olympic fever!

our favorite pic of the year!

china's guy

this is cool:


http://tinyurl.com/3erplk


the cynic in me says that you can't piss off a consumer market of (potentially) upwards of 1 billion people, but i'm going to pretend nike / pingan et. al is feeling for him and the sentiment of his fans. yeah, i know, hearts and flowers shit is going to my head.

amazing amazingness

it's been one of those weekends where i don't even know where to begin. sherry and i flew up to beijing to meet steph- who has been up there for the past 10-ish days for work - marc, her bf who flew up a day earlier to meet her, and our friend viv who is up in beijing to see her mom and catch some olympics.

it was somewhat of a small miracle i ended up going, what with the budget constraints and then a late-arriving and fairly debilitating flu that hit me friday morning. at any rate, come 4 pm, sherry came and picked me up in a cab, we made our way to beijing with only a 2 hour delay on our flight. directly from the airport we went to mao live, one of the live music venues in beijing, where steph's work was throwing this fucking amazing show/party featuring seven awesome local punk bands (more on that below) and z trip out of new york. he spun a fat show. i danced my flu away:










v for vachina








i finally left everyone at about 2:30 am outside of a bar in a hutong district nearby because my extra-strength tylenol wore off and my fever was back with a vengeance. so much fun. i must have scared the shit out of my flu, because the next day i woke up chipper and ready to roll to our FIRST olympic event - athletics qualifying rounds. thanks to sherry and her superior planning skills, we procured these tix the day before for about half what the other scalpers were charging:




women's 400 meter



the torch



herzog & de meuron's bird nest, sherry admiring in foreground







after at least an hour of post-olympic giddy times,




steph in purple, marc in red


we headed to the legation quarter, which is a project that my company did some work for to see maison boulud, daniel boulud's newest restaurant. not only did we get to hang out with chef boulud himself, who toured us around the restaurant,








the red room, ready for al roker!








that's chef daniel boulud to marc's left


thanks to marc's contacts - marc is an amazing chef also - we also got to see the kitchen, chat with the chef de cuisine, brian reimer, and managed to invite ourselves back for drinks that night. stoked! we are all intense foodies, so this was an incredible honor as well as being just an incredible experience. i mean, look at that kitchen! it's spotless. there are glass tiles on the walls for god's sake. the building restorations are really mind blowing, and i work for two exceedingly talented and famous architects, so that's saying something.

and on... we then went to boxing (light and midweights):



prelims

which were cool, but after a while, suffice to say the crowd got bored enough to start singing 'the star spangled banner' during a match when neither opponent was american. our favorite fight was india vs. thai, because we were able to stretch the curry vs. curry joke the entire night.


we went to pick steph up from mao live again, and caught the most fucking amazing beijing band, queen sea big shark. steph has been insisting on their greatness for months now, but only last night did i realize how stupid i was being in not immediately dropping everything i am doing and following them around everywhere. they are an incredible show. i now insist you visit their myspace page and listen to their stuff. 'man on the moon' was what got me, being a girl and it being a ballad and all. in fact, it's constantly looping as i write this.






after that, we made our very late way back to maison boulud, where we caught the chef at the bar drinking a beer, the restaurant completely empty. the extremely kind man that he is to us so very imposing group of people, he had his bartender make us delectable martinis from lychee / raspberry / rose-infused vodka, then disappeared behind closed doors to reappear with plates and plates of food that he had chef brian reimer prepare. i'm talking foie gras, country pate, three types of bread, and a impromptu terrine made from the leftover suckling pig from al roker's birthday celebration held there earlier that evening. i wish i was kidding (no, i don't), but it was that intense of a day. we were beside ourselves with joy. it was about 1:30 am at that point and i hadn't eaten dinner, so i was especially grateful and ecstatic.



my martini, with a formed ice cube encapsulating a rose petal. awwwww





what a weekend.

lucky day triple 8!

see ruby's:

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/shanghai/dining/dessert.htm

so today is the commencement of the summer games! the whole city (country, i dare to extend) is buzzing with excitement. most companies have given their employees half days off. true to the nature of my business, my company did not. hence i am writing this.

anyway, this is short one because i am sneaking out soon to run around the bund and sniff out the good parties for later tonight with sherry, but we had cake to celebrate the olympics (cheaper than letting your employees leave at 1 pm?) and it was the shit.

you have to be a fan of the chinese cake variety - super soft cake, cream, and either fruit or chestnut filling - ruby is your girl. i don't like cake, but chinese cakes remind me of birthdays when the only cake i would entertain would be chestnut-filled cakes topped with those ubiquitous but somehow tantalizing mandarin oranges. i love those.

anyways, i'm off to rage.

some amusing tidbits

from one of my favorite shanghai news blogs, the shanghaiist:


August 1, 2008
Whatever you do in Beijing, DO NOT wear white socks with black shoes

The Wall Street Journal reports that 4.3 million copies of "an etiquette book outlining rules on good manners and foreign customs, including rules about what not to wear" have been distributed to Beijing residents for use during the Olympics. A snippet: "No matter what, never wear too many colors...especially during formal occasions. When you wear [formal shoes], be sure to wear socks in good condition...socks should be a dark color -- never match black leather shoes with white socks. Older women should choose shoes with heels that aren't too high." Let that be a warning to you.




here's the link to the WSJ article. i found most amusing the guidelines of wearing 3 or less colors at one time. they need to add a sub-topic: only one detail per outfit. you can have ruching, tassels, paint splatter, acid wash, sequins, or drawstrings, but only ONE detail per outfit.

olympics... and outta here

cyn and i joked all the time about how we were going to be as far away from bj as humanly possible when the olympics came. we made jokes about how the government was going to paint the grass green and 'relocate' millions of factory workers by shutting down all the industry in the vicinity to clear the air for the lao wai. can't look bad in front of foreigners. of course, we joked with an air of cynicism, halfway serious.

after a long weekend in bj, where i experienced the dust and grit from the construction sites on every block or so, i am officially concerned. trev and i frequently discuss that shanghai is much better organized as a city - the airport, the way you pay your bills, the traffic, whatever. the metro in beijing alone is cause for alarm. you pay only by walking up to the booth and fighting your way to the front of the crowd, and then correctly shouting the name of the stop you want to go to. they don't speak shit for english, so good luck with that strong northern errrrrrrrrrrrr accent. you have to know where you want to go in terms of metro stop, and you have to say it legibly to the metro worker, who is not a linguist and doesn't give a fuck about you. to enter the metro paid area, you hand your little ticket to the girl standing there. there is usually only one girl. no turnstiles. one person at a time. and they plan to support 2+ million foreigners? i don't know about this.

taxis will be another problem. the city government has started early and hands out pamphlets as you head towards your taxi at the airport taxi line. i haven't read the pamphlet, but i assume it will be relatively useless against taxi drivers who are renowned in the country for being crooked, and who don't speak english, aren't linguists, and don't give a fuck about you. there's also a huge shortage of taxis during rush hour, and bj is a city much like LA: spread out and impossible to navigate without a car. see above if you plan to travel by metro.

lastly, the government is 'cracking down' (and thats no joke in a country like this) on foreigners without visas, and trev warned me that maybe i should start carrying my passport with me while in bj. the police will be randomly stopping foreigners and demanding to see their entry visas. i made some comment about sewing the star of david to my clothes, which of course was a whiner-lame comment for obvious reasons, but i feel a little scared about the liberties with which police can take. if i was white, i would be less worried, but looking asian and not being local presents a lot of issue here. on one hand, if i were alone i probably just wouldn't get stopped for obvious reasons. but with trevor, i might. 100% of chinese believe that i'm being some snotty local who refuses to speak chinese because i have a lao wai boy at my side. they are more baffled when trevor speaks chinese to them and then translates to me in english. you would need to see how white foreigners get treated here vs. local chinese to fully grasp what i'm talking about. once, after checking in at the airport counter in guangzhou, cyn and i headed towards security. a man stopped us and put our bags on a scale, and told us we were carrying overly heavy bags and to go back and check them in. meanwhile (as we're arguing), about 37 lao wai businessmen with huge carry on suitcases go rolling by us, very clearly over the 10 kilo limit. we then go back and check our shit in, and witness the same man who told us there were no earlier flights to ho chi minh (our layover was 6 hours), allow a white couple on a flight to ho chi minh that was leaving in an hour.

this shit is typical.

i'm not just china-bashing (which i do a fair share of, i know). i know greece isn't exactly a model for municipal organization, and athens went off fine. i know bringing their cities up to par is forcing china to engage in a value system that, while considered a figment of the current western paradigm, is largely believed to be the right direction (hello, environmental controls). it is bringing a huge injection of significant architecture to the capital city. (speaking of which, i just flew out of the new wing of the bj airport. very cool. it's totally a copy of hong kong's airport, much like SFO's new international building is a copy of narita, but it's very nice. hk has such an amazing airport, copying it wasn't a bad idea. i insisted on going to the burger king, so trev and i shared a whopper tao can and walked around admiring everything.) it's a boon for the image of the nation and playing a part in driving the skyrocketing economy. but being here, living here, knowing how already difficult and poorly planned so many aspects of the actual day-to-day logistics are, and knowing that china holds that additional complication of a censored media and corrupt government and a lack of infrastructure... i'm just saying that maybe you want to bring your respro, load a crash mandarin course on your ipod, and be very patient.

snow 2008

so those of you outside of china were probably hearing about all of the severe weather that was hitting china the week before and of cny. i've heard that it may snow on occasion here, but it's pretty rare and never sticks.

here are some photos of the snow (from the week before cny) coming down outside of my office, which is located on the bund. the bund area is a stretch of buildings on the huangpu river where a lot of the ritzy boutiques, restaurants, and clubs are located. it's kind of annoying - especially if you work there - but the buildings are heritage architecture and are quite pretty.




out the front window looking at #3 bund



out the back window where some of the smaller buildings (residences) hide behind the grander bund structures