China Trip, Day Seven—April 12: On the programme for today was a visit to the Danish embassy and hereafter the Danish industrial company F.L. Schmidth. During the night there had been hurricane winds, which completely cleared the usually dusty air and smog-filled sky, which was wonderful. You really feel the clean air, when you took a breath, and you could see the sun for the first time, because the smog had been blown away. On a day like this, Beijing started looking attractive and got the nice spring-feel over it. Everyone had their sun glasses out. Our embassy was situated in an Embassy neighbourhood, so it was a rather calm place, with almost no traffic and people, but a lot of fences and guards. The nice weather, though, made these rather cold surroundings seem nice. Below, a picture of the entrance to the Danish Embassy.
After our morning visit, we split up for lunch. A couple of friends and I headed for PizzaHut to get some real proteins, something we had been missing ever since we got here. What stroke us about the restaurant, which is a normal McDonalds-like fast food restaurant in Western countries, was that it was a really upscale, nice restaurant here: Marble floor, starlight ceilings, luxury couches to sit in and so on. And—not to forget—the toilets were the nicest we had seen so far here in China, and they were up to par to any Western luxury restaurant.
Our afternoon visit was with F.L. Schmidth, a Danish industrial that makes concrete factories and related things. Their head office is located in a good looking apartment/business cluster called East Lake, which is in a very nice part of Beijing. East Lake Villas was actually established many, many years ago by another Danish company, EAC. Below a picture of the entrance to East Lake.
