Big Statements and Little Discoveries

We still haven’t checked out the Olympics sites, which are supposed to amazing architecturally, but I did go to the new Capital Museum. It’s less than a year old, and really a gorgeous building. It’s a little lacking in “wow” art and artifacts, which reminds me of the Getty, but I did really like some aspects of the museum. For one, it’s huge, which allows them to display whole hutongs. They had a cool exhibit of all sorts of different kinds of gates which lead into traditional courtyard houses, and explanations of how they represented different status levels. They had a reproduction of a traditional Beijing opera house, complete with all the two story seating and a two story stage. It really gave you the feeling of being there.

Beijing makes lots of big statements, like the museum, but there’s also so much little stuff to discover. Peter’s colleagues have been taking him to all sorts of hole-in-the-wall yummy places for lunch. They took us to a Hunan-style banquet lunch at a beautiful restaurant in some nondescript building the other day where we had course after course of wonderful food, and Peter had too much erguotou, a lethal Chinese very high proof rice alcohol. They were impressed by his ability to drink at lunch, but he definitely paid for it later.