Days fly by. I put a big table in the gallery space to experiment with water colour, Chinese ink and the different sort of paper I bought in the material shop near the Academy. But life is not work alone. So this afternoon we had lunch with Nan Fei, an artist I had contacted already via e-mail at home. After lunch she took us to a gallery lead by a French women married to a famous Chinese rock star and the studio of a Chinese artist who made huge paintings. That’s again such a question I’m wondering about. I have seen now so many real big paintings. Where are the walls to hang them, who is buying them?
But that’s not what I wanted to write about today. Today is showtime for our hutong restaurant, the one I mentioned already several times before. Simple but clean and delicious food. The best way to show this is of course by a lot of pictures.
The daughter or son is taking the orders, father wipes the floor and takes care of his grand child, mother keeps an eye on the bills, the money and puts rice from a big pan in the small cups and then there are two men in the kitchen. This kitchen looks very organised with only one disadvantage, the noise of a starting aeroplane that’s coming out of it when the gas is burning high under the pans for new plates ordered. But we don’t complain about that because we know how high, or better said low, the bill will be afterwards. And that the beer-machine is standing besides the dishwasher in the restaurant itself while the television is sometimes a bit too loud, well, who cares.
By the way, when we leave at the end of the month the restaurant will have one menu with English characters besides the Chinese ones. Each time we see an interesting dish on one of the tables we ask if we may have a look at it, ask where it is in the extensive menu and write the English translation to it. Isn’t that a good example of globalisation?