Sights and Sounds of Chinese New Year in Beijing

The first day of Chinese New Year was crazy! Starting at 5pm, fireworks lit up the Beijing Skyline and didn't stop till 2am... absolutely the biggest fireworks show I have ever seen or experienced. Every street corner in Beijing, people were shooting fireworks into the air and lighting fire crackers on the ground. Remember the TV images you saw of the Iraqi invasion and all the tracer fire going up into the sky?

Visualize it, now multiple that 10 fold.

(These videos don't do what I said justice, but they'll give a small taste of the action)


On the street


Outside the 26th floor window!

Random Pics...

I'll look out for funnier ones... promise.

Tonino would be really upset...

The outfits were crap...

If you were dyslexic, this would make sense...

Finally after a 106 day drought...

Some long-awaited precipitation in the form of the white stuff... apparently it's been the driest winter in the last 60 years. This light blanketing of snow is most welcome, especially in China's breadbasket.

Literally freezing in Beijing

It's been pretty cold in Beijing, temperatures in the day rarely rise above freezing and at night it goes down to negative double digits. Truthfully, -10º isn't that bad... it only gets bad when there's any sort of wind, that's when the windchill factor kicks in and it hurts. By all accounts, this has been an extremely mild winter in Beijing, I keep hearing from the locals how bad it was last year.

But darn it, it hasn't snowed yet...

Frozen fountain outside Solana mall, one of our favorite hangouts... the mall, not the fountain


This is what sub-zero temperatures will do, even to flowing water

Frozen Chao Yang Park Lake, equally frozen photographer and a warm monkey...

Close up... dirty frozen thick ice, do note the bubbles in the frozen ice (at the bottom right), it certainly shows the thickness of the ice, by my reckoning the ice is easily two feet thick

Our apartment facing Chao Yang Park

Chao Yang Park, apparently the largest park in Beijing, it's 2.8km long and 1.5km wide. Our apartment, Palm Springs (yes, cheesy and we have fake palms in the lobby), is directly opposite the south entrance of the park offering an unblocked view of the whole park and surroundings.

Chao Yang Park, note the 'lake' on the left and the amusement park in the centre. Currently the lake is frozen... and in the mornings you can see tough little old ladies practising their tai chi moves in sub-zero temperatures.

The living room, the landlord was pretty generous with the sofas... and nothing else.

Dining area, not much storage space in the apartment, so we had to do an Ikea run for the bookshelves...

5 pitches in 4 weeks...

This blog is not going as planned, looks like updates will be few and far between. The workload is HUGE, trying to turn this office around will be tough and it starts with getting new clients, so we're in serious pitch mode. Publicis Beijing isn't Beacon Communications with all the trappings, secretaries and perks... no more Singapore Airlines business class, fancy hotels and fancy meals.

It's back to basics here... Air China, tea lady and a tic-tac.

Even the office is pretty plain and bare, very utilitarian.

We do have high ceilings...

...and not much else.

at least I have a room, note the imitation Ikea desk...

Wish the Sashimi luck, he's actually got to work for a living... damn.

Turning colder...

The past couple of weeks have been lovely, sunny with the highs in the lower to mid teens, since the weekend it's taken a turn, today's high is around 7 degrees. Looks like winter's coming. I suppose we shouldn't complain, the locals mentioned last year's first snowfall happened on the 1st of November... brrr.

It definitely ain't Tokyo.

Been in Beijing since July

Howdy folks, it's been a while since the ol' Sashimi has reported in... since January! Well a lot has happened since then but the end result is the whole family is now based in Beijing.

All that time away from the blog, I managed to have a few months off from work too – highly recommended, but only of if you’re aged above forty, otherwise you’re too damn young to ‘take a break’.

The ol' Sashimi has finally left the Land of the Rising Sun and is now in the Middle Kingdom, not to be confused with Middle Earth, though there certainly are some Orc-kish looking creatures here displaying Orc-like behavior and mannerisms. It’s fairly easy to avoid the Orcs, when summer was in full bloom and temperatures reaching the mid 30’s during the day, you tend to smell them way before you see them.

Having been here in the capitol of the Middle Kingdom, Beijing, for a couple of months, I have managed to dodge death several times while crossing the street, been caught in a two hour traffic jam (which promises to be a regular occurrence), eaten the meat of an animal I cannot identify, given a few kuai to an female Orc beggar just to get away from her and been scolded by the toilet cleaner for entering the bog while she was cleaning it… the culture shock continues.

The office is just as interesting, I have the privilege of working with an Ant, a River, a Moja, a Coco, a Cherry, a Ding, a Bright, a Sun and a Fox, colorful names for a bunch of colorful characters, though I’ve yet to meet the legendary Pubic Ha from the Hong Kong office. Productivity in China must be at an all time high, with the banning of western social networking sites like Facebook, Blogspot (where this blog is hosted), Youtube and tons more, what else can the regular office worker do during office hours but, work, what a novel idea. We finally updated our systems in the office and now route through our Hong Kong server, so no more blocking!

That's pretty much the whole gist of things, Mei and Nicole are well and truly settled in, things are moving along and I'm going to try and revive the blog and provided periodic updates of our ongoing adventures in Middle Earth... er, I mean the Middle Kingdom.

The Big News is... We're coming home!!

Back to Singapore!

We'll be heading home for good middle of March... back to sanity and fishball noodles! While it's been a pretty good run here in the Land of the Rising Sun, all good (snigger) things must come to an end!

So the Fried Sashimi Blog will probably come to an end, but who knows, it might live on in another form.

Anyway, this won't be the last entry, we still have a couple of months here, I'm sure something worth blogging will happen.

Till then, over and out!

I know, I know...

I've been really lax in updating my blog... but big news coming up, real soon!


Promise.