Blue skies!

This year Beijing has had its worse air quality since 2005, when the government really stepped up efforts ahead of the Olympics. This is not good news; and can be fairly depressing. However, on the bright side, when Beijing has beautiful blue skies like today, everything just feels amazing. These days do not happen more than once or twice a week on average it seems, especially in the last few weeks since i got back from vacation, but they are incredible days -the sun reflects off of the glass skyscrapers and temperatures sore up above 30 degrees. It also makes it very tempting to go and sit in the coffee shop nearby, in a mini-park, to work and enjoy the weather (rather that sitting in the office).

As football starts to take over weekends and weekday nights, now that Tottenham are in the Champions League, I continue to play around 3 times a week, though neither watching or playing seems to make me any better! It is good fun and good exercise to complement my running as the Beijing Marathon comes up in just 2 months. Scary thought.

In the meantime, work is going along nicely, and I even managed to find some time to watch a few movies recently, though none of them offer that much to write home about.  There might not be much free time in the next couple of weeks as we launch a new website for the program i have been managing, hold a big launch event and do a bunch of interviews as part of a white paper on 'the future of philanthropy in China'.  

We moved into a new apartment recently and have now sorted it all out; it is not far from the other one, but more expensive and smaller unfortunately, such is the way with property prices in Beijing. The good news is that we have great views and an attic in our apartment (weird I know) for the extra space for all of our stuff.

Today we went to watch the World Combat Games in Beijing and saw some Taekwondo. Some of it was fairly exciting; others they just danced around and poked at each other with their legs. It was kind of interesting when a Taiwanese person came third as the flag that is raised is a strange quasi-Olympic flag as China refuses to recognize Taiwan as an independent country with its own flag. Not many paying spectators unfortunately but thousands of kids were brought in to watch the violence! Maybe it is part of their self-defence training before the new school term starts, and they have to protect themselves against more psychos running into schools and knifing kids! 

This weekend Andrea and I are off to Dalian for a three-day weekend to get away a bit and check out one of the few cities I have not yet been to. Will be in touch in a week or so I expect.