Being in Beijing now means you absolutely have to visit the tourist obligation number one, the OLYMPIC AREA, the place where IT all is going to happen in August. It doesn’t matter how you think about all the publicity the Olympic Games get in all its forms, a bit too much in my eyes but who am I, you cannot just pass it here. If it’s not the big displays everywhere with the seconds countdown till The Day or the huge posters of sponsors of the games, it’s the image of the five rings on all the beer bottles here and there are many beer bottles.

So yesterday, Sunday, had to be the day. We planned to have a quiet walk around, and may be over the area with the different stadiums. This was a wrong idea! What we didn’t know was that just this weekend for the first time athletic games were organised in the big stadium and that this was a great opportunity for many Chinese families to admire their own spaghetti building from the in and outside for a reasonable price. Because the price for an Olympic ticket is a bit outrageous for a normal Chinese income. So it was sold out which in itself should already have been a good reason for an extreme bustle but the parking facilities and the Olympic subway line are not yet ready. Result? Traffic chaos! But nevertheless we could have some walks along the fences that stretched away for many kilometres with also a lot of military guards.

A few kilometre north of the central stadium, the blue building for the swimming (see photo) and this spectacular skyscraper in the form of the Olympic flame another area is found with for instance the tennis (see photo) and the hockey stadiums embedded in a lot of green and parks.. Here it was remarkably quiet.
The conclusion is that costs didn’t play a role, cheap labour is still abundantly present and finding ground so near to the centre of the town has not been seen as a serious problem by the government. In this way a spectacular concentration of sports facilities has been build. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the months of June and July form a very precious supply of time that is very much needed to complete the picture.

Sunday, day of the Lord! But the real reason that there is no instalment today of this weblog, lies in the fact that we just came home now, about 11pm, from a barbecue with some of our neighbours, the Georgian sculptor Aleksandre and his Chinese wife, tapestry weaver Nino in the company of Australian, Spanish/Brazilian and Korean people in which from time to time also Russian was spoken.

Saturday evening is clearly a free evening. That was not so difficult to notice in ‘our’ hutong because of the lively atmosphere. So we feel it really after several weeks, ‘our’hutong. If we walk around in the ‘shopping mall’ it’s a mutually reconnaissance, friendly smiles and a lot of waving hands. Therefore this hutong deserves tonight the attention with a lot of pictures and a short text.

Today we had our Chinese lunch in the gallery because we had to celebrate a kind of opening amongst us. This of course sounds a bit strange after the official one of nearly two weeks ago, but as it always is, there is an explanation.

I have already mentioned a few times the name of my art companion here in the gallery, the Australian Hilary Pollock. We regularly go out for dinner or for visiting Beijing with Hilary and her husband Graem. Just as I had done Hilary took a big role of oil paintings with her from home and had them stretched here. She also had the intention to create a number of paintings on paper in the gallery because we have the facility to do so during our exhibition. We both do so but Hilary spends more time on that then I do. In the series of paintings she took with her, dedicated to the five senses, she already had worked with a variety of Chinese symbols. With this she continued in a series of four different Chinese pots on a real big format of paper. This series she just finished before the official opening.
But after that she started a new series about the four seasons and this she ended this morning. So now you know the explanation for our small celebration in the gallery in the form of a Chinese banquet.
To give an impression of her work I made the pictures you can see here.

If you come home at 10pm after a dinner with Chinese hot pot the mind to write the daily part of this blog is not too big anymore. So I decided to write it in the morning and take advantage of the fact that the sun rises in the East while the rest of the world is still asleep.

A couple of days ago we accidentally met Rob Korfage, Dutchman and teacher at the WAB, the Western Academy of Beijing. This is an international school with departments from pre-kindergarten to high school and many nationalities among which of course Dutch pupils but also a lot of Koreans and Chinese. The building complex lies just a few kilometres from our place and so an appointment was made quite quick and settled for this afternoon.

It’s really amazing what this school offers in facilities. Every teacher an assistant, a pupils restaurant with a real international menu, beautiful classrooms, big libraries, an Apple laptop for even the small children of 6 years old, for the older children the kind of lounges you also find in the more expensive establishments and a huge row of new school buses. But if you pay $ 20,000 a year for your child you may expect something of course, even if this money is probably paid by the company or the embassy you work for.
I found it very stimulating to see how much attention had been given to art, big music rooms with a recording studio, pupils filming in the corridor, a film studio, a theatre where pupils were rehearsing, but also big bronzes of scientists like Galileï and Newton besides other modern art objects in the garden.
Accidentally there were two exhibitions of pupils of the school, one of 10 year old children also teached by Rob and one of the elder high school pupils. Both showed a very good level. Is it to be expected that the picture above is made by a 10 year old child that took ‘The Scream’ of Munch as starting point but gave it a Chinese turn if you have a look at the face?
I hope that the other photos give a good impression of what I had to tell today.

And this hot pot, together with Rob in a place where till now he had never seen another Westerner, was again another very positive experience!