Earth Train: 798 Artists' Colony

Back home in Tulsa, folks tend to say things like "bigger than Dallas" or "everything's bigger in Texas." I wonder if the locals say things like "bigger than Beijing" -- because everything in here is BIG, and the artist's colony known as 798 is no exception.

For the record, I have been flipping through my book of Chinese idioms with English translations that I bought the other day -- hoping to find some saying along those lines, but no luck yet. I have found a few other favorites though:

   *mount the clouds and ride the mist (to feel giddy)
   *a jeweled palace on the mountain of the immortals (a dreamland)
   *to try and fish the moon from the bottom of the sea (strive for the impossible)
   *a thousand words flow from the pen, but ten thousand li (miles) away from the theme (long winded and irrelevant writing...)

So, to get back to the subject at hand, 798 is an old factory area in the outskirts of Beijing, where a small group of artists moved to in the 1990's to open workspaces and galleries. Today there are over 150 galleries sprinkled through the collection of low-slung brick buildings and large, abandoned factories with high ceilings and gorgeous, huge windows. Here are just a few photos of the area and some of the art we saw: