Gone skiing

We finally got around to some shopping! We headed for The Friendship Store-- a large store orginally set up to cater to the Russian workers in the seventies. It sell a wide variety of goods and at 0ne time only tourists could buy goods there. It is hard to imagine that it is not that long ago, the Chinese could not buy very much of anything and certainly not imported goods. Now of course, most imported goods anywhere are made in China and if they have the money they can buy anything.
We had a wonderful time at the Panjianyuan Market. Vendors come from far away provinces (which you could really see in their faces) every Sunday and sell collectibles and antiques, rugs etc. And you are expected to bargain which was great fun.
We actually went to see the Chinese acrobats one evening. It is a very touristy thing to do, but we did enjoy the show as it was the week to showcase the children who come from the acrobatic school. There were most entertaining, and do quite the most amazing contortions at a very young age. I am sure they will all have agents and be heading very soon to Las Vegas to work for Cirque de Soliel!!
And a dinner at the Family Li restaurant in a very old area of Beijing. This restaurant is in their actual house down a very old, dark and narrow street. The little lanes and houses called hudongs are rapidly being torn down and replaced with new high apartment towers. According to the newspaper 600,000 people have been moved to new apartments getting ready for the Olympics. Papers are all government controlled so you are sure you are getting the whole story or if you are getting a what we want you to know. So it is quite possible many more people have been moved. These old time areas of Beijing are disappearing at an amazing rate so we were pleased the hotel had steered us to Family Li and their little house--really a series of little rooms, no decor to speak of, and a fabulous Imperial Style Bangquet consisting of about twenty different little courses of fabulously interesting food.
Peter went to visit another factory(not rare earths this time, rather this factory makes magnets) and I went to the National Art Museum to see an exhibit I had read about called "The Farmer". The exhibition was huge (of course!) about five floors of paintings. Most of the gallery seemed to be taken up with various forms of Chinese paintings, but this exhibition was really a series of group scenes and portraits. There was an audio guide which was quite painful to listen to. If each painting had a two minute blurb, most of the talking was about the artist educational background, where he learned his painting, who was his teacher and how many committees he now chaired--all quite boring. There was a big sign in Chinese and English at the beginning of the show, explaining the Central Committe was now focusing on the importance of the farmer and the farm. So the whole exhibit was some sort of politcal statement; "a lets all thank the farmers and their wonderful life". All the figures seemed to be very jolly and well fed! And the group pictures from the '40s all had little paintings of Mao in there somewhere. Still there were some very good artists for all that and some of the current painters in "new open era" were very strong indeed.
And as luck would have it, we had dinner that night with a niece of a dear friend and her husband who is serving at the Canadian Embassy as the Trade Commissioner for Agriculture. They live out in a new area by the airport which suites them very well, as J. must travel all over China and the international schools are nearby. All the various embassy folk used to house their staff in compounds near the offices, but with traffic now so bad in Beijing, more and more families are staying closer to the schools. It was such an interesting evening to hear how things are going out in the countryside that J visits regularly. The Chinese government is in fact focusing on support of farmers and farming, and trying to clean up the polluted land and food supply. So the art exhibit was all part of the current propaganda compaign. Not for the first time we heard that the biggest pollution problem was not the air but the earth and water and all the pesticides that had been used over the years now accumlating in the food supply. And of course, with all the building projects going on in all the big cities, workers are leaving the land and heading for the bright lights--sort of a "How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they have seen Beijing"
The newspapers actually had an acticle about how tea sales were way down as Japan was not buying anymore tea till the tea plantations were made"green". Needless to say after reading that I dropped tea purchases from my shopping list, and not for the first time marvelled at just how much these papers were allowed to say.
I will wrap tomorrow.. as ever Katie