Rice-lifting. An Olympic sport for 2012?

It keeps you fit; it keeps you healthy

and you save all of those horrendous gym fees...

A walk in Chao Yang park

As part of the Festival of Australian Theatre in China, we go for a long walk in Chao Yang park to see the Melbourne based Strange Fruits 'SynchoSwing' - basically an air ballet come synchronised swim atop 4 meter bendy poles. It's a lot better than it sounds.

Experience it yourself. And more.

Taming of the Shrew

I never win anything. But, last Friday I won a pair tickets for TNT's production of Taming of the Shrew at the Peking University Hall. TNT is an international touring company and this production was terrific. The talented six person cast take on multiple roles, sing the original score and even change the simple scenery themselves.


It was a lot of fun and this huge auditorium belonging to the Beijing University was packed out. The audience loved it and, even though a translation was provided at the side of the stage, clearly had an excellent command of English cheering, clapping and laughing at this faced paced play.


But theatre-going in Beijing has its little quirks. Especially when it comes to finding your seat. Seats are numbered from the centre of the row with even numbered seats going out to the right and odd numbered seats going to the left. And the numbers are on the back of seats and each row doesn't line up with the row in front. What's all that about? Actually, this is less of a problem than you might think since many Chinese believe in sitting in the best empty seat they can find regardless of who it belongs to. So when you do find your seat, someone else is often in it. They move on graciously to the next best one they can find and so on. This bizarre seating ritual continues until - in a sold-out show like this one - everyone is finally sitting in the correct seat - generally by the interval.

The sincerest form of flattery

I remember when touch tone dialing first came out in the US, AT&T published a list of all the tones that controlled the system. Kids with perfect pitch could whistle down the phone lines to make free calls...

Our friend Peter Gottlieb does a perfect imitation of the ring tone of a '70s Trimphone. Takes me back to my youth whenever he does it. Unfortunately, not too much demand for that skill these days, I guess.