Monday Night

Monday was the Lantern Day Festival. We had our usual dinner club and ate at the Renaissance Hotel's Fratelli Fresh. In America, eating at a restaurant in a hotel is out of the ordinary, but in Beijing and much of Asia, some of the cities best restaurants position themselves in hotel settings to draw the right kind of clientel. They were offering a promotion of all you can eat pasta or pizza with a glass of wine for about $15 us. So I had a great gourmet veggie pizza. I left early because I was falling asleep at the table because of jet lag. Chase being the social bee between the two of us stayed and they went upstairs to have some drinks at the hotel bar.

The whole evening, fireworks were being lit off in a major way. In the past two weeks you could hear fireworks every one to two minutes. And they are usually set off just on the street corner. But Monday night being the culminating night of Chinese New Year, the fireworks were non-stop. And the kind of fireworks they use here are not the tiny ones we get in Texas. They are LOUD. They are HUGE. They are the kind of fireworks that the City of Austin sets off for the Fourth of July. But instead, here, any person can purchase those and set them off two feet from the edge of the building. In fact, you could hear the sparks bouncing off our windows as the fireworks shot past the side of the building. We do have a corner apartment, so I mean the fireworks were being lit right below me.

So Chase had an adventure. While they were getting a drink they got word that the Mandarin Oriental Hotel right by the CCTV Buiding was on fire. It was up in flames. The entire thing. They shut the 3rd Ring Road down all the way back from where I live (which is about 1km south). I couldn't see it from where our apartment in positioned. But Chase got a good look. They took a taxi and it had to swerve around all the way to the 4th ring road and then all the way back to the 2nd ring road and through some side streets to get where they were trying to go. CCTV has taken blame and said they are committing to working to rebuilding the huge hotel because it was their fireworks which set off the blaze.

I wondered if anything like that happened during the New Year because of the proximity of the fireworks. I wonder how many people get burned or injured each year.

The sad part is that I know one of the Directors of that hotel. His child is in my class and they have been in Beijing for the past year getting ready for the opening of the Mandarin Oriental Flagship hotel. So it's been a year's worth of work for him up in flames. So sad. They must be going through so much.

So that's the drama that's been going on here.