China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

The other day I passed by the construction site of the new . This building has a unique shape – referred to as a Z criss cross. The CCTV Headquarter Building is 230m high and will have a floor area of about 400,000m2. It combines space for administration, news, broadcasting, studios and program production – encompassing the entire process of TV making. The outside structure is now almost finished:

Unfortunately I did not take many pictures in regular intervals to document the progress of the construction (that would have been nice… maybe next time they build such an outstanding building…). I did take some. Here was how it looked like on Mai 3rd 2007:

For a long time the two sides of the building were separate, just like two towers. When they got really close everybody was often asking“Are they touching yet?“. This is how it looked like on October 28th 2007. It is hard to see in this small resolution, but they were not touching at all on this picture:

But yes, now they definitely are touching, as can be seen here. And oops there is a small fire from the welding (Feb 16th 2008):

It is great to be back in China. After a full day of work we decided to go to our favorite neighborhood Sichuan restaurant to finally enjoy Chinese food again. And even more: We did get the good service we had been missing in Thailand. From the time the lady that took our order had left our table it took:

• 2:50 min till we had our drinks (fresh suan mei tang)
• 4:40 min till the first dish was on the table (da bai cai)
• 6:35 min till the Chinese style french fries arrived (xiang la tu dou si)
• 13:10 min till the huge plate of dried red chillies with chicken bones filled up our table (chong qing  la zi ji)

It all tasted great! And the portions were huge. And we got more food than what we would have gotten for that price in Tonsai or Railay. And the waitresses were friendly, even when we said we do not want to use the expensive packaged chop sticks and requested her to give us the free chop sticks. I was really missing the Chinese cuisine so I am happy to be back in Beijing. Maybe we will go for some Xinjiang food tomorrow, or maybe first for some Dongbei food, or Shanxi, or Hunan, or Yunnan, or Taiwan, or Shanghai, or Hakka, or…

Really, what are they showing on international TV??? It must be a catastrophe! And do they really say that it is happening in Beijing???

But there is no snow in Beijing. Really. Nothing. Not even a trace. Zero snow.

Today on my way to office I passed by the famous Forbidden City. I did not have my camera with me, just my mobile phone, but as the weather was so beautiful (it has been like this for 1 week) I still stopped to take pictures. Here is a picture of the north-east tower of the Forbidden City.

Does that look like we have a snow disaster in Beijing? Does that look like it will continue to snow and we are cut off from the rest of the world without telephone or internet or any kind of transportation? If you are not yet convinced then have a look at this picture of the Beihai Park with the white Buddha Temple

China is a big country. Really. If the news say there is some snow chaos that does not mean in whole China. I heard that something is going on in 6 provinces. And I am sure Beijing is not one of them.

I might not be able to post anything on this blog for the next two weeks as I will be going on New Years holiday 🙂 Therefore I will not even notice if it actually does start to snow in Beijing in the next 2 weeks…

Yesterday was again beautiful weather even though there was not much wind. We went to the Houhai lake again for some ice skating. The section for swimmers was slightly frozen so the swimmers had to first get all the ice out of the water. Here you see one of the guys with Beijing’s Drum and Bell Tower in the background.

After the 1 hour the cleaning of the water was almost finished. Finally his friend started swimming. Good that he was wearing his swimming cap so that his hair does not dirty the water…

I have been doing some dragon boat racing on this lake in the summer time.  Each time I need to shower afterwards to get the itchy feeling off my skin from the water that splashed on me. I just find it amazing that Chinese people swim in this lake – winter and summer.

The wind is great! When wind comes into Beijing it just blows away the pollution. Yes, it feels slightly more chilly than it is, but I love these blue skies like yesterday:

The World Trade Tower 3 is almost finished. It is (and will be for a while) the tallest building of Beijing. I should have taken more pictures of it during the whole construction phase. It was really fast. Not like other buldings which hardly got anywhere in the past year. Not even the Tower of Jiianwai SOHO is completely finished yet. And I am not sure if all of the ugly unfinished buildings will actually be completed before the Olympics…

Yeah! It was all white outside when I woke up in the morning! This is not very usual. I heard that there had been some small snowfall last week when I was not in Beijing. But today was the first time I saw snow in Beijing this winter! Unfortunately that little amount of snow was gone quite soon. Not just because it is not very cold, but also because Beijing is very dry. We usually get west winds that come from Europe. All the moisture is gone by the time the wind passes the Ural mountain chain. After that there is the desert of Gobi and then Beijing. So it was nice to see a white Beijing today.

Finally 🙂 It is cold enough to skate on some of the lakes in Beijing. We had to wait till mid January for that to happen this winter. That was too long…
Many people in Beijing felt the same so both yesterday and today the Houhai lake was overcrowded. And that despite the fact that they this year charge an entry ticket to step onto the lake. The official reason is because the ice is not so thick yet so they have to control the amount of people on the ice. My person impression is that the people working in the ice sport industry (like the ones that rent the ice skates or the ice chairs or the ice bikes) have not had any income this winter so they now need to make up for it.

Anyway it was a great feeling to finally ice skate again. Here two pictures of how my fellow Beijingers enjoyed their day on the ice:

Isn’t it romantic? And the wonderful polluted air of Beijing…