Lion dancing

January is Hong Kong's sleepy season, chilly and damp, and since apartment buildings are generally unheated here, lying in bed under large piles of blankets sometimes seems the only solution. It's easy to lose weeks or months to blankets and tea and piles of books--and as pleasurable as this kind of hibernation can be, I suspect there are better ways to use my last few months here. Example: lion dancing.

Yes, I'm voluntarily participating in a biaoyan [performance]--and yes, it involves dancing of multiple types. Chinese folk dancing classes start on Monday, but yesterday I had my first initiation into lion dancing. Yesterday's class involved a group of five of us marching around in an approximate circle (after we put the lion costumes on, calling our formation a circle would involve serious suspension of disbelief) while our teacher (the head of the putonghua program at the Chinese Language Center) beat a drum and yelled "zuo! you! zuo! you!" while we all stared at our feet, ran into each other, and got tangled in our lions. It's amazing how smart people around the world all seem to have great difficulty differentiating left from right. The class proceeded, in the kind of polyglot cacophany typical of Hong Kong, without noticeable improvement. Things I learned: 1. Bamboo (?) lion heads are heavy and hot. 2. If you are me, it is extremely difficult to remember to simultaneously open/close the lion's mouth, shake the head from side to side, walk in time to a drum, and periodically jump up and crouch down. I suspect that this would be difficult even if I could remember the difference between shang [up] and xia [down]--although I learned these words in my first week of Chinese, they still give me more trouble than discussing, say, Macao's gambling industry [Aumen de bocaiye] or the museum housing the tomb and terracotta warriors of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty [ Qinshihuang binmayong bowuguan].