Jianjun's Blog

The Grand Canal of China（大運河; pinyin: Dà Yùnhé）, also known as the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal（京杭大運河; pinyin: Jīng Háng Dà Yùnhé）is the longest ancient canal or artificial river in the world. (Wikipedia)

The Grand Canal also runs through Tianjin, the city where I live. This afternoon I took some pictures along the river bank.

I should have edited and uploaded the footage earlier if not for some urgent projects that needed my attention.

Tan Siok Siok, the Director of the Olympic documentary Boomtown Bejing（北京沸腾）gave a welcoming message and then a Q & A session after the screening at Yugong Yishan（愚公移山）. All proceeds from this event went to the Library-Project.ORG.

My short review:

Boomtown Beijing is more than a documentary of the Beijing Olympics. It shows the spirit of the Olympics through the life of common people and tells us their dreams.

Olympics as a large-scale international sports event has more meanings than competing for medals. We should also remember and practice “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (swifter, higher and stronger) in our lives and I think this is one of the reasons why the Olympics are held all over the world and loved by the world. Boomtown Beijing shows us the people who really uphold the Olympic spirit.

Unlike some ‘official’ Olympic films, what you are going to see is all real. There will be no hyped talks or propaganda. No wonder after seeing the movie, some people changed their views about Bejing, China and also their attitude toward the Beijing Olympics.

NOTE: If you are on FB, do check out http://snurl.com/25viy instead for faster video. Thanks.

[display_podcast]

Library Project（中华捐书会）is a charity founded by Thomas Stader, that aims to help the school children and orphans living in poor rural areas of China to gain access to good books.

Florence Xu, the Event Manager from the Library Project made a brief introduction to the charity at the Boomtown Beijing’s screening on April 20th. All proceeds from the screening went to this organization.

The book selection process includes listening to children’s opinions about what they’d like to read. They choose high quality books and some of them are printed with Pinyin (phonetic Chinese) to aid reading.

If you are interested in learning more about the project, please visit Library-Project.org.

[display_podcast]