What today ate we?: April 2010

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Pott(er)y!

We went to a pottery festival with Amanda on Sunday. Who knew that overalls could be this cute?

Amanda was quite good at making pottery, but A and F really sucked.

Afterwards, we went for lunch. Amanda is a food pornographer, too, these days.

We had lots of veggies.

And, since the abalone was on special (10 kuai instead of 240) we also had some seafood.

We found out later that perhaps it is better not to order seafood at a 95% discount.

In Dutch, F sometimes refers to going to the restroom as "claying" but there was none of that after our discount luncheon.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Sometimes China makes us angry. Very angry. Because people lie and change the rules all the time. And this can be really annoying, as we have explained in previous posts. It is annoying us right now because we are trying to get money to go to a conference, and new rules appear all the time. We suspect we know the reason.

You all should be annoyed too, because we are not the only ones being lied to.

Yeah yeah, Beijing does all it can do to fight pollution. But can we really deny Chinese people the right to have cars when all Westerners do have them? No, we cannot. And hence Beijing is a polluted city. It is not the government's fault, it is just because there are so many people in Beijing...

Yeah, right! Behold this photo.

It has not been this clean in months. Maybe not since Obama was in town. We are not aware of special regulations taking cars of the road.

However, we are aware of this upcoming visit of Sarkozy.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Feelings Are Slippery

Sanne and Wanching came to visit Beijing, so it was time to visit 798 yet again. Here are some impressions:

As usual, UCCA had a very interesting installation. This is called Feelings Are Facts:

It consisted of a large space filled with mist and lighted in these beautiful colors.

A better name may have been "Feelings Are Slippery", as the floor was very slippery and the space was not level (by design). A came out with sticky jeans, because she ventured too far into the world of art.

Tony Ousler's exhibition was still there, too:

Friday, April 23, 2010

Self critique

We are sorry we have let our dear readers down with our recent lightposting.

We are even more sorry that we let the poor people at ChinaUnicom down. Even though we believe we were being harmonious citizens when we paid them for a whole year of internet service in advance, it was inexcusable that we subsequently forgot to pay our fixed telephone line fee. And even though we still had more than 40 euros left in credits for our internet service, we completely understand they had to disconnect us from the interwebz because we were 7 euros behind in paying our telephone fees. We apologize sincerely for our stupidity.

Fortunately, today is our weekly mental health day, which is spent working at Cafe Konstanz. The owners of Cafe Konstanz apparently do pay all fees when they are due, because the internet here is in top shape. So we can finally update our dear readers about recent developments:

It has been cold and rainy here.

Also, spring cleaning has begun.

Such exciting newses.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Bah!

We finally went to Brasserie Flo, but were extremely disappointed. It's hard to believe we went to same place as these people.

The food was bland and bad, very bad. The soup was flavorless and watery, the spinach that came with the pork tasted like seafood, the pork was on the verge of being dry and the mashed potatoes were cold.

Even the dessert was just not appetizing: the rosemary tasted boiled (chlorophyll), the pineapple was badly baked and cut (see the brown knots that were not removed on the pineapple below) and the coconut marshmallows were disgusting.

It's been quite a while since I did not finish my plate in a French restaurant --- today I did not finish any of my dishes.

The only positive point was the wine: Chateau Cabannieux 2004.