International spinning top Museum Inauguration

The day before the competition, the work at the museum was completed in extremis after ten months of construction non-stop, 24 hours a day. The collections had been transferred from the old museum to the new building and we took advantage of the evening to visit the museum before the planned inauguration the next day. As I wrote in another post, the new museum evokes the shape of a spinning top: a truncated cone largely glazed and surrounded by a spiral in red metallic siding, supposed to give the movement impression.

On the ground floor, a large circular exhibition hall which featured in showcases different models of spinning tops. On the walls were racks where different types of sticks and whip were hung. A shop offering some models of spinning tops and small sticks, and a conference room that I would have the opportunity to test the next day for the second conference to which I was invited. On the first floor, a kind of multimedia room which I did not quite grasp the utility and probably a terrace on the upper floor that we could not visit.

On 29 July 2017, it was thus the opening of the international competition of whip and spinning top and it was also the inauguration of the International Museum of spinning top. And on that occasion I was requisitioned by President Liu. I had to attend the opening ceremony. At nine o’clock in the morning, we joined the forecourt in front of the entrance of the museum. There was a carpet, a desk and a series of micro. And of course the reporters were already there.

We were aligned in columns; the workers one, with their red helmets, who had participated in the shipyard, the foreign delegations one of which I was a member and those of the local delegations. We waited half an hour, under a blazing sun, for the local elected officials to arrive, and then there were the speeches which this time were not translated. After an hour of figuration, we were given our freedom and we ran to the arena to attend the beginning of the competitions.