Dispatch from Beijing

After a good flight we arrived at lunchtime in Beijing Airport. We were just able to glimpse the outline of the new Norman Foster designed terminal in out transit bus, but couldn’t quite see if it was open and running yet. We can however report that Starbucks has now arrived and is fully open at the entrance to the airport.

We headed straight to our hotel in the Chaoyang district and after a brisk unpack striaght out for lunch at the Jackpot, a Hong Kong style cafe right next to our hotel. As the food is good and they have Wi-Fi we elected this as our Beijing office for the trip.

We then set off to the Dongcheng district to meet producer Cheung Fai. He’s just finished producing Ibsen’s ‘The Master Builder’ with the renowned theatre director Lin Zhaohua. He is very keen to help us make 100 Words happen in China and not just Beijing. We had a wonderful brainstorming meeting discussing 100 Words in theatre, film and dance. We also decided to look for a real office in Beijing (any ideas please email us).

Our brainstorming coffee at the Waiting for Godot Coffee and Bar (the first time I’ve had delicious real proper coffee in China) turned into dinner in a fish restaurant on ‘Ghost Street’. It’s a long road of restaurants. Ours was packed full of people. There wasn’t really any table space left so we were almost sitting in the kitchen. At the entrance there were fish tanks and buckets of shell fish and basically, whatever we pointed at got cooked. We pointed at a variety of things, some we recognised and and some we didn’t. Most of the dishes came steamed or in a very simple sauce. The prawns were in a chilli tomato based sauce and again, this was our first time tasting anything tomato-y in Beijing. The razor fish in a brown piquant sauce were also very tasty. By 9pm our brains were feeling frazzled, so we headed back to the hotel confident that the success of our first meeting boded well for the rest of the trip.