Cigarettes and Alcohol

After my first game of squash for well over a year with new partner Greg, we went down the pub to put back the pounds we'd lost in the game. My nearest is the Black Sun Bar. It's not the best in Beijing (for others, see this post) and I can't think of a less attractive entrance. But you can't argue with a 5 minute stroll from home. Inside is OK: the usual footie on the telly, snooker, table-football, reasonable prices, decent food and there's even a summer patio. The down side is the smoke. And not just cigarettes: we left when the next door table lit up cigars. 

Art

Monday evening art class. The girls' drawing and painting skills are coming on. They switch from drawing & shading cubes & cylinders, to painting colourful still lifes (lives?) of fruit. Here's Alyssa's today. They get a lot of help from the teacher, but I'm pretty impressed by this. Naomi's too. 

Despite being an Arts Manager, I don't remember being very enthused about art in school; didn't even take O-level. And I don't think we even touched on art history. On the other hand, brother Patrick was very good - at both. Funny how things turn out.

Crammed

Day of domesticity, then dinner with Ken, our Japanese friend who's on a business visit. Nice to catch up on news of the family, including twins, Tatsuya and Chihiro, who went to school with our two in Bangkok. Like most Japanese children, they now supplement their regular school with juku ('cram') school four nights a week. Plus homework. For both. 
"Lucky you weren't born in Japan!", we joked to our two on the way home.
"We were!", they replied.

Ping Pong

Deep in the bowels of our tower block, there is a table tennis room. I'd never seen it before, but if you ask reception, they'll give you a key and point you down a darkened corridor in B3, and there it is.
Patrick and I used to play quite regularly as teenagers. In fact we used to be in a team with another boy from my class (Nick Trend, now the Daily Telegraph's travel editor). I think we were called Chichester Youth Club but were based in Hunston village hall. My mum would take the three of us to matches in the Chichester area. I don't think we were that good, but it was a proper league and everything.
It's tempting to think that China invented table tennis, but actually, like a lot of sports, it originated in England in the 1880s. Still, the Chinese are masters of the game. You can often see tables set up in parks, like this one in Urumuqi.
So anyway, Naomi and I had a game. She's got a long way to go - our longest rally was six - but it was fun teaching her. 

Under Construction

Such is the pace of expansion of Shanghai's cultural infrastructure that today my meetings took place in one museum that's just opened, another that's just about to, an office under chaotic renovation and a concert hall that ten years ago was moved 65 metres to the left to make way for a flyover. 
First up was a meeting with Wei Wang, the charming, killer-heeled wife of billionaire investor Liu Yiqian. The couple are proud owners of a fantastic Chinese art collection, lovingly amassed over 20 years. Better to show it off than keep it private, so they've built the beautiful state-of-the-art Long Museum, currently the largest private museum in China, out in Pudong. The opening selection features blue-chip Chinese contemporary art on the ground floor; Modernist works from the first half of the 20th century plus heroic, all-smiling revolutionary oil paintings from 1949-79 on the second (my favourites - it was like looking at history not art); and traditional works and ancient artefacts on the third... all in a gorgeously minimal Zhing Song-designed cube. And get this, they're building another, bigger museum downtown which will open later this year. With a Monet show. 

From there to Shanghai Concert Hall, the grand 1930s building which was literally picked up and moved a bit to make way for a flyover, then restored. In May they're going to present a weekend version of the South Bank Centre's The Rest is Noise festival (itself worthy of a post, but I'll make do with a link). 
The rest of the afternoon was spent talking about film - first with Shanghai International Film Festival in their noisy, under-renovation office; then wearing a yellow hat in the under-construction Shanghai Film Museum, which will be impressive when it's finished. This is the kind of day that makes my job such a joy.

Air Bridges at Lunch

Nursing a hangover, managed to get through a meeting with Shanghai's Cultural Bureau, a thank you lunch for some UK Now sponsors, a couple of internal meetings, and a long session with Ogilvy on turning our temporary festival website into a permanent non-festival site. At the lunch I sat next to a Chinese chap from HSBC who turned out to be Hertfordshire born & bred, didn't speak Mandarin and was called Calvin. He told me the story of how HSBC cornered the market on air-bridge advertising. It wasn't some well-thought through, year-long piece of marketing strategy; it was from a lunch, just like the one we were having.

Paris, Shanghai

To Shanghai. Internal meetings all afternoon, then dinner with the team - after which Leigh, Matt and I carried on drinking in a tiny French bar. We could have been in Paris. Zinc tables, newspapers on sticks, colonial concession architecture, a decent Sauvignon Blanc, European clientele and a reassuringly rude proprietor. (For the record, there are about 200,000 foreigners living in Shanghai, that's double the number in Beijing, but still only 1% of the population).