Summer days drifting away to those summer nights

My last week of June has been very busy getting all my work done before my summer vacation. I've also been very busy outside of work.

For the dragon boat festival long week-end, I travelled to Lanzhou for a few days of hiking along the Yellow River with Beijing Hikers. My highlight from this trip was the many colours and forms that the river took depending on the topography it flowed through. Despite its name, the Yellow River turned to blue in a lake created by a dam along its course. I was accompanied on this trip by the smiling handicapped mascot of the 2024 Paris Olympic games, a phryge. It looks like a red smurf hat and is a symbol of liberty. We shot lots of photos together as part of a promotional campaign to introduce the values of next year's Paris Olympic games to the Chinese netizens through a series of short stories on the Chinese Twitter-like Weibo platform of the mascots visiting various emblematic Chinese sites.

On Thursday 29 June I gave a solo recital of French Romantic melodies together with pianist Cheng Tong. After a trial recital last year which only attracted 8 people because of covid-phobia, this time I sang a full-length programme of 12 pieces in front of 44 people. For the first time, I realised the difficulty of singing live, solo and for a long time: one needs to deal with voice quality but also interact with the audience, say a few words of introduction before singing, keep going although the pianist and I realise to our horror we are no longer in synch... It was an exhausting learning experience. The audience nonetheless seemed to enjoy the show. I was fortunate to have lots of singing friends come to listen to me: I already have a group of fans in Beijing.

Finally, just before leaving China for France, I travelled to Taiyuan in Shanxi province to take part in the wedding ceremony of my French cousin Henri who had met and got married to a Chinese lady in France. This was the Chinese side of the wedding and I was the only representative from the French side. The ceremony was very colourful and well choreographed to maximise photo opportunities. The music was loud; the lights multicoloured and very bright; but the banquet was a delicious assortment of local Chinese delicacies.

It has been a tiring week, made all the more exhausting by the scorching temperatures reaching 40°C during the day over the last month. I am now glad to have left the heat of Northern China for the more temperate European weather for my three weeks of summer vacation. 

Summer nights
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, original soundtrack from the motion picture Grease, 

Recital photos: Autumn and Katia Wistoff