2 months we moved office, only across the road, but today I returned to the old office building to visit a new cafe that opened. What makes it special is that it is pretty much an exact replica of Central Perk from Friends (with the addition of a TV showing friends all day long) -check out some photos here: http://french.peopledaily.com.cn/Photos/6989231.html. It is very impressive and a great idea to distinguish itself from all the other of hundreds of coffee shop. The owner there just loves friends and says it has always been his dream to relax in Central Perk -so he created his own!
Last night we found a new deck outside a bar to watch the England friendly, and it might become the regular spot for watching games, even though most start at 2.30am! And in further bad news, because the chinese Dragon Boat festival is a wednesday and the Chinese want to make it a 3-day weekend, although we'll get monday, tuesday and wednesday off, we'll have to work the saturday and sunday before, which includes the england-usa game. I'm not sure how awake I will be on the Sunday!
In the last few weeks I've been to see the BBC Symphony Orchestra (the second half was particularly good with lots more instruments -see what matters to me about music!) which was truly impressive as ever -very very powerful stuff- and also happily discovered the return of a local vegetable market; this time the sellers have been given an actual permanent structure to be based in so hopefully they'll be here for a while.Tuesday, something we'll organize every 2 weeks to encourage some of our friends out to dinner at a local street vendor to support the local community -and of course drink lots of cheap beer (and last time, we did drink lots!).
The School next door is almost finished, and the massive apartment complex of about 12 30-storey building should be done by August too -there is a new park that they are building next to it, which is nice. The accommodation for the workers is just next door. We counted that with 8 people to a room (on 4 bunk beds), and 16 rooms on a floor (2 rows of 8 with a corridor in between) with 2 floors per building, 6 buildings in a row and 4 rows...well as you can imagine that is a lot of accommodation (around 6,000 workers) although we've certainly not seen that many working!
2 weeks ago we went to Beijing's first organic farmer's market. Unfortunately most of the actual organic farms (there are around 5 near Beijing that are well known) did not come, instead most of the things on sale were packaged organic food (i.e. not fresh), but there were lots of other stands selling fair trade things and a decent band as well as some good food. After watching Food, Inc (highly recommended), the Symphony of Soil (also good) and chatting to a few of our friends who work with environmental NGOs, Andrea and I are making more of an effort to buy organic and eat less meat too (less, not zero!).
On Saturday I learned to my cost the difference between playing football at 6pm or 9pm compared to 2pm... let's just say at 2pm, without any shade and 25 degree heat, the quality and tempo of our (11-a-side) game was not much better than dismal England!
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