29 December, 2020

Raise your glasses for a toast to a little bit of chicken

I am blogging again for work, though not about my work.

The cultural section of the French embassy in Beijing asked us agricultural counselors to write a series of articles around Christmas-time French food culture for Chinese readers, who are more accustomed to dipping all kinds of ingredients in boiling soup within hot pots during winter. 

After discussing various possibilities and topics, we agreed I would write a series of three articles on French traditional poultry Christmas recipes. I have tried to write the articles so that they are reader-friendly for both French and Chinese readers. 

The three recipes come from my family's cooking books:

Hen in the pot

Roasted capon with chestnut stuffing

Duck magret Rossini style

Ironically, I did not cook any Christmas meal this year. Although I had moved into my new apartment on the 22nd, my cooking utensils have still not arrived from France. The more important consideration for me was to be with family for Christmas. So I flew to Shanghai where I enjoyed a very juicy roasted chicken for Christmas lunch with the only family members I have in continental China: my Singaporean cousin Annie and her family.  

 


Chicken fried

Zac Brown band, Home grown, Atlantic

07 December, 2020

In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan

It is already bitterly cold in Beijing with night temperatures always below freezing and only just above freezing when the sun is shining. So, in the weeks coming up to Christmas, I am delighted to be preparing the festive season with warm friendly feelings, hot comforting mulled wine and carol singing. After five years living in France where the tradition of carolling has unfortunately disappeared, I am very pleased to renew with Christmas carols, although I have to sight-read and learn a whole lot of new tunes, in German! I have joined the Deutsche Kantorei Peking (DKP).

Having just arrived in Beijing, I immediately started looking for a choir to start singing again. I was particularly keen on finding a good quality choir as choral practice has been virtually banned since last March in France because of covid-19; I needed my fix of community singing.

I was first confronted with the obsolete nature of the worldwide web in China. All the references I could find to international choirs or choral societies in Beijing on the Internet were outdated from 2018, if not earlier. I finally found a QR Code for the Chinese instant messaging app Wechat to contact a singer in the French-speaking Maurice Ravel Choir of Beijing. Unfortunately, the French choir was not recruiting new members until February next year. However, I asked whether there were other international choirs in town and the lady I was in contact with said she would ask around for me.

On Friday afternoon of last week, I got a Wechat message putting me in touch with another person who could introduce me to the German DKP. Only 30 minutes later, after a series of instant messages on Wechat with a British DKP singer now stranded in Hong Kong, I was in contact with a German Beijing-based singer and the Japanese Chairwoman of DKP. The latter asked to give me a call. They were singing carols the next morning for the German Christmas market in Beijing; could I come join the singing? All I needed was a very warm black coat because we would be singing outside. I usually do not like busking concerts, but this opportunity was too good to miss. So, the next morning, I was given a folder with the music and off we went into the cold singing carols in German beside giant plastic Christmas tree and snowman. We were glad to enjoy warm mulled cider, mulled beer, hot dogs and sauerkraut in between the carolling sessions. 


One week later, choir members were invited to a private teatime party in one of the German members’ clothes shop for more carol singing, more mulled wine, raisin bread and ginger biscuits. We sung through most of the German carol song book together for over an hour. I left rather tired but elated just as the pianist was starting to get “jazzy” on my more familiar English and American carol repertoire. I hope he will stay inspired until next week. We will be carolling again at the Beijing German Embassy School next Sunday!

In the bleak mid-winter
Gustav Holst, Stephen Cleobury and choir of King’s college Cambridge, Holst: the composer of the planets, Warner

Photo DKP, snowman and Christmas tree: Christine Bérillon


22 November, 2020

Run run run run... To run away from you... Run run run run...

Continued from the last post here.

So I arrived very relaxed at the Victorian era Astor Hotel in Tianjin around 7pm for what I was hoping would be a quiet weekend to get used to seeing normal people up close without face masks agains, and to get to experience crowded streets and shops without keeping distances for fear of covid-19.

But there seemed to be a problem with my quarantine exit certificate. The hotel staff pointed to me that my certificate stated that I had just finished my 14 days of quarantine but also that I was invited to go home and stay there without coming out for another seven days! Having connected to the hotel free wifi, I could now register into the Tianjin healt kit app which gives green or red QR codes according to one's health status. Mine was green: I should normally be able to roam free around town. I also tried to point out that I had no home in China and that I did not know anybody in Tianjin. The hotel staff would not check me in. They called the booking agent who called me to say that the situation had changed since I had made the booking two weeks before and that they would cancel the hotel reservation with no penalty. However, I now knew for certain that no other Tianjin hotel would check me in for the weekend. I had to leave Tianjin.

Indeed, what had happened while I was obliviously confined in my quarantine room was the discovery of 4 covid-19 cases in Tianjin three days before I came out of my safe bubble. The situation in Tianjin had changed dramatically with everybody wearing face masks and travel restrictions for people entering and leaving the municipality. I signalled my predicament to my embassy colleagues in Beijing by instant messaging on WeChat. They immediately set into action to talk to the local Tianjin government and ask them to allow me to stay thanks to my diplomatic status. The reply was straightforwardly undiplomatic: the French government should make all efforts to get me out of Tianjin as quickly as possible. I had to leave Tianjin. 

My embassy colleagues told me to go to the train station, catch a fast train to Beijing and try to get a room at the hotel I had planned to check into after the weekend. I sent an Airbnb message to my Beijing host but there was no instant reply. Checking out the Airbnb website, I could see they had no room available for the night. So I asked my embassy colleagues to find a room for me in a Beijing hotel that would accept guests just coming out of quarantine with an official certificate stating they had to quarantine for seven more days at home. Luckily, they already had to deal with a similar case and immediately booked nights for the weekend at the Kempinski Hotel close to the embassy. I was to send an update when at the train station.

So I took a taxi with my two enormous and heavy suitcases for the train station. Dropped off in the underground car park of the station, I found my way to the front door using several escalators. There was a queue of people in front of the train station, all fidgeting with their mobile phones. Guards wanted to the see the Tianjin health code status of all people entering the station. There was no free wifi network around so I switched on my data roaming and managed to download a green health status QR code and got into the train station with my two enormous and heavey suitcases. The result was that my French phone operator texted me indicating that I had used up all my prepaid talk time with that one quick data sharing.

I then had to pass through my luggage and myself through X-ray scans. I found the ticket booth and purchased a ticket for Beijing using cash after one unsuccessful try using my French credit card. My train would leave in 40 minutes. I managed to pass a second security check and moved up a floor to the departure hall. By that time, it was already 9.10pm and I had last eaten lunch at 11.30am. I found a small shop selling Chinese fast food and gulped a hot bowl of beef noodle soup in just 10 minutes, thinking to myself that my original plan had been a leisurely Western dinner with meat roast and potatoes doused in gravy, a glass of imported red wine...

I then proceded up another flight of escalators to the main departure hall. It was huge and very crowded. My train platform was at the other end so I had to zig-zag between people and suitcases to reach my platform. Being a foreigner, I could not check myself in using the automatic check-in doors but had to show my ticket and passport to an attendant. She was busy explaining to another harried traveller that he could not get in. All the while, I was waiting to proceed while my departure time was approaching and I didn't know how far still I had to pull and push my two enormous and heavy suitcases before finding the door to my train coach. Luckily, finding my train seat was very easy once I cleared this third security check.

But I still had not managed to send my update to Beijing colleagues who were probably getting worried by now. Once in the train, I managed to get onto the free wifi network. I could then communicate with my Beijing colleagues to confirm I was on the train and give them the expected arrival time. One of them confirmed that my room at the Kempinski was booked and that he would be waiting for me in the hotel lobby. I should take a taxi from the Beijing train station and make sure I had a green health status on the Beijing health kit app. I tried accessing the Beijing health kit app but the system would always tell me there were too many people trying to access the app and that I should try again later. 

I decided to wait a while. The fast train to Beijing is very fast. I had hardly found the time to relieve myself in the toilet, have a sip of water and rest for five minutes than the conductor announced that we would shortly be arriving in Beijing South station. Even the train ride had been stressful and I still had no green QR code to enter Beijing.

Luckily, there were no health safety checks when leaving the train station. After queuing in a very long line with other travellers, I boarded my taxi which wheezed me to the hotel. I only had the time to top up my prepaid mobile phone and decided I would stop stressing with technology and have the hotel staff help me to get the right QR code.

Indeed, the porter was reassuringly proficient with both English and WeChat, even though I was using the French language version. He deleted the Beijing health kit app that wasn't working, downloaded a new version and helped me get the text message code that would allow me to unlock my WeChat app, and then take a digital picture of my passport with my mobile phone finally to get the indispensable Beijing health kit green QR code that would allow me into the hotel. 

My embassy colleague found me; I checked into my room. By the time I had calmed down, showered and enjoyed a cup of hot peppermint tea, I went to bed close to 1am. 

From cloistered autarcy to 24/7-expected hyperconnectivity and Big Brother supervision in just a few hours... Welcome to modern China!


Thorn in my side

Eurythmics, Revenge, RCA

21 November, 2020

Get them while they're hot - buns buns buns


I have just come out of 14 days' quarantine after having managed to get onto one of the last flights from France into China!

To protect the covid-free health status of the capital city, international flights bound for Beijing all land in Tianjin, around 110 km farther away to the East. And all travellers have to go through 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room assigned by the local government. We do not get to choose the hotel, nor the room, nor the view, nor the food. And of course, we are not allowed out of our bedroom and there is no room service.

I think I can consider myself lucky to have had pretty good quarantine conditions at the Society Hill Hotel. My hotel room was suitably spacious at around 25m²; it was comfortable; I had a view on the sister conference hotel across the avenue, a large wooded park and the high speed railway with trains zooming past every 15 minutes.
The room was equiped with essentials to last the 14 days alone: soap, shampoo, conditioner, toilet paper, tea bags, kettle, 8 litres of drinking water, a bar of soap to wash clothes, broom and dustpan, even a mop and bucket. I was lucky to be alone in a twin-bed room. I was therefore able to switch beds and towels half way through the quarantine.

The Internet connection was rather patchy but good enough to be able to telework on my new job. I am now one of the three counselors for agricultural affairs at the French embassy in Beijing, to cover China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia. It is likely that I will not be able to blog about my work because of its classified nature. However, I will keep posting blogs on my travels, musical and culinary adventures.

So back to my quarantine: the few people I crossed during 14 days starting from the airplane door until I got out of quarantine were all clad in full protective equipment, masks, goggles and extra transparent face screen. Outside in the streets, people were strolling together unmasked, at least during the first week. The feeling was quite surreal.

 Thanks to my teleworking during the day, I did not get bored. I had a Kindle stocked full of books for the evening and the weekends and could also download and listen to radio podcasts. The past 14 days have been like a restful moment to get over jet lag, observe the people on the streets outside, listen carefully and intently to the radio broadcast.  

My food was served at set hours: 7.30am breakfast, 11.30am lunch and 5.30pm dinner. Somebody would deposit my food box on the console outside my bedroom and knock on the door. When I opened the door, the long corridor was already empty...

The food was of good quality and varied. Always Chinese food; there were no other options. Other quarantined guests were complaining bitterly on the chat group we were all on, or requesting exotic items like lemon or even croissants. I was quite content with the food served. We had our five fruits or - especially - vegetables per day, some meat or fish, rice or dumplings, soup or porridge. After insisting over two days, I was given a large box of chili preserve to spice up the food.

The only meal that was rather boring was breakfast. It invariably consisted of millet or rice porridge, some kind of raw vegetable salad, preserved turnip or carrot, slices of ham, a hard-boiled egg, and buns. The only variety came with: 

1) the vegetables, which changed every day;

2) the preserved turnip, which was either just salted or spiced;

3) the buns.

I was actually quite surprised by the variety of colour and form of the buns that appeared each morning in my breakfast box: steamed buns coming in all sorts of colourful patterns and shapes, oven-baked buns, plain or filled with red bean, coconut or other sweet paste.  

On the morning of day 13, when I opened the breakfast tray to find a pack of warm sterilised milk, 4 slices of very plain white bread, a cold fried egg, two slices of ham, a bunch of sliced iceberg lettuce and a tablespoon of mayonnaise, I even came to regret the Chinese breafast.

My quarantine ended on a high note of beautiful sunny weather and the expected thrill of visiting the old city centre of Tianjin where I had booked a colonial style bedroom at the upmarket Astor Hotel, to celebrate my renewed freedom with style.

The taxi ride from the quarantine hotel to the city centre was slow through the evening traffic jam. I was definitely very relaxed upon arriving at the Astor. And that is when the reality of modern China suddenly struck me a very hard blow.

To be continued... here.


Hot cross buns, hot cross buns

Traditional nursery rhyme, The tick tock boys, The children's favourites collection - the teddy bear's picnic and many others 

18 October, 2020

Passing through, sometimes happy, sometimes blue

I have left Pau yesterday. The autumn weather has been cold and wet lately and the mountains were already snowclad when I left my empty apartment.

After over three years in charge of the administration of subsidy requests from local farmers, I have seized a new job opportunity.

From my time in the Southwest of France, I will particularly miss: 

My parents' country house only 1 hour and 40 minutes' drive away. It was particularly easy to pop over for the weekend and enjoy their company, my mother's home-cooked food and the ocean nearby.

The farmers' market in Pau and all its delicious fresh food at very competitive producer prices.

The Pyrenees mountains just one hour away. In winter I could be on the ski slopes in just over an hour from leaving home. In all other seasons I wandered through the network of footpaths crossing only a few human beings, but lots of free-grazing cows and sheep. I might even have been spied upon by a lone wild wolf on the Rey mountain one August day in 2019. Overall, I managed never to come back on a path I had already walked on during these past three years. Walking through the hills and mountains has been a rejuvenating experience, especially for my mind - very often absorbed by my job's responsibilities.

I start my new job tomorrow teleworking from my parents' country house while I wait for a visa and a plane ticket to reach my next destination...

Passing through

Leonard Cohen, Live songs, Columbia


24 July, 2020

The sleepless nights I've had about the boy

In my second year in Pau, I met Guillaume. He had joined the symphonic choir of the local Pau and Bearn Country Orchestra (OPPB) where I already sang. A barytone, Guillaume was of my age group. Within the large symphonic choir, I only had few interactions with him during rehearsals and concerts.

Then in the summer of last year, Guillaume and I were both invited to join the smaller Ensemble vocal émergence (Evé), which needed experienced singers to beef up the chamber choir for Brahms' German Requiem. With the intensive programme of rehearsals for this project, I got to know Guillaume better. Not only did he have a beautiful barytone voice, but he was also particularly friendly and easygoing, eager to give his time and energy to the musical projects of the symphonic and chamber choirs we were both in.

I happened to queue up for a jazz concert organised by a local association one night. Guillaume was there again, selling tickets and drinks during the interval for Tonnerre de Jazz. He was all smiles, still full of energy and mingling freely among the audience and the artists. At another memorable concert this past March, Guillaume had driven his SUV to fetch a Spanish jazz group who had been stranded by a rare snow blizzard while attempting to cross the Pyrenees for their gig. The audience waited patiently while Guillaume sped down from the mountain with the players. That concert was all the more emotional afterwards.

Getting to know Guillaume better, we discovered we both practiced long-distance running and started running together. It helped that we lived close by in town so it was easy to meet up in the evening to run around and out of town. Guillaume showed me all the small alleys snaking up and down the plateau at the edge of the city. This knowledge of the city centre's pedestrian shortcuts and staircases he generously transferred came in particularly handy during the covid-19 lockdown when I could run up to the regulatory 1 hour within a distance of 4 km from my house but still avoid running around in circles. While running together, we would always cross people that seem to know Guillaume and who would greet him warmly. This guy had a large network.

Recently I discovered Guillaume was also very active within Pau à vélo, another local association promoting the use of bicyles within town. Indeed, I had seen him drive two bicycles: a cross-country bike when we met one morning to run together in the city's woods; and one of the dashing yellow electrified bicycles on rental by the city council on which he elegantly cruised through the city from work to various social events.

During the covid-19 lockdown we only glimpsed each other once or twice along the streets and only greeted each other from afar: me on my bike or on a solo run; Guillaume walking his terrier dog. When the lockdown was lifted we had agreed to start running together again and had made plans to meet the last week of May.

On 27 May, Guillaume and his bicycle were run over by a car at a city intersection. Broken spine. Unconscious for one month and a half. He did not wake up and died on 13 July. All his energy, generosity and warmth lost. What a waste!

Mad about the boy
Dinah Washington, Queen of the blues, Mis

02 June, 2020

Lonely, you don't have to be lonely

Finally out of lockdown!

The last time I had felt really lonely was in 2016 during a 10-day solo road trip in Western Australia. Back then I had experienced loneliness being alone without any sound or company although in a limitless and grandiose scenery. I had driven for two days up North and then two days back down South across the bush, with only scarce FM radio signal and no music recordings with me.

During the covid-19 lockdown I experienced loneliness again for a full month. I was not bored. On the contrary, my time at work was extended to cope with the new working conditions: my whole team of 35 civil servants were suddenly all teleworking without the proper equipment or IT infrastructure. Though purely administrative, our mission had been declared "essential" by the government. So we had to find ways of ensuring we could keep servicing our clients remotely. I kept going to the office every day to make sure IT was working for all of my colleagues, sending by email the files on the server they no longer had access to, scanning incoming mail to them so that they could service our clients' requests. The office was deserted: we were usually 5 or 6 people in a building normally meant to hold 200. Anyway, we had to avoid each other for fear of spreading the virus. Lonely at work.

All my social singing and sports activities were of course cancelled because of lockdown. Lonely after work.

To make things worse, during the second week of March, my parents were still travelling in Australia and their flight back to France was meant to go through Singapore and Hong Kong to arrive in Paris, all three locations where the covid-19 virus was actively circulating. I was not sure they would be able to fly back safely. If they did fly back to Paris, would they have to self-isolate in a hotel full of other potentially sick people? In the French context of very strict lockdown enforced by police, would they be able to travel from Paris back to the much isolated -and thus safer- country house in Southwest France? Although the sanitary conditions in Pau were under control, all this uncertainty was very stressful for me.

At home, radio and internet worked fine. I had the radio going on most of the time to listen to soothing music. However, because working conditions were deteriorated, I would come back at home rather late in the evening and only had time to eat, wash and go to bed before going back to the office the next morning. I managed to keep myself occupied during normal weekends for the first month of lockdown in my small apartment. However, I reached my limit during the three-day Easter weekend. I felt really lonely all alone at home.

By then, my parents had safely come back to their country house from Paris and had passed their 14 days of self-isolation. I could go see them. My Director had suggested I go telework from my parents' house rather than be lonely at home and lonely at work. I gladly took his offer to issue me a special travel authorisation to leave Pau.

My second month of lockdown with my parents was much more pleasant. Gratned: very slow internet access in the countryside hampered my teleworking. However, I had space, diverse home-cooked food, and company. I was no longer lonely.

After the lockdown ended the three of us had a fresh haircut.




My name is Tallulah
From the original motion picture Bugsy Malone, Paramount Pictures

19 March, 2020

I take a breath of air

I have just come back from a short but restful stay in the Alentejo region of Portugal. It was citrus flowering season. Everywhere I went, I could smell the lovely scent of citrus blossoms.

In the morning wafting up from the cloister of Evora cathedral



In the afternoon along the streets of Vila Viçosa



At night flowing down from over the walls hiding inner courtyards



Staying at the wonderful Convento do Espinheiro Hotel outside of Evora, lemons, sweet and bitter oranges were hanging from their trees in the courtyard. With the authorisation of the staff, I picked some fruits to bring back home. I now have my own citrus marmelade to remember the scent of Portuguese orange blossoms.


Orange trees
Marina, Love + Fear, Atlantic records

13 January, 2020

J'aurais voulu être un chanteur !

The last time I was involved in a very large production in 2012, I was overwhelmed by the 2000-strong teenage crowd rising to their feet and giving us a long standing ovation in the Parisian Théâtre du Chatelet.

This year I sang in front of an even larger crowd in the Pau Zenith arena for a public dress rehearsal followed by three shows for the New Year's concert of the Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn and its choir.

The repertoire was mainly classical: Wagner, Verdi, Tchaïkovski, Brahms, Dvorak. However, the atmosphere felt more like that of a rock concert with artificial carbon mist, traveling colourful lights and more than 3 000 people in the audience nearly filling up the large arena hall. The organisers counted that close to 12 000 people came to listen to us over the three shows and dress rehearsal.



The one migiving I have from this project was that the sound return for the choir from the microphones did not provide a good idea of the whole sound given by the orchestra and choir. I sometimes felt that I was singing only with my close neighbours and just the strings, brass and percussions. Nevertheless, the crowd must have had a better overall sound because everybody I met afterwards was delighted.



Le blues du businessman
Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon, Starmania, La Gagneraie