It has been so cold the past weeks in Beijing. Our Natooke shop is in a traditional hutong building and we do not have any proper heating. We did buy some electric heaters and that gives us some warmth near the heater, for example in our office. But the rest of the shop is around 3 degrees Celcius. But today I finally started taking some pictures of some bike parts. I started with the beautiful chromoly Flying Banana frames. I did not take many pictures because my fingers got really cold.
As I love outdoor sports like rock climbing, skiing, mountaineering I was looking forward to the Banff Mountain Film Festival coming to Beijing. A friend rock climber and mountaineer has opened a bar and cafe down the Wudaoying hutong where my bike shop is. It is called the „Together Cafe“. Inside there are many outdoor magazines and pictures from his expeditions to Tibet. The film festival started yesterday and I actually wanted to go but never checked the schedule. When I finally looked yesterday afternoon I was shocked to see that the first movie screening session was already over as it had started at 9am and the second one was already on going. So we could only go today and went for the early starting screening. There were quite some people even though I think there were only 3 foreigners.
We saw a movie called „Cliff Note“ (悬崖笔记) about cliff diving in a canyon. Amazing was a movie about free solo rock climbing and then base jumping from the top. Or just base jumping when you fall during the free solo climbing. Also doing slack line balancing between peaks or cliffs without being secured and also just using the base jumping parachute in case you fall.
I enjoyed the movie called „Searching for the coast Wolves“ (寻狼记). It was the very touching story of the former cross country running champion and biologist Gudrun Pflueger from Austria about her research about the coast wolves in Western Canada. She actually had an encounter with the coast wolves that seem not to have any bad experience with human beings in the past centuries and therefore did not see any threat in Gudrun and just played around her.
The Chinese movie maker Ricard was asked to come up and to talk about his outdoor movies. One is called „Dragon Breath“. On the back of the DVD is reads (including the typos) the following: „During the Spring Fesitaval, four Chinese top climbers came to Shuangqiao Gully, located in Mt Siguniang in Sichuan, to challenge the Dragon Breath, the hardest route in the vally. This documentary record their climbing and life in the vally.“ They only screened trailers of 4 of his movies and of course we recognized some of our Chinese outdoor and climbing friends in these movies.
After that we met our friend Nicolas Favard who is a French jewelry maker. He does very beautiful jewelry and each piece is unique. He designs pieces of art for his customers. If you are in Beijing I recommend you drop by his boutique in Sanlitun in the Nali Patio on the 3rd floor.
Last year a Japanese film crew came to Beijing to film me cycling. They have put together a short movie called „Riding in the Circle“ about my passion for cycling and my life in Beijing. They put the movie trailer on their website – you can go there and watch it.
They have submitted this movie to the Bicycle Film Festival 2010 as well as other movie festivals and I hope it gets selected.
In November when I was in Tokyo and met with the film crew again they had given me contact sheets with some of the pictures they had taken during the making of the film February 2009 in Beijing.
It was great to see all these pictures that brought back the memory of a really intense but fun time in 2009. That last dinner we had had some Erguotou (very strong Chinese rice alcohol) to celebrate the end of the filming.
The result was me hugging the bicycle that was painted on the bike lane in front of the restaurant. I have not drunk any Erguotou since then and would like to avoid it also in future.
It is Liman’s birthday. She is one of those people that do not tell others when her birthday is and rather not have any celebration. So I did not know until her boyfriend invited me a few days ago to a surprise party. So he arranged that all of her friends meet at a friends place and prepare a cake and flowers. She thought she was going to see a movie and just drop by that friend on the way to the movie theater. But we were all there when she came.
She was really moved by this. And it was a very nice party with nice people and it lasted quite long.
For the upcoming track cycling world cup in Beijing there was a press conference today. The organizers, the Chinese cycling association and other officials were present.
The organizers confirmed that everything is prepared for the big competition which is the 4th and last in the series. They have prepared everything for a safe and smooth event. Cyclists from 38 countries have already registered to compete in the different races. But they did not confirm who of the Chinese National cycling team will compete.
After that official part we were able to go inside the Beijing Laoshan Velodrome and watch the Chinese National track cycling team and members of China Giant professional cycling team train. Here are pictures from the Women’s Keirin race:
And then it was the turn for the men of the Chinese National team as well as the Giant team. I like the Keirin race as the cyclists first have to follow the motorcyclist. I uploaded many pictures to my webalbum, click here.
Since 2007 the Chinese National team has the French coach Daniel Morelon who is a French legend. He is a four-time Olympic champion and won seven world titles during his reign in the 1960s and 1970s. He used to coach the five-time world champion Felicia Ballanger. He has brought especially Guo Shuang to new levels and are looking at good results in the upcoming World Cup.
Today I received this article that a friend of mine (thank you so much) found in the Global Times newspaper. It describes that with the push for Chinese people to get cars, Beijing is now congested (I can totally agree) and this has stimulated the Chinese Government to issue a plan to persuade more of the Beijing residents to ride bikes (I am so happy! This is great!) like commuters. Bikes are not expensive in China, but as bike theft is a huge issue (Yes, I know that) the government wants to increase bike rentals in Beijing like in Hangzhou.
Sarah will soon have a baby boy so she invited her friends over for a baby shower. This was the first baby shower I attended and of course I did not win the baby word scramble nor the baby bingo games. But it was great to see Sarah who seems very happy and doing well. And it was fun chat with friends and eat delicious cookies, brownies and ice-cream cake.
Finally for the first time this winter we went ice skating. Every year they change the layout on the qianhai lake in the center of teh city. This year there is no free area (like last year) which is a good way to control the number of people on the ice. We decided to buy the 10.-RMb ticket for the big open space even though we saw that this year the designated ice-rink was a little bit bigger than last year. As always there were hardly any people on ice skates. The typical view is like this:
So still the small wooden chairs on the iron frame are the most popular. But this year the price for the ice bicycles increased and we hardly saw any. But a new think is the electric bumper cars.
The games near the island on the lake were not so popular, like the basketball or the dart ballon:
Or also the throw the hoop around random objects game was also not attracting many people today:
Next time we go ice skating we will go in the skating rink as the ice was very chopped up in the main area. This year they also made a special section for the ice scating lessons and one section for ice hockey. Very smart idea. I hope it stays cold and dry 🙂
Today was Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) talk series „China Story 6“ that they invited my do on „Unstoppable: Fixed Gear Bike Culture in Beijing“.
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is a non profit, comprehensive art center founded in Beijing by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in November 2007. UCCA presents exhibitions of established and emerging artists and develops a trusted platform to share knowledge through education and research. The core of UCCA programs includes conferences, lectures, special events, artistic performances, and films. UCCA activities are a magnet for many kinds of audiences, from art fans and specialists to families and children.
We had arranged with the UCCA management that we could bring some of the fixed gear bikes inside and display them during my talk and performance.
It was nice to see that many people came out to the contemporary art district despite the cold weather, snow on the roads and traffic jams. Even though some came a little bit late. This picture shows part of the audience before I started my talk.
And it was very nice to see some of my friends come, even from as far as Germany.
My talk started with a brief bicycle history explaining that the first bicycles were fixed gear. Then showing the bicycle messenger scene around the world and how that created a sub-culture with many people doing urban cycling and wearing messenger bags. Then I showed how the first people started riding fixed gear in China and how big the Beijing fixed gear group now is with over 80 cyclists.
I then also asked some people of our Beijing Fixed Gear Group to come on up and explain why they ride fixed gear bicycles. The first one was my friend GMing.
And then I took off my clothes and did a trick bike performance. Well of course not all clothes. My bicycle show was very well received and I had many people come up to me afterwards.
In the question and answer session one Chinese person made a nice comment saying that he hopes that I can inspire people to follow me and ride bicycles like Forrest Gump in the movie when he started running across the USA and then had many people follow him. All in all it was a very nice event.
Afterwards I went with my friends to eat some cheese fondue. Julien found a nice way to explain to geeks what fixed gear bikes are. They are like Linux: Most people do not understands why people use it but the people using it have huge fun. And there are more and more people using it. And actually I am a linux user too.
Just recently I uploaded my talk I had given last November at the Beijing TED event up to slideshare. You can click here and have a look at that presentation. The topic I had chosen for that event was „Changes of Perception – Bicycle Culture in China“. At that TEDxBeijing conference I wanted to inspire people to ride bicycles and change their perception of bikes being something for poor people.
We went to a small renovated hutong bar near Houhai for a concert of our friends. The Over Easy Dance Band plays foot-stomping rhythm and blues. They claim „If the Rolling Stones knocked up the Scissor Sisters, we’d be the spawn“. The band consists of Jimmy Biala on drums, Matt Forney on electric guitar, Meilan Frame on vocals and flute, Matt Roberts on the doghouse bass. But Jimmy flies forever to the United States in February so this was their last gig.
They played songs from Depeche Mode as well as Tom Waits. I think it is the first time that I heard a band play Tom Waits in China. It was really nice. Too bad the entertaining drummer is leaving Beijing.
