Sunday 28 September 2008

A weekend full of Tat

The last days have been fairly stressful with trying to sort out the contract for our little flat. Hopefully, we'll be able to move in later on in the week, so we will blog from there then. 

To reward ourselves (and to help out a friend who needed a gift for his room mate) we went back to the Electronics market on Super Bar Street. The purchase we made can be seen in  this little video. Honestly, it's the coolest pig I've ever seen and pigs are supposed to be lucky as well, so we're covered on all levels.

Today, we took a slightly more cultural route and went to visit the Temple of Heaven.

And truly heavenly it is. A big park surrounds several temples and houses form the 14th century. We were wondering where the masses of Chinese tourists were that had been promised to us (next Wednesday to Friday is public holiday in China). Thene we realised: Because those three days are off next week, the Chinese have to work all weekend to make up the time for it. not sure where the fun in a public holdiay is then, but it seems to work quite well.
The highlight for Mark was not the wooden structure of the temple or the glazed dragons all over the place, but some chickens and geese we saw just as we left the park. On the right side, one of the buzzling three-lane roads in Beijing and on the left, some chickens and geese chilling out on a Sunday afternoon. Just as Mark wanted to take a picture, two little boys came running and chased them away. Maybe chickens are not so photogenic in Beijing.

Thanks to the public holidays, I only have one day of work, which is tomorrow, so there will be a blog about my work later on this week, maybe even from our new flat!!!!!!!!!!



3 comments:

Kevin Richardson said...

Very pleased to see that Tat is as important to the Chinese as our Social Policy mob...as Nick famously announced last week when answering the phone to a delivery man...'has anyone ordered 50 boxes of tat?'...
anyway, the flat looks nice...but do the local charvas piss on the stairs as they do in Cruddas Park?
and what would your new Chinese friends make of charvas? :)
keep the blog going
Cheers
Kevin
ps....the toon were even worse at the weekend....doom, doom and more doom

German in Zhong Guo said...

no charves seen yet, and don't think they would survive here, they just make food out of them or something. Haven't seen any neighbours yet, but will let you know about incidences as soon as we have any.

There will be more on tat, for some reason I don't think this was the last purchase.

Speak soon.

Kevin Richardson said...

Guess what....we might even be moving offices soon..!!! well, that might be the first sign of the restructure actually beginning to happen...christ, am I going mad....why did I write the last sentence...must be 'early onset'
anyway, off to Brussels Open Days tomorrow....along with most of ONE staff....still, DG REGIO kindly paying me again to go...must be my dulcet tones? and, I've managed to wrangle bringing Lucie in on an admin basis...before she gets snapped up by someone with more money...did I send you her disser?
anyway, off to bed soon....have a ducks head for me for breakfast:)

Kevin