Wheels of Addis

We work up early in order to visit the factory making one of Jean-Pierre’s sofa designs. It was a tough start as we spent the morning testing, analysing and prodding cushions. 

Today was freezing and smoggy. The sun never really came through strongly and the moon was orange in its zenith. The smog, the traffic, the endless tower blocks, and concrete; Beijing really felt like a grey metropolis.

The factory invited us for lunch and took us to a shopping complex where the best ‘hot pot’ restaurant in Beijing is found. It didn’t look all that much, hidden away as it was on the top floor of a mall, and yet it was hugely popular. A massive restaurant packed to the rafters with hungry diners. 

The hot pot itself was gorgeous - and boy was there a lot of it. We had beef, lamb, pork’s blood, quails’ eggs, fish balls, mushrooms, daikon, lotus root, tofu, bean curd noodles - the list goes on. 

At the end of the meal - just when we were really fit to burst - out came a man who employed incredible acrobatics to prepare our noodles for us. Dough flying over our heads and round us like skipping rope.

And then we ate some more.

Our final stop for the day was 798, which is the art district of Beijing. It’s like the Tate Modern multiplied fifty times over. A whole borough dedicated to contemporary art, photography and design. Galleries were housed in beautiful Bauhaus factories and the surrounding area was industrial, dusty and hyper trendy.

People from remote parts of China gathered here to sell tribal art or black market art books. We encountered this kid and his mother selling pelts and trinkets on the side of the road.

We spent a long time wandering around looking at some great (and not so great) art. It reminded me of being in Berlin’s Mitte or London’s East End: here too you can spend hours hopping from gallery to gallery without ever getting bored. I briefly forgot we were even in China.

The traffic on the way home brought us crashing back to reality as we were quite far out from the city centre, and cab after cab refused to take us back to our hotel. They couldn’t quite work out where it was on the map. So we stood on the side of the road wincing as we were rejected by cab drivers time and again. It’s easy to forget how big this city is until you realise even taxis are unlikely to know more than a portion of it well. 

Tomorrow, we’ll be back in our district and re-exploring Beijing’s heritage, which will make a nice contrast to today’s adventures.