the Beijinger

3,800,000

The number of calls received by the official Olympic hot line (952008) between 9 and 10am yesterday morning. Due to the system being swamped, ticket sales were suspended later that afternoon. Depending on who you trust more, China Daily or BOCOG , the official ticketing website recorded an average of either 200,000 submissions per second (China Daily) or minute (BOCOG) during the first hour of sales. What makes it worse is that of the 9,000 tickets that were sold between 9 and 11am, 98% were through either the website or at Bank of China branches. According to our math, that means that only about 180 tickets were sold over the hotline.

Organizers have apologized for the “technical problems” and have announced that those who managed to secure tickets will receive them and that they will have the problem solved by Nov 5. The official ticket site now looks like this.

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by Shelley Jiang



This being Beijing, sometimes even the best of bars and restaurants survive only a season or two, and what was popular last October has now crumbled into rubble. Sanlitun venues, especially, are as short-lived as flies – and that’s where our newly updated Sanlitun Fall 2007 area guide comes in. We’ll help you avoid embarrassing situations like taking your best out-of-town buddies to a show at the old Yugong Yishan – now a yawning pit swarming with hard hats and cranes – or to a wild night at Brown’s, whose demise was almost as fast as its rise. Read more...

I have a recurring nightmare about being chased around Beijing by Megatron, leader of the Decepticons. He chases me around Nanluogu Xiang, forcing me to duck and weave my way through the hutongs. If only Optimus Prime would come and rescue me … Well, the imaginings that inhabit the dark recesses of my subconscious are soon to become a reality, as Obiwan will be screening a series of short Chinese transformer-style animated films in November as part of the Beijing Film Festival. Of course, the films have nothing to do with the Michael Bay-helmed blockbuster, but it’s still cool to see robots kicking the heck out of each other in a hutong.

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The witching hour approaches: All Hallows’ Eve is October 31st, and in celebration of this haunted holiday, we bring you this grisly collection of traditional Beijing ghost stories we resurrected from our old City Scene vaults.

The Coffin Shop

Master Li ran a successful tailor shop in the western part of old Beijing during the Qing Dynasty. Business was good until the day a coffin shop opened next door. Undeterred, Li kept at his business. Nothing out of the ordinary happened until he heard the door of his shop open late one rainy night. Li was in bed in his room at the back of the shop.

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After numerous announcements that tickets would go on sale in mid-October, the second phase of Olympic ticket sales finally starts tomorrow, October 30. Unlike the first phase, the tickets are being offered on a first come first served basis and aside from tickets to Olympic events, Chinese nationals and foreigners with temporary resident status will also be able to buy tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paralympics. Unfortunately, tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics are not being offered in this round.

Tickets can be bought in one of three ways:

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It’s now 20 years since the first overseas e-mail was sent from China – around which time I would spend hours on end waiting for Bubble Bobble to download onto my Commodore 64. And when I say “download,” it’s worth remembering that I’m not speaking in the Paris-Hilton-video-on-Limewire sense of the word, but rather I was waiting for a cassette tape to load, allowing me an hour of unadulterated, pixilated, platform fun.

This all seems very basic now and it goes without saying that computers have come a long way since the late eighties – indeed, it wasn’t long before I moved on from the innocent fun of navigating a camp bubble-belching dragon across a screen to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis, as I believe it was referred to in the US). The Megadrive and its Nintendo equivalent, the SNES, caused quite a fuss during the mid nineties: “video games will give you epilepsy!” screamed the press (and my parents), but all that really happened is that I didn’t meet girls until a lot later than I should of.

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Yes, Halloween is right around the corner. You know what that means – time to dust off that slutty nurse costume (or was it hutong harlot?) and hit the clubs. We’ve concocted a party guide, divided by both date and personality type.

Who should go: Premature Partiers
When: Friday Oct 26

If you’re jumping the gun, throw on your mask and hit Mingle’s pre-party on October 26. Promotional material promises “sexy nurses with tasty injectors.” Yep. Drink specials before midnight. Ticket price includes one drink. RMB 50. 9pm.

(Mingle is a new bar located on Sanlitun Houjie, under La Maison de Marguerite; 135 0116 7018)

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Picture:
Kris Ryan (second right) and Luga (far right) celebrate happy times with the rest of the Rickshaw/Saddle crowd at the 2007 that’s Beijing Bar and Club Awards.

A large number of partygoers (and the police) turned up to The Saddle last Friday, to see the famed Mexican restaurant/bar ride off into the sunset for the last time. Or so we thought.

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When water wars and water shortage pose a major global problem, selling water can mean big business. It was with this frame of mind that Norwegians Ole Christian Sandberg and Christopher Harlem started the company VOSS Artesian Water from Norway. Launched in 2001, VOSS seeks to combine a unique and innovative design with that utmost human necessity: water.

They've also combined their design with that utmost human desire: status. When carrying around your RMB 120 cocktail from Lan is socially unacceptable (during yoga class, for example, or strolling mid-morning through the sterile wonderland of The Place), you can make sure that your liquid accessory does your salary justice. With prices estimated to start at RMB 55 for a 375ml bottle, your daily dose of VOSS could pay for the schooling of three migrant children.

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How did you come to devote all of your time to rescuing cats?

In 2001, I found a little kitten outside my home with a broken tail. I brought her home and named her Sweet Dumpling. Later, I found another cat and brought her home too. Her name was Cola, and my mother was very annoyed that I had introduced a second cat into my home. But Cola was very friendly and loveable, and soon endeared herself to my mother. Over the next couple years, I rescued ten or 20 cats, and friends and family helped me foster them while I left to work in Canada. I had been in Canada for seven months when my mother called and told me that Cola was very sick.

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It’s no surprise that Beijing’s population is growing, but the figures are still astounding: experts have predicted that by 2020, 20 million people will live in the capital. The Peking University report (by way of the China Daily) also reveals that come 2020, 12 percent of the population will be “considered aged,” while younger people will make up 13 percent of the city.

Meanwhile, the birthrate in the capital has been outpacing the death rate in recent years, particularly in this, the year of the Golden Pig (which, as it turns out, is actually the year of the Earthen Pig). Fifty years ago, around the founding of the PRC, the city’s population was just under 5 million.

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I was given certain tantalizing clues, but there was no certainty that I would find the book that I was looking for. And I had to have the book today.

My first stop was the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Wangfujing. I went in and it was a surprise, as I found riches that I had not been anticipating. Yan Geling, D. H. Lawrence and friends were all bouncing about, but no matter how hard I searched, I couldn't find the one that I was looking for. Wordsworth Classics were in abundance, and the carpet was printed with the logo of Penguin: Everything was set up just right, making the disappointment an even bigger mockery. There was no Doris Lessing, either, despite her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature this month!

I had tried the Beijing Bookworm the night before, but I walked out feeling the failure as it was absent from the shelves and would take three weeks for it to arrive on order.

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It is hard not to mythologize the uncanny CCTV building: that Martian migrant workers are responsible, that there will be an invisible crutch supporting the central overhang, that it is merely a hologram — all falsities, as far as we can tell. But ever dedicated to sifting truth from truthiness, tbjblog will now delve into two recent CCTV rumors (to match the two towers of course)...

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Dewar’s built a castle between buildings A and B at Jianwai SOHO. They call it “Academy of Whiskey.” Hostesses stand stolidly on either side of the gates with stern expressions as unshakable as the Queen’s Guards. A bunch of guys in kilts are inside. Some wear tartan patterns, and others don solid black skirts like a waiter’s apron. Models strut and pose in the Academy. There’s a couple bars and a classroom with three long screens curling around it like a poor man’s IMAX. This is the newest drink promotion in town. It’s pretty extravagant.

Dewar’s came late to the China game. Competitors Johnnie Walker and Chivas beat them to the punch by a decade. Chivas in particular employed genius marketing – mixing tea with whiskey to mask the flavor for uninitiated palates. As even Dewar’s PR people acknowledge, "Now, whiskey is a fashion statement." The castle in Jianwai SOHO is Dewar’s first stage of combat with the current giants. The operating phrase is this: “With knowledge comes good taste.” The guy who said it was wearing a kilt.

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Time for your weekly reminder that Tuesdays are half-price days at cinemas around town. Take that to heart, because local movie prices are vastly out of proportion with Beijing salaries, and it’s rather silly to venture out to a first-run movie theater on any other day.

If you make it out tonight, we have a few suggestions:

Ratatouille

This Pixar production following the adventures of a French rat with a gift for the gastronomical opened in Beijing this past Friday. The film got rave reviews when it first hit theaters in the US early this summer. Read reviews here and see the trailer here.

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Pandas are perceived as among the cutest and cuddliest of creatures on earth, but like any large, territorial animal, they can inflict serious damage when provoked or startled. Consider 240-pound Gu Gu, one of the Beijing zoo's main attractions who was last featured in the news after being bitten by a drunk tourist last September.

The hapless herbivore is in the news again today, this time unfortunately, for doing some biting of his own - on the mangled leg of a 15-year-old teenage boy who startled the animal when he jumped in its pen and tried to hug him.

Read the full story here.

Links and Sources:
AP: Beijing Zoo Panda Bites Teenage Boy
Shanghai Daily: Panda bites scavenger in Beijing Zoo

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"We won’t be coming back," grumbled one Dutch runner soon after he crossed the finish line of yesterday's Beijing Marathon. It seems that he and 49 of his compatriots who had flown out especially for the race were disappointed by mile after mile of expressways and construction sites around the outskirts of the city. Having just run the race myself, I could see their point: the promotional material promised participants the best of the capital's "modern and historical" aspects but, in reality, runners were treated to little more than the best of Beijing's wastelands.

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From defensive wall, to Disneyland-esque playground (Badaling), to controversial rave location, the Great Wall of China has gone through many different incarnations since its initial construction in 221 BC. The most unusual, perhaps, took place on Friday, when Karl Lagerfeld and Fendi turned it into what could arguably be described as the longest catwalk in the world.

Set against the backdrop of the Juyongguan Great Wall, the show was bound to be a striking and impressive affair. Held on the ancient structure itself, spotlights lit the catwalk as 88 models strutted its length. Organizers were blessed with crystal clear skies on the night, although the timing did present the problem that the open-air event was, in the words of our mole, “freezing.” Fortunately hot chocolate and brandies were on hand to ward off the winter chill.

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