Chinese New Year is whole 7 days of public holiday (only if you chose to work on the weekend, otherwise you only get 3 days off) and fire crackers. Finally I could join the Peloton this morning as I had finally managed to open the lock on my bike. Tom arranged the standard winter easy 2.5 hour loop bike ride along the Wenyu river North East of Beijing. I arrived at the morning meeting pint with another cyclist who came for the first time. We waited a while till another guy showed up that said he never had ridden that route. As it was already after the meeting time we were starting to wonder if anybody else would show up and started talking about how we could ride. But finally our master Tom arrived and guided this small group of cyclists towards the Wenyu River. Half way through he said that he will turn back as he is slightly sick and he gave us further directions. We missed one turn but noticed that when the road suddenly ended with a huge construction fence. When we reached the North East banks of the Wenyu River we really enjoyed this newly paved empty road and were happy to live in Beijing and enjoy the Olympic investments that had been done. Because of this beautiful road we decided not to do a loop, but just cycle back the same way. Then we decided it would be shorter to actually cut through to the 2nd Airport Expressway on the other side of the river. But that road was first not nicely paved and soon after it turned into a dirt and brick road. So this shortcut was shorter but did take us longer. It was fun though.
In the afternoon we continued to work on the 1000 piece puzzle of a traditional Chinese painting that we had bought at the temple fair for 10.-RMB. We actually had to start the puzzle by ripping pieces apart that originally came uncut. We soon also found out that almost every piece was the same shape. Today was the third day working on it and we did finish it with only 16 pieces in the wrong place – There are letters printed on the back so that you can afterwards double-check that you placed every piece correctly…
…or maybe it was actually meant to do the puzzle with the letters facing upwards so you can then conveniently put the glue on it for framing. The shop we had bought it at only sold one size puzzles plus the respective size of frames to go with it. But as we are not Chinese we did not buy the frame and we will not hang the puzzle on the wall. I had enough of looking at different shades of yellow and orange while doing the puzzle. If the painter of this painting would still be alive I would like to tell him that a river should not be the same color as the soil otherwise it makes not a good choice for being used as a puzzle.