Water Cube opens for business

Like some spectacular alien spaceship the Olympic 'Water Cube' landed in Beijing last week and opened its doors to the public for the first time, hosting Olympic trial swimming and diving events.

We went to see the finals of the men's 10m platform and the women's 3m synchronised. Not that we are great diving enthusiasts - I have traumatic memories of standing on top of the 5m platform at Richmond pool as a kid but not being able to work up the courage to jump - but we really wanted to see the inside of the Cube.

To me all the dives looked great - I struggled to understand what made it a 9.5 or a 4.5 - something to do with the straightness of entry and lack of splash. The full house, mainly Chinese, audience on the other hand were clearly knowledgeable - the volume of their clapping in direct correlation to the diver's score. Maybe because China is a good diving country - in fact they won the gold in all the week's events except the men's 10m which went to Sacha Klein from Germany.

We did get the opportunity for some nationalistic cheering. Thomas Daley -the 13 year old GB diving prodigy competed and led the field for the first two rounds. He never really recovered from a poor third dive but still managed to come 6th overall. This result allowed him to qualify for the Beijing Olympics in August and, apparently, he will be the youngest Olympic diver ever (14 on May 21st). His diminutive figure can just about be seen here making his last and qualifying dive. Good luck Thomas!

The synchronised was incredible - so graceful and elegant - how do they manage to dive in perfect unison?

Chinese new year finishes with Lantern Festival

Traditionally, the last night of the Chinese new year celebrations, Lantern Festival is another opportunity to set the skies and streets alight with thousands of fireworks.

Fireworks light up the Beijing Drum Tower

We went out for a great dinner - My Humble House - a beautifully designed Chinese fusion restaurant in the Oriental Plaza complex and then for a walk to Tiananmen Square to see what was happening. We though there would celebrations going on but even though there were plenty of people out and about the square was shut off and nobody allowed on. That is a rare sight in itself.

Coming home, the streets and pavements were a sea of red firecracker fragments as families and friends set off huge boxes of fireworks on street corners. One child was happily sitting on top of a giant, ready to be used, box of fireworks which, his mother told us with great pride, contained 100 rockets.
View across to an empty Tienanmen Sq with Great Hall of the People in the background on Lantern Festival

Umm, yummy

It was Heather's birthday today and we gathered in the conference room to celebrate and eat cake. Usually, these enormous cakes are brightly decorated affairs with lashings of whipped cream but today we had a plain, sweet, sponge with a strange looking grey/brown mesh-like filling..reminded me of bits of used Brillo pad. Not too tempting but I accepted a small portion for the sake of politeness. The first forkful reached my mouth just as someone explained that the filling was meat. A meat cake? I couldn't swallow. Brillo pad would have been better.