China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

Again a beautiful day. Blue sky and sunshine. We had a look at the construction site of the World Trade Tower 3. That building will be the highest building of Beijing for quite some time to come.

The outside construction is almost finished. They have added windows till a very high floor already. In the picture below you can see one of the first World Trade Towers in the bottom right corner. It looks small compared to this third tower.

I was riding around with my Corima track bike – it rolls so nice :-). Julien was inline skating. He loves doing all kinds of tricks in traffic.

Because of the great weather we decided to go to a restaurant with a courtyard so that we can have lunch outside. When we arrived the head waitress told us we cannot have lunch outside because they do not have tables and chairs and because of the wind (some leaves might fall in our dishes was the excuse). We kept explaining that I am German and I need to eat outside because all Germans always eat in beer gardens. We even proposed that we can use the huge white and blue gold fish bowl as a table and we can get chairs ourselves. Even though she kept on shaking her head she did eventually bring us chairs. That was a good meal with a delicious spicy bullfrog.

The exhibition of the Art of Dunhuang has been running for some weeks only. Whenever I passed the Meishuguan (the National Museum of Art) there was a queue. I have never seen that before for any other exhibition.

They had actually even covered the outside of the museum with huge canvas (or banners) with real size pictures of the outside desert of the famous Mogao Caves of Dunhuang. They only left the middle part uncovered so it even resembled the pagoda of the Mogao Caves behind which the huge Buddha is standing in Dunhuang.

The exhibition itself mainly contained copies of the original cave wall paintings. It was nice to see, even though I had been to Dunhuang already.

Inside the exhibition was really crowded. You had to watch out not to get pushed away from a painting by elderly people. It was crazy inside, so full. The reason was: Anybody over 60 years old has free entry to the museum. It seems this kind of exhibition attracts more people than if they do one of the typical „French Paintings“ exhibition.

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):