my mom used most of the stuff when she was younger.
I also went to the science museum but it was aimed for kids. I knew most of the facts already, and some of the things there were already demonstrated in physics, but it was still cool. I got to do the Zimbardo illusion thing, where forced perspective in a room makes it look to an outside observer like I'm getting bigger as they walk around the room, when instead the room is strangely shaped. You could also walk through a rotating tube on an immobile catwalk, the tube being marked just right so that halfway through you'd suddenly feel like you were tilting and lose your balance, even though the catwalk wasn't moving at all. I got to run in what was basically a hamster wheel for humans that would crank a chain to turn a gear of some sort. It was incredibly difficult to get moving, but incedibly hard to stop, which was inertia and all that. I just got a riot out of running in a human-sized hamster wheel There was a face that looked like a hologram because it'd turn and watch you if you covered an eye. Actually it was a sunken into the wall, like a jello mold or something, but some lighting effect made it so that if you only viewed it with one eye (no depth perception) it would look like it was popping out of the wall and rotating. Lots of sound stuff too. There was a thing that you squeezed to force air through different plastic passages that were shaped like your vocal cords, so it would make crude a e i o u sounds. There was a maze-like room that absorbed sound, so you couldn't hear anything going on outside. If you pounded on the walls inside the maze, other people in the maze could hear it, loud, low, and distorted, as if you were inside a whale's heart or something. Totally unrelated, but if you stood under a certain convex plate at a certain point and clapped or talked, you'd sound very loud to yourself but nobody else. And there was a narrow wave tank which you viewed from the side to see what happened to waves when they hit a beach. One of the lecturers drove around a remote control hovercraft, which is actually not as impressive as it sounds, because it just looks like a boat that rides very high on the water. I measured myself against outlines on a wall showing the average set of Chinese boys and girls at various ages. I can't believe the average 18 year old is that tiny! There was a mound of fake food which was how much food an average Hong Kong adult ate in a year, which was .. I don't know how much I was expecting. And there were some unoriginal features like the kinetic energy machine (balls rolling down a track, basically), and the obligatory fake tornado.
Not on the same day, because my legs were tired enough to drop off, I went to the Hong Kong Tea Museum, which was amusing in itself because there was a giant inflatable teapot set on the lawn. Some pottery.. I guess I feel educated, even though we had to rush ahead of a throng of students on a field trip. Some cups.. pots.. tea cabinets.. scoops... dried tea leaves... video on excruciatingly boring tea ceremony.. You know.
Also tried to go to the art museum on my last day in Hong Kong, but it was Thursday and museums are generally closed on Thursdays. I guess it's to clean up after the rush of field trip kids after Free Admission Wednesday.
I went to the Hong Kong history museum, which involved me looking at lots of Neolithic pottery shards. Admission is free on Wednesday, so it was incredibly crowded, with loads of stupid elementary school kids. It was really interesting though, because they put a lot effort into the reconstructions. There were facade reconstructions of a theater and a brothel, and then there were reconstructions that you could actually go inside of. I got to go into a junk, a shrine, a Tang (I think) dynasty tomb complete with vaulted ceilings, a tram, and a reconstructed street from the colonial era inside the museum. And it wasn't just a facade of a street; it included reconstructions of a tea parlor, a pharmacy, a bank, a printing press (the building with the press inside it), a store, a post office, and an alley with market stalls and clothes hanging out to dry overhead. The icing on the realism cake was the recorded sound effects, so at the junk, you would hear the creaking of the ships, the slosh of water and the cries of the seagulls, and in the tea parlor you'd hear the clinking of eating utensils and gentle conversation, in the alley you'd hear the vendors' cries, so it was like you were actually there. Not actually part of the street was a reconstruction of a British boat (which was unexciting, looking like every other boat in Annapolis harbor), a colonial collunade, and large boxes marked "Opium." Some breech loaded cannons, a rickshaw. For realism, of course. There was some video on the Opium War which had a portrait of Lord Palmerston in it at some point (I was like, woo! It's him!), the rest of which I didn't bother to watch because it looked uninteresting. In the folk culture section there was a mountain of steamed buns from a folk festival or something, a wedding panaquin and historical wedding clothes, ceremonial dancing lions, dummies posed to do the ceremonial rowing dance (an ethnic version of the Dragon Boat Race- maybe they were too ghetto to afford boats). There was an exhibititon on the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the 18 Day's War, which basically had never-before-published photos of the war from journalists intended for Japanese newspapers, and a Japanese propaganda film about the victory in Hong Kong. And there was an exhibition on modern Hong Kong, which is just MMC... my mom used most of the stuff when she was younger.
I also went to the science museum but it was aimed for kids. I knew most of the facts already, and some of the things there were already demonstrated in physics, but it was still cool. I got to do the Zimbardo illusion thing, where forced perspective in a room makes it look to an outside observer like I'm getting bigger as they walk around the room, when instead the room is strangely shaped. You could also walk through a rotating tube on an immobile catwalk, the tube being marked just right so that halfway through you'd suddenly feel like you were tilting and lose your balance, even though the catwalk wasn't moving at all. I got to run in what was basically a hamster wheel for humans that would crank a chain to turn a gear of some sort. It was incredibly difficult to get moving, but incedibly hard to stop, which was inertia and all that. I just got a riot out of running in a human-sized hamster wheel There was a face that looked like a hologram because it'd turn and watch you if you covered an eye. Actually it was a sunken into the wall, like a jello mold or something, but some lighting effect made it so that if you only viewed it with one eye (no depth perception) it would look like it was popping out of the wall and rotating. Lots of sound stuff too. There was a thing that you squeezed to force air through different plastic passages that were shaped like your vocal cords, so it would make crude a e i o u sounds. There was a maze-like room that absorbed sound, so you couldn't hear anything going on outside. If you pounded on the walls inside the maze, other people in the maze could hear it, loud, low, and distorted, as if you were inside a whale's heart or something. Totally unrelated, but if you stood under a certain convex plate at a certain point and clapped or talked, you'd sound very loud to yourself but nobody else. And there was a narrow wave tank which you viewed from the side to see what happened to waves when they hit a beach. One of the lecturers drove around a remote control hovercraft, which is actually not as impressive as it sounds, because it just looks like a boat that rides very high on the water. I measured myself against outlines on a wall showing the average set of Chinese boys and girls at various ages. I can't believe the average 18 year old is that tiny! There was a mound of fake food which was how much food an average Hong Kong adult ate in a year, which was .. I don't know how much I was expecting. And there were some unoriginal features like the kinetic energy machine (balls rolling down a track, basically), and the obligatory fake tornado.
Not on the same day, because my legs were tired enough to drop off, I went to the Hong Kong Tea Museum, which was amusing in itself because there was a giant inflatable teapot set on the lawn. Some pottery.. I guess I feel educated, even though we had to rush ahead of a throng of students on a field trip. Some cups.. pots.. tea cabinets.. scoops... dried tea leaves... video on excruciatingly boring tea ceremony.. You know.
Also tried to go to the art museum on my last day in Hong Kong, but it was Thursday and museums are generally closed on Thursdays. I guess it's to clean up after the rush of field trip kids after Free Admission Wednesday.
Labels:
archaeology,
Hong Kong,
museum
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)