The olive italian food

Guess what is that? It is a bottle for olive oil and vinegar. This is my first time seeing this 2-in-1 liquid bottle :)

One thing I would missed about Beijing is the food. There are just so many restaurant around, with more variety of foods, eastern, western, european, italian, french, russian, japanese, belgian, deutch, korean, thai, singaporean, indonesian, (of course we seldom eat thai/msian/singapore/indonesean food here :D ), vietnamese, turkish and etc.

There is a restaurant called 'the olive'. It is quite nice decorated. The picture on the wall are specials made up a relaxing dining environment.



Here we go for food :D



For soup, we have the mushroom soup and pumpkin soup. The pumpkin soup taste is very good, natural pumpking sweetness, no added cream and thick. The mushroom soup is a bit localized we think.

I always like to try risotto, and the pumpkin risotto is just unique and enlighten my taste bud. Different from the normal seafood/mushroom risotto always appears on the menu. The pesto pasta taste good as well. The chicken sandwich is okay, fresh and not disappointing.

The New Orlean cheese cake at the left is the best among the three. The tiramisu cheese cake taste like normal cheese + chocolate layer cake, and it doesn't has any alcohol taste at all. The blueberry cheese cake at the bottom is not in our favor that night :)




After dinner, the rain stop, which make some trees body looks even darker and nice looking scenery.

Time flies

I read from somewhere, life is like a roll of toilet paper, the older you are, the faster it rolls.

Well, 2.5 months in Beijing will be a memorable one. Next week this time I should be resting in my room at Penang :)

See you soon friend!

From 65th floor of Beijing

If you been to Komtar Tower Palace restaurant before, this is no surprise for you, except the view are different. Here in Beijing at 65th floor altitude, more matches box can be seen compared to that in Penang :)

I learnt a trick, when going to such high class places, speaking English is probably better as I am in casual jeans wear. Unfortunately it was hazy, although from ground we saw the sky was clear, but when we are at top, it was hazy at the ground.



The bird claw building from top (in the center of the picture).





The food:



Unique bread taste with the sauce. The blue cheese crab is famous and it taste special.

The main course are BBQ beef rib and chicken breast. Both taste good and tender texture. Surprisingly the portion is huge too.



Forgot to mention, a 700ml of Voss brand still water from Norway cost RMB 90 :D

国家大剧院之旅 A tour to National Center for the Performing Arts

I am a lazy person, sometimes :p so I will just use 'national theater' to represent National Center for the Performing Arts.

It is just next to Tian An Men West. I saw this egg when I was at Jing Shan park also. It can be easily reach by MRT, and buses. Very convenient public transport system here, especially if compared to that of my motherland :)

If you ever heard people said it is very pack inside MRT, let me give you a chance to see it.


I was one of the 'sardin' inside the coach :D

This is the entrance to the theatre.



To go in, we need to walk pass a 'underwater path way'. Look at picture below, will you guess it looks a bit like swimming pool? This theater is surrounded by water. The swimming lane like area is some glass to let some sunlight to go into the walkway. We need to walk pass this underwater walk way to get into the building.






This is the walk way inside the building.



Unfortunately I do not have much chance to take picture. This building is in oval shape, with one big hall in the middle, then another two halls at each end. The left is the center hall we watched Red Cliff :) There were some exhibition about the theatre, with the theatre proposal model, history and arts behind. I learnt from there the ceiling are constructed by high quality brazilian wood, looks unique eh.



Another uniqueness is the floor/wall tiles. There are few different kind of marble being used. I forgot those name :p There are three types of marble in picture below, 2 on the floor and one for the wall. There are few more which I just didn't have chance to take a shot :)

Hail

It was raining heavily yesterday and today, both started at 5pm.

This is the first time I experienced hail. We was in the taxi, and suddenly heard a lot of sounds things hit the taxi from front and top. I was puzzled why are there so many 'big sand/stone' on the taxi and why it comes from top on the highway. After IV explained only we realized it is hail. I didn't really see the hail as it was raining heavily, but I will remember this experience. Cool isn't it, as long as no injury and not harmful to the car at that time.

北京京剧 - 赤壁 Peking Opera - Red Cliff

Some said if you ever have a chance to visit Beijing, try to watch one or two Peking Opera. Well I almost forgot about this. Luckily SH bought this show ticket, and then I just follow :D We bought two tickets online, RMB 200 each, discounted to RMB 150 each.

We reached National Center of Performing Arts around 6pm, although the show starts on 7.30pm. There were some exhibition inside which we would like to go through.

At the building entrance, there were security guards using bar code scanner to scan ticket. Then we had to put our camera/food/drinks at the locker service counter. After that, we need to go through the scanning, like in airport. The security checking is really tight.

There were two exhibition at that time. Click on respective language title for URL.
1) 《光色音韵——袁运甫20世纪60—70年代的绘画艺术》 20th Century Modern Painting Exhibition focusing on Yuan,YuanFu.
I do not really understand paintings, but in my opinion, his painting is unique in such a way that the color he used is so light, but yet it is still so clear after almost half century. He can draw a lot of things, portrait, industrial scenery, scenic view, and a lot more. Some paintings are available from the mandarin URL.

2) “今夜无人入睡”—国家大剧院歌剧节主题艺术展 NESSUN DORMA ---- Opera Art Exhibition
A very good exhibition for opera lovers :) Well, I am not familiar with it but nice to see some old poster/sketch/costume on opera e.g. Turandot and Traviata.

To fill up the stomach quickly, we went for sandwiches for dinner. As expected, not cheap but luckily it is fresh :)

Around 10 minutes before the show start, there were bell sound to remind audience. This is a 3 floor opera hall. The hall is design well that although we are at 3rd floor but every row here can see the stage and also the orchestra in front of the stage. There were a mix of young and old audience. The aunty sit next to me sometimes sing very softly with the opera actor. It started on time, this is another thumb up for the system here, always on time :)

If you do not mandarin opera, don't worry, both English and Mandarin subtitles were provided! There were quite a few westerner audience, and I am sure they can enjoy the performance as well :) Of course there are advantages if you can read Mandarin. The subtitle not only display the actual sentence, but also describe the singing type 唱板, for example 慢板，散板，二黄散板，四黄散板。

If you watched the movie Red Cliff 1 and Red Cliff 2 before, it will be even easier for you to understand the story :) The details is a little bit different but the outline is almost the same. In brief, here are the stories:

Act 1铜雀兴兵 Fire the war


Cao cao forced the Emperor to fire the war. Cao cao is not in the picture. The backdrop looks exactly the same, will the emperor on second floor, doors and 2 big pillar.

Act 2 舌战群儒 Sun Quan's government debating on war



Liu Bei visited Sun Quan to propose for union. The governors debating if to war or white flag. Some scene is funny and will make you laugh :D

Act 3 结盟定计 Deciding to war and planning


Zhou Yu and Xiao Qiao in the scene. After Sun Quan decided for war, Liu Bei and Zhou Yu both has the same idea to use fire in war.

Act 4 泛舟借箭 Borrow arrows



Liu Bei use some trick to get a lot of arrows from Cao Cao's troop. The boat is amazing isn't it. In fact, the stage is designed in such a way that there are 6 horizontal 'belts' on it, so in the show, the boat sailed in from left to right or right to left. That's not it, the belt also can go up and down, which can lift up things or sink it. This is a modernize opera show with latest technology. I like it :D

Before the arrow scene, I tried to imagine how are they going to show Cao Cao's troop archered the arrow to Liu Bei's boat. Look at picture below, those arrow are static and the slow it down from the ceiling, with the arrow as backdrop, the scene is really amazing and artistic, a portion of it is shown at the picture but you may imagine they 'hang' the arrow accross the whole stage in arch shape.



Act 5 备战借风 Borrow east wind



Pic above show the troop is practicing for the war. Then Liu Bei borrow the wind for fire war.

Act 6 火烧赤壁 The war



The war. In this act, more traditional opera action were perform e.g. tumbling/handspring, opera typical spear rotation. It is a mix of tradition art movement with modern technology scene setup to make the performance interesting. At the end of the show, some parts of the ship above will 'break' a little bit to show it is burnt and broken (Like that of Universal Studio's Underwater live performance's ship).

In between the act, they took very short time to setup the backdrop.

After the show ended, we quickly go to locker to get back our camera and take some shot. Unfortunately I didn't manage to take a lot of shots, as the security guard is really tight that they politely and systematically chase visitor out. I will share those picture in another blog post. This post is long enough to read :D

Some information can be found from
(E) http://www.chncpa.org/n457779/n457834/n516566/2270973.html
(C) http://www.chncpa.org/n16/chibi3/web/2-1.html

Well, I was wondering if Malaysia performing center at KLCC is able to handle similar show. Anyway, if there will be chance to visit the KLCC symphonic hall once in the future :)

KFC in Beijing

www.kfc.com.cn

Before get started, please be reminded that fast food is probably not healthy, take it as luxury in occasion :)

One thing special about Beijing KFC is egg tart appears in the menu, original (RMB 5) or blueberry (RMB 5.50) :D





I like their egg tart better than chicken meat. The chicken meat taste is localized which for me is too salty. The corn tasted so so, not really fresh. The other is fish seaweed roll.

I have not tasted all KFC in the world, but I would missed Malaysia KFC's chicken especially hot and spicy flavour!