Blood is Thicker Than Water - 血浓于水

           One of the many things that I find especially enchanting about Chinese culture is their writing. To my unsophisticated eye , characters written using only a mechanical pencil or a cheap ballpoint pen are still beautiful. However, Chinese characters truly seem to push the line between art and writing when they are portrayed through Chinese calligraphy.          This past Saturday, I got to attend my first Chinese Art and Calligraphy Class at the Chinese Cultural School in Duluth! I was a bit nervous about going, because  when I had visited the school to see about enrolling, I had noticed that the Calligraphy class was small, and that all the student's appeared to be a lot younger than me. When I entered the classroom, there were only four of us as students, and I was by far the oldest. Furthermore, I had come with none of the necessary supplies (no brushes, paper, or ink). Not to mention, once we started to prac...

    Lately, many of you may have seen a trailer advertisement for a performance called Shen Yun on TV or YouTube. This past year, I told my parents that I really wanted to see it. So, as a Christmas present, my parents got me two tickets. There were exactly two things that made the experience one of the best in my life: 1) we had front row seats directly in front of the stage (seriously, the only thing between myself and my mom was the orchestra pit) and 2) Every aspect of the show was so well executed that the only way for you to understand how amazing it was is to go. Warning:   Do not attend if you cannot go without air for a very long time, as the majority of the 2 hour show will be spent gasping in awe and holding your breath in suspense I'm honestly very tempted to make a super long post describing every detail I can remember about the show. However, I would also like to make this post a little reader friendly, so I will just share a few details that I fo...