March 22, 1999.

My class went to the museum today. There are lots of people in my Chinese Literature course but only 9 wanted to go see the Chinese galleries at the museum and one was my friend St Jack so he doesn't really count. I don't know why people in my class didn't want to go to the museum because the museum is lots of fun and it's not like being in class at all which is where we'd all be if we hadn't taken a trip. But that's my class. They don't like talking in class either so my teacher just talks to us for a long time. I like talking to my teacher especially in class especially about books and stuff. But I got to talk to him today so that's okay.

I met my friend St Jack and we went over to the museum and looked at all the other classes of kids going to the museum. We were the first people there and St Jack made a joke about the other kids who were there. He asked if they were my class which is funny because my class is old and this class (the one he pointed to I mean) was full of little kids, like babies next to us. So we laughed. And we talked about being little and going to the museum. When I was young we took a trip to Sudbury which is near where St Jack grew up and when he was young his class almost took a trip to this city, like we were switching places almost. But his class didn't go because they didn't make enough selling cheese and grapefruits.

Then my teacher came in, and a few other people from class and we got a cloakrack to put our stuff on while we went through. It made me excited, and I started to bounce in my shoes. And then my teacher found out that nobody from the museum would talk to us in the galleries because we didn't have enough kids. But that was okay because my teacher led the tour and he knows a lot about Chinese history and besides we got a dollar back instead of a museum guide. So I bounced and bounced and practiced balance and stretching and then we went to the galleries.

We looked at all kinds of things from all through Chinese history. Some of it was very very old. Almost all of the older things belonged to rich people, because they could buy pretty things out of stone. We looked at oracle bones which are the oldest Chinese writing and the writing is so clear it's like they were carved last week or something. (Only not carved more like scratched.)

We looked at little bottles that were painted from the inside and St Jack talked about how steady your hand would have to be to do that. We looked at lacquered things which are boxes and trays and other things that they put layers of lacquer on. Each coat takes about 2 weeks to dry and then when it's thick enough they carve out designs. Some of the trays were so thick that it must have taken forever. Plus the lacquer is poisonous so the artists had short lives. My teacher made a joke about Chinese art. He said that he thought that the Chinese figured out the hardest longest way of doing things and then made that the tradition of the art. We all laughed because everything was so pretty and looked really hard to do.

We saw a jade burial suit which is little square pieces of jade sewn together into a full suit. Jade was supposed to be something that kept you safe so they covered rich people with it when they died. And not only that they had little jade pieces for the eyes and mouth and tubes of jade to stick up the nose and other tubes of jade to stick lower. No really!

There were also later things all in one colour which were really pretty in a quiet way. All the things in this period were like perfect whatevers, like perfect jugs or perfect plates or perfect bowls. An alien would know what they were for right away because they were so perfect. I looked at a pretty jug which was a perfect jug shape and I started to laugh because I remembered another trip to the museum with my mom when I saw Victorian stuff like The World's Biggest Blue and White Vase. It was an imitation of the Chinese style and it was really too much and kind of ugly. But the real Chinese stuff was really pretty. I guess that's why they had it at the museum.

I asked lots of questions. I asked why the woman held jade pigs and I asked if the Chinese people wanted their stuff back. I remembered what Q got for Christmas and I asked my teacher what a stone frog with a Chinese coin in his mouth means but he didn't know (my teacher didn't know I mean). Sometimes I asked silly things like about the old urinals. My teacher was really nice to us all and explained lots of things and we all laughed a lot. St Jack said that my teacher was the cutest little teacher he'd ever seen kind of like a big teaching assistant.

At the very end we went into a room with big paintings from tombs. One had the Buddha in the middle and my teacher said if you stared at him long enough that he would smile and start to float off the background. So I sat down and started looking real hard and breathing the calm down breaths that you're supposed to do when you feel carsick. After a minute I started to feel all good and a little dizzy and then Buddha started to smile at me! It was really cool. I was so happy! Then we all walked out of the room and the class said goodbye to each other and when everybody had gone but St Jack and me I felt so good that I looked up to the windows in the high ceilings and spun and spun and spun. When I stopped I fell down because I was so dizzy but it made me laugh.

Then St Jack and I looked at the stuffed animals and went through the Bat Cave and then we went for tea. It was a very good day and I'm glad that St Jack came with me to the museum. And I'm also glad that my class went to the museum even though we didn't get a button. It was so much fun that I forgot about the statues. I'll go see them soon.

(picture withheld due to photoshop crashing the computer)