What better way to spend the last day of 2006 than at one of China’s premiere art museums (well, one of China’s museums, anyway)? The museum’s walls greeted us with an eerily apropos religious statement (see above - if you can’t read it, it looks like the words “In God we trust” used to be affixed to the wall for years before being removed). I’m not sure what was more disconcerting, the fact that the words had been removed, or that they hadn’t bothered washing the walls afterwards (i.e. they didn’t care if people saw –or wanted people to see– that the words had been removed).

Once we got past the disconcerting facade, the grounds around the museum yielded some beautiful vistas. Taara found a pianist sculpture which made her “Ooh” and “Aah” and snap a couple of nifty shots (below).

The sculpture garden included other interesting works of art such as a Triceratops fashioned out of plastic bones and other sculptures.

The inside of the museum was nice but a bit stranger…the exhibitions were all made up of works by various contemporary artists (if you can call them that), which basically consisted of pieces designed to shock and disturb rather than evoke an appreciation of beauty. Below you can see a couple of these: Stephen Hawking rolling his wheelchair off a cliff and a grotesque head hanging in mid-air, spewing out blood, brains, and miscellaneous innards. We weren’t actually supposed to take pictures inside (they had signs everywhere), but I managed to place myself strategically and surreptitiously snapped these while the guards’ backs were turned!

On our way home through town, we passed a couple of street performers similar to the ones we had seen on our trip to One Link plaza (the wholesale place we had visited the day before). Taara got some great shots of two men playing their erhus and a woman in traditional dress singing (along with some not-so-great shots of the rubble in the background — they’re building an extension to the metro/subway).

This post wouldn’t be complete without our daily episode of “Mock the Bad Use of English!” Our winner today is the Sudstantial Supermarket, a small store near Aaron’s apartment in Guang Di Huay Yuen. At first we thought this was just a clever name for a laundromat…

Taara will be back tomorrow with her coverage of the next couple of days of our trip! Until then, make sure you leave us some sudstantial comments! We love to hear from you!