04 Mar 10

Yesterday I had a nice thought while passing this place: ‘it’s impossible for me to get lost in BJ; since I don’t have a clue where I am to begin with’.
I found it a very comforting thought, so now I can wonder around for 3 months without worrying too much about directions.

Stairs in the Dongdan Sports Centre swimming pool. Totally Yayoi Kusama going geometric. The sign is -I guess- literally translated out of Chinese, you see that a lot. This one is almost poetic. The pool is great, at least twice the size of our petite 25meter pools. So now there are no excuses for not following my training schedule.

03 Mar 10

798 is the old bomb & ammunition factory area turned into an art district. Although it stills hosts some nice galleries and museum (UCCA) it’s really commercial nowadays. I was passing by this morning and found out it’s also very popular with newly weds for taking bridal pictures.

They call it ‘walking your bird’ (forgot the chinese name). I’ve seen men before bringing their birds to an outdoor game of checkers but I’ve never seen them hang on trees in a group.

24 Feb 10

For the Dutch Cultural Media Fund (Mediafonds) book assignment I had to do some hard core photo selecting. 15 projects with numerous fine pics. As they say: kill your darlings. These weird stills are among the unfortunate ones that didn’t make it.

22 Feb 10

So it finally looks like winter is over. This morning I woke up at 6.30 by the singing of a lonely bird! Only nice thing about winter are these fine mittens made by old Lithuanian women. Jan gave me the brown with pink ones. Funny thing is they kind of are ambidextrous since the thumb is in the middle of the mitten. So it always feels a bit funny when you wear hem. I have a habit of losing gloves but with these beauties I make sure not to leave them behind.

15 Feb 10

I was making my iPhone China ready. Downloading apps as DH Dictionary so at least one of us speaks Mandarin. I came across this picture I took in Lijang of some sort of message board in a store. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera with me at the time and the next day we had an early flight back to Shenzhen. Looks great all these colored notes.