Love In the Polluted Beijing Air

In Beijing, there are many things in the air. Pollution is the main component, but there is also love!

It was Valentine's Day in Beijing! As good fortune would have it, Valentine's Day fell on a Friday, and so we had a great opportunity to go out and enjoy some culture.
After weighing multiple options, I decided to opt for a home cooked meal. I made sure to bring home some roses, nicely arranged and sprayed with water at pickup to make them look like a picture on pinterest. Most of the water droplets had sadly disappeared on my walk home.
For dinner, our fried rice was on the menu, a dish we had a long time to work on improving and working out details. It tasted great.






Now it was time for the excitement of the evening. I had ordered some tickets to a Beijing Acrobats show. This show was obviously was tailored to foreigners as the website was all English.
Arriving at the theater, I was contacted by phone by the lady who had our tickets. The system is that there is a proxy who you give money to and who then goes to buy tickets at a reduced price from the ticket office. These people are apparently able to get tickets for a cheaper price than mere mortals. Either that or this is just an elaborate way of ripping off tourists. The latter is probably more likely.
My trust was tested when I handed the proxy lady my money for the tickets. She told me to wait here while she went and bought the tickets. Then she disappeared. This was a lot like on our trip to Guilin, when our travel guide disappeared right after we gave her our money for the tour. But just like in Guilin, the lady returned a short while after and gave me two tickets. Trust restored!
As people do who plan in advance, we had arrived about 45 minutes early. This time we spent talking and sitting in the theater building, which also featured a movie theater. There we saw a Spanish sign advertising the fourth Shrek movie, which came out years ago. And in Spanish. In a acrobat theater in Beijing. Some things we will never quite understand.

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The show itself was amazing, but only sparsely attended. Next to us sat a retired pediatrician from Texas, I think, his wife and a Chinese friend. On learning that I was from Germany, the man could not stop telling us how much he enjoyed German beer. He was somewhat of a beer tourist, an old veteran to the Oktoberfest, which I have never attended, and well versed in all kinds of beer. He told us stories of how he, on military service in Germany, broke away from an army run of sorts and went to a bar with a friend. There they ate and drank heartily. The story was much more fleshed out, but I don't remember the details. The main message is that this man would do anything for good beer and finds his true happiness in it. He also informed me that there is a place in Germany where you can take a bath in beer and he is dead set on finding that place and bathing in German beer. I left the conversation with the feeling that if there is anything I can be proud of as a German, it should definitely be beer.
But there was more to the show than our beer-loving seat neighbor. The acrobats were amazing! The feats itself were standard acrobat show fare, including juggling acts, 12 girls riding on one bicycle and various strength and balance feats. I have a picture of another favorite act, which I don't know what to call. Look at the picture.

It involved rotations and one of the acrobats doing jump rope jumps while running on the outside of the iron ring. It was quite impressive and him catching his feet in the rope and almost falling made it all the more exciting... Another impressive feat, and the final one of the night, involved multiple motorcycles (large ones) to drive around in a really not that big metal sphere. I can't remember how many they got in at the end, but every time I thought that there could not possibly be another motorcycle in there, another one pulled up to join the fun. Very thrilling.

Thus concluded a fun night! Valentine's Day was a success!
 We left the empty theater feeling very impressed with what we saw. It is remarkable what skill is shown by these acrobats and thinking about the small scale they perform them on. In another setting, millions of people watch these skills on TV with amazement, but here we were watching young Chinese do amazing things in an almost empty theater in Beijing.