After spending Thursday and Friday learning knitting from Panda, I managed to make a small, pink square decently enough--something like the beginning of a scarf. In order to get even this much done, I had to learn a simpler way of knitting. Saturday, I met the tutor with whom I'll be studying during break, and afterwards I went to see Panda again.
Panda, a former doctor, is big on healthy eating and exercise, so since three days of rain had made exercising outdoors an impossibility, she had picked up two jianzi.
Jianzi are basically Chinese hacky-sacks: four large feathers and some smaller ones bound together at the bottoms with some metal washers and a little plastic nub, the original precursor to the shuttlecock used in badminton. Apparently they used to be used for some game, though I've never seen anyone playing according to what looks like sensible rules (though I have seen a group of kids playing in two teams, one team using their feet and the other team using ping-pong paddles in what looked a little like volleyball, with one team trying to paddle the jianzi toward the ground while the others defended). For people like me, ti (kicking) jianzi is usually just what it sounds like--kicking this little clutch of feathers in the air as many times in a row as you can.
Panda and I ti jianzi for an hour or so. Again, I had one of those moments of seeing myself from the outside and got a bit of laughter out of the moment. Then I worked on my scarf for a bit before we had dinner. After dinner, with Panda's help on quite a few rows, I managed to finish my first knitted scarf Saturday night. I gave it as a gift to the co-worker who had given me my "I am not a Capitalist Drover" T-shirt (now the image on the right side of my page).
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