First snowman of the year

It snowed in Beijing!
A beautiful, wet, and cold snow came last night after a rainy day, leaving my feet drenched in icy water as I came back from dinner with friends. The sidewalks and roads were cleared by cars driving, feet walking, people with handcarts shoveling, leaving the sidewalk partially dry and mostly either ice or icy cold water. Kids played in it as adults tramped through and around it with umbrellas to protect from the continuing rainy snow. A snowman was erected in front of a nearby shopping center. Beautiful, wet, and cold.
The past week has been mostly filled with classes with brief intermissions of social life.
Last Wednesday, a Chinese girl came up to me at the bus stop, asked if I was a student at Beida, asked whether I had a girlfriend, and then asked for my number. She is from Hangzhou, so I guess she isn't so circumspect as conservative Beijing girls. I ended up giving her my number, and a friend of mine and I went to dinner with her Saturday night. A lot of fun and very good practice for my Chinese.
Friday night, a few classmates and I went to see a ballet on the Beida campus called "The Red Detachment of Women," which is a famous revolutionary ballet in which a badly treated servant of a landlord escapes, joins the Red Army's women division, and helps in the uprising against the evil landlord. It was a fantastic ballet, though the subject led to a few head-scratching moments for me. One of the most interesting part of the play was the prevalence of weapons. Dances were very frequently performed with rifles, pistols, swords, spears, and even hand grenades. In the ballet, the weapons served not so much as the objects of destruction that most of us see them as today, but rather as objects of liberation and empowerment. Another really interesting moment came when the evil landlord was at last killed. The lead protagonist shot him, bringing, in my mind, a kind of vengeful, peaceful, and foretelling silence, only to be broken by about a dozen other soldiers turning their weapons on his dead body (which had fallen off the back of the stage as he tried to run away) and shot him several dozen times. The crowd clapped. I was left surprised by the seeming childishness and brutality of that final act of violence.
Other than that, life goes on as I try to come up with a plan for my two and a half months of vacation this winter break. As we Americans steel ourselves for the upcoming election, Beijing (and its internet censorship) is steeling itself for the Party Congress that will begin the day after the election. As such, Facebook and actually commenting on my blog (I can write new posts, just not go to my actual blog page) are getting harder and harder, so please forgive unanswered comments. I can skype fairly well and easily during my evenings (US East mornings) if anyone would like to talk! My skype name is drkolhoff.