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Well indeed, everything comes to an end. Even when I made myself home at Artfarm with barely comfortable convenience, my visa was running out, and winter in China setting in.
Winter means temperatures drop quickly below zero at night with the keeper working round the clock to shovel coal on the fire. A system with huge pipes and stocky radiators provides hot water running around by mere pressure instead of a pump. Large lumps of coal have to be hacked to pieces before they fit the stove, and even then with doors and curtains closed, the average temperature in my room barely reached over 16° C. That's pretty cold to cramp behind my Powerbook and watch some people's emails with huge attachments crawl in. Email and internet are fantastic means of communication, but people should learn to use them properly. You don't send out a delivery truck with 100kgs of paperwork to announce your exhibition, so why send 1Mb attachments to promote your latest goodies? Especially people who have to rely on electronics because other means of communication are unreliable suffer from heavy mails that are dropped off as if it were nothing. Often you've been stealing 20 minutes, half an hour of my precious time before I found out it was a huge glossy jpg or bulky pdf for something I couldn't care less. Get yourself a website to put all your stuff and send a pure text email, the Department of Hungry Electric Ghosts will love you.
In these last days I provided my dedicated contacts with some live images from my room at Artfarm. In the picture left you can see the setup with a Sony videocamera firewired to my old iBook which I used as a local server. It all worked well for those who stayed up late or got up early in Europe and otherwise you just had to please yourself with a black image. Although I also catered some downloads, which might be available again in the near future, mail me if you want to get updated on those.
Speaking of Electricity, with 4 freezers running at full power on Artfarm, and some occasional welding, once in a while things can go awry. In the village there's no fuses, and electricity comes from a rusty switchbox outside through a meter into the house. Occasionally you just plug in a live wire with some twigs to hold it up, it's easy. So the other day I had the welding unit hooked up when it suddenly stuttered and stopped. Behind my back, inside, I noticed a bright coloured flicker. I curiously wandered inside and discovered a live wire burning and dangling from the socket in the top corner of a wall. It turned out the wire had overheated and caught fire, it kept burning and shortcircuiting since there was no fuse to cut the power, so the only solution was to jump on the desk and pry the burning wire out of the socket. Well, we had to find a better workaround, so we connected a heftier cable straight to the meter and everything was fine. Until a couple of days later we found out the meter was overheating and it's casing was already deformed.... So we installed a new meter with a bit more ampère resistance and we're happy again.
And speaking of delivery trucks, there was a fine delivery of cattle next door the other day, a well varied crowd in the back of a truck. Apart from that, it's also the cabbage season, so the roads are filled up with trucks well loaded. After the 'orange period' of corn drying on the side of the road, we're now in the 'green period'. Too bad there aren't any impressionists around to capture the rays of coloured light.
As I said, I slowly reached some status as 'King of the Village', so I had no other option than inviting everybody in the Artfarm crew for dinner. Since it was the King's treat they all indulged in exquisite, large and expensive dishes! I had my favourite super-greasy meatballs, pig stomach and spicy mutton, also on came sliced beancurd, eggplant, 100-year-old eggs and sweet-sour pork, to finish off with mushrooms with egg and the largest fish available wherefrom the Freak and the keeper almost put up a fight to devour the head.
So all was well when we walked back through the village and posed for a memorable group picture of the Artfarm crew.
The next day I went to Beijing to arrange transport facilities for certain frozen goods not so obvious to send from China to Belgium, only to find out that the shipping agent couldn't move on because they had no authorization from the Governmental Quarantaine Office, and the Quarantaine Office couldn't move because they had no authorization from the Belgian Health Services to allow import. And the Belgian Health Services cannot move because they don't have a proof of export authorization from their Chinese companions.... So we're kinda back to the story of the origin of the chicken or the egg.
Anyway, due to the Quarantaine Office having a rather spacious lunch break, there was no other solution to engage in lunch ourselves. Cindy and I settled for Beijing Duck, and we further specialized in a dish of duck hearts and duck tongues! Delicious.
The last couple of hours I spent on Photoshopping some of my pictures and handing them out. So if you go to Yang Zhen's Police Station or grabbing something to eat in the village restaurant, check out the walls because they might be lined with DDV custom art.
25th I summoned our local nervous wreck driver once more for a ride to the airport. Swirling into traffic at 7.00hrs in the morning he got me there in time, wildly overcharged me and sped off before I had the chance to go into any discussion because I was handling three smart guys who were trying to 'help' me with my luggage, kind of reposessing it I presume....
Anyway, good looking as I am ;) I outsmarted the desk attendant who tried to also overcharge me for my overweight luggage. Including my Chinese army boots and stylish coat I'm still only slightly over 60kgs so I definitely had a point and yes, I made my way clear cut.
The flight into Am*dam went smooth, amazingly. Just before touchdown, they displayed information about transfers, and I learned that passengers for Brussels had to check with ground staff. Those were already lined up upon exit, and they put me through to Transfer Desk n°6. Wow, there I noticed that it was pretty crowded already, and as a matter of fact the queue was at least 60m long, with approximately 3 to 400 people waiting! I had already noticed that the 16.00hrs flight to Brussels had been cancelled, but there was another one at 19.10hrs, so I decided to waste no time and catch a seat on that plane. After about an hour of queue, ground staff announced that Transfer Desk n° 4 was also opening, so with about a hundred others I rushed to another end of the terminal. at least there were only 20 people before me in my line, but remember, each counter has about 5 manned computer terminals! in the meantime I also found out that all flights to the U.S. had been cancelled and most of the others queuing were trying to book other flights for the next, the next or even the next day. When I reached the counter after another hour, they told me that all passengers of the 16.00hrs flight had been issued train tickets to Brussels at check-in. Aha, since ground staff had sent me straight to transfer, I didn't know all that.... and by then, 17.00hrs I was not looking forward to board a peak hour train with all my (overweight) luggage. So I stressed for a seat on the 19.10hrs flight. That one was already overbooked with 15 seats (a small fokker!), but just as they double-checked, KLM decided to put a larger plane, adding 16 seats! So I was on. At the boarding gate I found out that the plane was already scheduled 40 minutes late. That gave me ample time to check on my luggage, which supposedly had already been hauled to the train terminal. So I had it delivered back to the plane and waited to board. Finally the plane left around 20.30hrs, stacked with people and luggage piled up wherever possible. arriving in Brussels in a snowstorm, I kind of got the idea about all the hassle....
And then I waited for my luggage, which of course didn't arrive. Checked with the carrier, filled in forms, and got out of the terminal just in time to get the 22.00hrs bus to Antwerp. From the busstop a taxi home (hey, sounds like Yang Zhen!), where I arrived around 23.00hrs, totalling about 23 hours of travel time once again.
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