Year of the Snake!

Chinese New Years

A lot has been going on, but for the most part I have gotten into a routine of studying, practicing, excercising and performing.  Weekends are long nights here in BJ, and probably once a week I go out and do some sight seeing.  This weekend I am going to the temple fair for Chinese New Years.  Learning Chinese is a slow, tedious process, but I am making progress.  It is great to see myself learning something.  Trying to memorize about thirty words a day now, but I am still researching which method of memorization works the best.  I am using PLECO on the Ipad with the flashcard add ons, that helps a lot.
I live in an apartment now, in ShuangJing - a neighborhood two kilometers south of where I am working, and where I used to live.  It feels great to have an apartment, hotel rooms after a few months are a bit confining.  I have a full kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, and patio (for air drying my clothes).  I like it.
My new singer is from Atlanta/Houston - she is great.  We are playing a lot of RnB right now, a lot of classic soul, and some new stuff.  It is fun to be playing totally different songs than I have ever played before, and the band is sounding great.
The other night was Chinese New Years, we got done with the show at 11:45, just in time to see the city of Beijing light up!  Our club we play at is on the 80th floor of the tallest building in town, and let me tell you this town does not mess around when it comes to fireworks!  Millions of the biggest, baddest, fireworks I have ever seen have been blowing off for days.  Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zUk-YnwQMs&sns=em

Every firework that is shot off is a massive explosion, totally illegal in the USA.  Really an amazing sight.  I jumped in a cab to go to work, and in the middle of the freeway there were cars pulled over and a bunch of guys blowing off these giant bombs right on the freeway.
The Chinese New Year actually lasts about two weeks - everyone goes home to visit their families.  The city right now is dead, stores are closed, places that are typically packed are basically empty.  Beijing felt a little like a ghost town, but now it is livening up again.  My impression of the holiday is going to be lasting.  I received a Happy New Years letter from my Chinese teacher Xiao Ling, some of her words really describe the New Year holiday well.
"....The New Year is very important for Chinese people.  We believe that no matter what has happened in the past, there are always a lot of good experiences to come.  We take this time every year to celebrate the good that is to come into our lives in the coming year..."
Chinese New Year is the major holiday in this culture, similar to Christmas in the United States.  It is celebrated in a similar way as well, people go home and visit their family and friends.  Lots of food and cooking, laughing and hanging out.  It is lucky to give money for New Years, so there are little red envelopes that are exchnged that have money inside.  My impression is that the CNY is not a religious holiday for most people.  It really left me with good feelings, and honestly it feels like a really worthy holiday to celebrate - I think that maybe I like the idea of it a little more than the idea of Christmas lately.  It feels honest, and it feels real.  I do love the Christmas season when I am at home and with the family as well, but this is a very wonderful time of year here, and I really like what I have seen of this holiday.  ( I also know at least ten people who will read this blog would LOOVVEEE to get their hands on some of these rated R fireworks!  Fuuun!  Were gonna go buy some tomorrow!!)

M

FAKE MONEY!? Red Rover Red Rover!

I am the proud owner of 600 FAKE RMB ($100USD).  I do not know where they came from, but I know that I cannot tell a difference between the counterfeit money and the real money what so ever.  The 100RMB note is the biggest monetary bill in China, it is bright red and its value is a little under $20.00.  All the stores here have a machine that checks to see if the money is counterfeit or not so I cannot use these bills at any major chain store or large business...

As a traveler, musician, worker, American living abroad, what should I do with this fake money?  Should I try to give it back into circulation, or do I destroy it on behalf of China and eat the $$$ loss myself?  Who scammed me anyways? WHY I OUGHTA....!!

Can you tell which of these bills is real?

In other news, today in Beijing a new law came into effect.

At all the traffic signals, the yellow light now means that you must be stopped at the white line.  It is no longer a signal warning that the red light is coming soon, but you must be stopped when the light turns yellow or you risk being fined.  Essentially, the entire yellow light has  been turned into a different color of red light.

The immediate outcome of this new law was the worst day for car wrecks in modern history.  People were so scared to get the new fine that as soon as a signal would turn yellow, they would slam on their brakes.  Anybody who has driven in Asia knows that when you slam on your brakes, you get rear ended.  Thus, hundreds of accidents happened through out the day.

My drummer Mico mentioned that this event is exceptionally funny because all the law makers and congress men here have private drivers.  The people who enacted this law have not actually been behind the wheel of a car driving in China in years.  Apparently they forgot what the yellow light was about... slowing down safely, or continuing through the intersection if you are already committed.
 
So now one can only wonder, are they going to keep all three color lights at each signal?  Why not just switch to Red/Green lights and forgo the entire yellow light?  Or are they going to add in a new color light that means slow down, like Blue?  So you have Green - Go, Blue - Slow Down, Yellow - Stop and last but not least Red - Stop.

Bangkok has a countdown timer so maybe that would work -but probably not as Bangkok has some of the worst traffic problems in the world!  

Is congestion going to be worse now too?  Great, all that Beijing needs is more traffic on these roads!


Love,
Mack

A disturbing evening...

    I must apologize to my blog readers!  I have not been a consistent blogger.  Many amazing things have been happening to me, I have just not had the time to be in my room writing away on my  laptop.  I am going to try to be more consistent though, starting now.

   First thing I want to do is introduce everyone to one of my closest friends out here, Tim.
Tim has grown up in China, and he works at the club that I play at.  He has expressed a serious interest in learning English, and I have seen his dedication to study.  We have what is called a language exchange going on, where he helps me with Chinese, and I help him with English.  What this actually equates to is both of us wandering around Beijing together not understanding each other for hours on end.  He is a great guy and has helped me on many occasions.  He is totally funny, and we spend more time teaching each other things that are "impolite" than useful language lessons.

    For the first six weeks I was living in China, I would ask people if I can borrow a pen and they would give me the weirdest look before handing over the writing utensil.  Tim is the guy that told me that I was mispronouncing the word for 'Pen' and instead was saying a slang word for "Female Genitalia".  Whoops.  "Excuse me Miss, do you have a P*&&$?"  For this little bit of advice, I owe a life debt to Tim.  For it would not have been long until I received a serious ass whooping if I did not start pronouncing 'bi' with the down up tone instead of the straight and high tone.

   I shot this video of an interaction Tim and I  had so that you guys can all see what our friendship is like.  He claims to be so wise because he is from the same home town as Confucius.

    Then these are my two other friends, Katrina and Sven.  We hang out often here, wandering around the Hutongs or going out to eat or whatever.

Katrina on the Left, Sven on the Right.  There Chinese
names are difficult to pronounce.

    I was late to meet with them the other day so they took me for some local Beijinger snacks as my 'reward'.

    Traditional breakfast food, this was a meal of cow stomach, what seemed to be onion rings with out the onion, and the most foul tasting soup I have ever had in my life.  It is made with fermented tofu, so basically you take the stinky tofu and blend it into this paste.  But anyone who knows me knows that I am not one to back down on any food challenges...

   They thought that I couldn't do it but I drank the entire bowl of soup no problem.  (It was awful, reminded me of a high school locker room after weights class), ate the whole plate of cow stomach and actually enjoyed the onion-less onion rings.   And what do you know?  I grew three inches afterwards!  I am 6'6 now!

Traditional Beijing breakfast comes with a Coca-Cola.  For real.  Can you imagine that? 

Now I will write about last nights adventure.

Deybis, Katrina and I were walking in the snow to a place called the LAN club, where we were going to meet one of our mega fans Sladi, who works as a manager for BMW here.  She is returning to Germany so she was having a going away party and we were all going to watch the "Jackson Twins", two twin brothers we know that sing R&B and dance classic hits here in town and around the whole world.

We were about ten minutes into our walk when I spy this:

Oh my god.

So we go over to check this person out, and they are convulsing on the ground in the snow, and it looked like they had been there for a while.

Hello?  Ni hao?  Nothing.  As I got close I could see it was a man, and I was basically yelling at him two feet away and I was not getting any response.

Should I shake him?  Me and Deybis discussed, but who knows if he was hurt and shaking him would cause more of a problem, plus I am in China and outside of introducing myself, telling people I am American, asking where ________ is and ordering beer, I cannot talk to anyone.

What do we do?  We would not feel okay leaving this person here, they would probably die.  It was really really cold out.  We asked Katrina what your supposed to do in this type of situation.  In the US, no problem, you call the cops or the ambulance and people would come help.  We were on a pretty popular road though, and there are quite a few people wandering past but everyone just kind of looked the other way.  She never had called the Chinese police before, the number is 110.  We asked her if she would do it and at least tell them to come grab this person.  She called and talked to them for ten minutes and told them where we were.  They asked us to stay with the person but not to touch them and wait for the police.

One hour later after standing in the freezing snow a police car with its lights flashing slowly drove past.  I ran out to the road to wave them down and they just looked, waved back, and drove off down the block.
WHAT?! Is that the kind of emergency help you get here?  When you hail a cop car for help they just look at you and drive away?

Katrina ran down the street after the car, they turned right on the next block.  Turns out that the police station was within 200 m. of the exact spot we were standing!  She went to them and asked them to come help and they would  not, instead they gave her a phone number to call for assistance.  The unconscious person was still shaking and twitching on the ground.

Fuming, Katrina called the new phone number.  A taxi driver drove up to us and noticed our situation and let us sit in the cab as we waited some more.  Thirty minutes later two cops finally arrived.  "Whats the problem?"  they asked Katrina.  She explained the circumstance.  "It is -10 C snowing, and there is a guy who looks like he is dying over there in the snow".  They tried to wake him up but couldn't, then said to her "This is a normal thing, you do not have to call the police for this".  Insert shocked, awkward silence.  She explained to them that it is not normal for me as an American or for Deybis as a Columbian, and the police officer shook our hands and they hauled this person up and tossed him in the back of the car...  I hope that they did not toss him in a drunk tank and rough him up at all.

No matter what this persons circumstance was last night, I hope that today they are okay.  We have a great emergency system in the USA, and to anybody who is traveling abroad just remember to be really careful because not every place is operating on the same or even a remotely similar system.  All the fun, uniqueness of living here in China disappeared a little bit after that eye opening experience.

Great Wall

After finally falling asleep around 4:00 a.m. I was pissed when my alarm started going off at 6:30.  Time to get up, the driver is here.

For about $80.00 USD Tiffany, Kate and myself booked a car and driver for the day on Monday for the purpose of going to see the Great Wall at Mutianyu.  I roused myself and threw on a pair of boots and my biggest baddest jacket and stepped outside to grab a coffee.  I met the girls who immediately teased me for being from Seattle and drinking a Starbucks coffee in Beijing.  Yea, maybe it is "funny" but there is a lot of shit coffee here, and there is a lot of expensive coffee here.  A classic Pike Roast drip from Starbucks is neither of those things, so when I am not feeling adventurous I opt for the good ol' Seattle brew.

Our driver pulled up in a old school VW, we piled in and we were off.

Thirty minutes into our drive we were in a China that I have not experienced yet.  The urban environment that makes up my world gave way to a much more rural setting.  Small towns, kids at school, older folks sitting on the front stoop, people working, beautiful scenes.  Every person I saw was bundled up head to toe, the temperature was in the mid 20's as I recall.  There were so many abandoned buildings, I thought it was very strange.  We were all chatting and having a nice drive despite being absolutely exhausted.  Tiffany screamed as our driver did some dare devil passing on a small village road alongside a river and both Tiffany and I were rightfully entertained at Kate's stories of her experiences working as a singer in Dubai.

Once we arrived at our destination, we paid some sort of ticket fee and made our way towards a ski lift that would take us up to the wall.  The shabby looking lift only fit two people, so being the gentleman I am I went up front alone and the girls rode together behind me.

I was wearing the biggest baddest North Face down, subzero, fur hood coat you can purchase in Seattle, some pants with long underwear underneath and wool socks with boots.  It was not enough.  I have never been so cold in my entire life as I was riding that stupid ski lift to the top of the Great Wall.  The wind was blowing in from Mongolia, it was 7:00 am and clear sunny skies.  The outdoor temperature was about -6 Celsius, which is about 20 degrees Fahrenheit  but the wind blowing in from the north was just awful.  I was a watermelon being decimated by the hammer of the celestial arctic ice Gallagher.

Once we got to the top of the wall we spent some time wandering back and forth between the guard towers.  The Great Wall in itself is really an amazing thing to see, and the view from the wall was equally incredible.  Mongolia was to the north of the wall, and China to the south.  I was under the impression that the wall was going to be a straight line, but in truth the wall winds all over the place.  In total the structure covers over 13,000 miles of terrain including natural barriers such as rocks and rivers.  It is a true testament to the power of ancient China.  Interestingly enough the wall consists of many different sections, and unfortunately the entire wall was never connected fully.  Thus, invading armies would just swarm in and invade China through the gaps in the wall.  <insert Homer Simpson "DOH!>

After wandering around for a while and checking out the view we were ready to go.  The section of the wall we visited was limited in how far you could walk in either direction before there were large sections in disrepair.  As the sun came up the temperature started to rise and the ice on the wall started to melt so walking back to the ski lift was not as difficult as walking away from it.

This part of the day was crazy.  You only take the ski lift one direction, to get down from the wall you use what is basically a luge (toboggan) set on a metal chute.  You release the break and you fly down from the mountain on this crazy course - oh and make sure you lean into your turns so that you do not crash.
Since we got there so early, we had to wait about thirty minutes for the ice to melt off of the course so we would not crash (comforting thought).  While we were waiting we chatted with a few locals - one guy found out that Tiffany and Kate were singers and he started singing songs for us.

"Oh that is a beautiful song" Tiffany would say after three or four minutes, and the singer would just hold up his hand in a gesture to Tiffany that said ' Hold on, I am not done with my song yet...'   So we sat and listened, and waited, and listened, and then he started singing Celine Dion, then Michael Jackson, then back to some Chinese power ballads.

Finally the chute was free of ice so we could go down.  I jumped on the luge and released the break and was off - it was really fun, I could go really fast.  I was banking my turns like a pro.  I do not know how far I went, but it took about ten minutes to get all the way down.

Once at the bottom I waited for the girls, they were like ten minutes behind me somehow.  I thought they were riding the break the whole time.  Turns out that after I jumped on the luge, the singer guy helped them onto their individual luge's and was not too sneaky about groping each of them in turn before pushing them off down the slide.  That was really obnoxious to me - wait til the big American guy was out of the picture before molesting my friends, what a pervert.  I liked that guy kind of when he was just an annoying singer, now however I want to go back up there and knock his last tooth out.

We jumped back in the car and joked with our driver as we took off home.  My favorite and most successful joke that I can tell in Chinese goes like this.  "I am not American and I do not speak English".  It works the best, every Chinese person just about dies laughing.  My continual successful results are giving me a false sense that I am funny.  Maybe I will consider a stand up comic career here in China...

We stopped off two times, once to grab some food at a local restaurant and the second time to run some errand for the driver unbeknownst to us.  I have learned that you just have to relax when traveling so it was not a big deal that the driver had secret detour plans - whatever man!  Got back home and crashed for a good three or four hours before heading out to Wangfujing street - translates to the "Snack Street".

before eating the tofu...

At Wangfujing we had some delicious street stall food.  Scorpions, centipedes, deep fried whole robins,  and spiders to name a few, but also dumplings, fried banana doughnuts (the best), candied fruits, meat skewers (chicken supposedly, but there were not any cats around...), and last but not least the infamous stinky tofu.  Actually contrary to what I just said, it was last and least.  That shit is raunchy.  I could eat it if I needed food desperately  but it is one of the few foods that I would say I did not enjoy in any manner.  I ate a bunch of it too, not just one taste, but maybe four large pieces of the tofu covered in mystery sauces.  The overwhelming smell of disgusting, moldy, rotten gym socks is almost overpowering just being near the stuff, and as you eat it that smell permeates your entire body for the duration of the consumption.  Not to mention rancid breath afterwards!  YUK!

Love,
Mack

Maybe I'm Crazzzaaayyy, Maybe I'm Craaazzaaayyy. Thank you Gnarles Barkley

The China World Art Museum has a exhibit on Contemporary American Realism, on display are supposedly fifty or so American artists works, although no specific names are mentioned.  The exhibit is sponsored by the US-China Oil Painters Union, and also backed by the Shanghai Art Museum, as well as the China World Art Museum (not the Beijing Museum, or the Chinese National Art Museum).  When I found out about the exhibit, I decided I would go check it out the following day.

When I got off the subway after about a twenty/twenty-five minute ride I was standing outside of the Chinese Military Museum.  It looked very interesting, but it was a huge building and was only open for another hour.  I will make a trip there soon, to see some of the American spy planes that were shot down by the Chinese in the fifties.  These trophy's are readily on display outside the entryway to the museum - and I read that an entire floor of the museum is not translated into English to avoid being offensive to tourists.  I do not know what is more offensive...

My destination was behind the Military Museum.  A weird sun dial shaped building holds the China World Art Museum, a stark contrast to the uber communist, stalinist Military Museum.  I walk up to the front door - locked.  An old man comes over and speaks Chinese to me.  "往往破坏o趣味我?" He asks.

"I want to see the art museum" I reply.

"往往破坏o"

"I want to see the art museum" I reply again.

This goes on for a good six minutes, neither of us budging, neither of us understanding each other.  Eventually he walks over and gets a younger woman that works at the building.  She comes over and speaks Chinese to me.

"趣味我?"

"I want to see the art museum" I say.

"Closed" she replies.

Well damn.  It was two o'clock in the afternoon on a Monday - the only thing I can think of is that the museum is maybe closed on Mondays, but it did not say that on any of the posters or ads or on the website... or at least not in English.

This is a typical every day interaction that I have so I am really putting a lot of time and effort into trying to learn some Chinese.  If you could speak Chinese and English, you would be able to talk to most people on the planet.

Wow, it just look cold!

Anyways, slightly frustrated I decided to walk around a bit.  For the first time since I have been here I was in West Beijing.  Directly behind the art museum I found a huge park, with a large lake in it.  You can rent boats and go paddle out into the lake for a nominal fee, but it is so damn cold and windy here that a boat trip seemed a little treacherous.  I walked around the edges of the lake, it is about 4k to walk around the whole thing.  It was a beautiful park, there are some pictures I took that I will post to this blog.

One of the CCTV towers, not as good
as the space needle!

As I was leaving the park (I cannot find the name in English, but it is the western ancient park - Beijing has a historic park from hundreds of years ago in each cardinal direction from the city center) a portly old man saw me and yelled "HHEEEELLLLLLLLOOOO" as he tore off his pants and shirt and ran and jumped into the fridgid lake.  Oh my god it was probably 40 degrees F, with a windchill that could freeze the sweat on your mustache!  I do not know what was going on but I said "NNIIIII HHHAAAAUUU" back to him, and noticed that there were several senior citizens going for a dip.  This is not like your typical Polar Bear, where everyone jumps in for a second then gets out, these folks were literally going for a swim in the freezing water.  It will always be a happy memory for me thinking about the kind of old, kind of fat Chinese guy running while tearing his shirt off and screaming "Hello" at me and then jumping in a nearly frozen lake...


M

Halloween

I had the fortunate experience to be invited to a staff party this last week.  It worked out well since it was on Halloween evening, and I was worried that I was going to be the only twenty-something American that was not waking up November first with a gnarly hangover.  It was a staff party, so the company was picking up the tab - they booked a VIP room at KTV from 8pm til 8am.  I have been to Asian karaoke clubs before, but nothing yet that compares to this.

We have to play until midnight every day, so I naturally asked if the party was still going to be going on by the time we arrived.  It was explained to me that since people are all working different shifts at the club, throughout the entire night waves of people will be joining the party at KTV.  Ok cool, lets go.

A short taxi ride later we pulled up to a building.  There were all sorts of people out front, most of them dressed to impress.  As I descended the huge escalators to the karaoke club, it felt more like I was entering one of the monstrous casinos in Vegas, Caesars Palace, or the Venetian or something like that.  We got to the reception counter, and I was confused because it really looked like we were entering a five star hotel.  I explained through gestures that we were trying to meet our friends (can you imagine that?) as the workers at reception did not speak any English.  Ten minutes later and a few phone calls, we figured out that our room was 555 (Wu, Wu, Wu).  "Atmosphere party...!"  says the receptionist.  "Isn't that what I have been telling you the whole time?" I respond slightly frustrated.  That is just how things go here, so I am getting used to it.  My secret trick is this:  Smile and nod, smile and nod again, give a high five, shake hands, smile and nod, then repeat from the beginning.  It makes friends every time!  Oh, and my mandarin is good enough to say you are my new friend, "你是我碰育" that works wonders.

Now a little background information:

As a 'very white person' I am only told peoples English names, which often times the owner of the name is so unfamiliar with they do not know I am trying to talk to them.  Anyways, there is this guy Ken that I see every night.  He has been requesting me to play on the piano "Gangnam Style" for weeks, and I keep telling him, there is not much to it.  If I play Gangnam Style on the piano, you will not even recognize it because it is an electronic song, and played on a acoustic piano it sounds so empty, and simple, and utterly stupid, not to mention I cannot sing or rap in Korean.  It is the number one song in the world right now, and I recommend that everyone stop reading this blog for three minutes to go watch the video on Youtube.

We find room 555 and open the door.

Smoke billows out into the hallway and music is blasting, and what do you know, it is Gangnam Style.  Ken is dancing around the room, and thirty other people I know are all doing the dance and going nuts.  Food, beer bottles, liquor bottles, cake and cards are all over this room.  All of our friends cheer when we enter :) and I am quickly rushed to the front of the room to do the 'dance' from the video.  Wow, I need a drink for this! (or two, or maybe four!)

Gangnam style is played three times in a row, then finally onto some Chinese love songs. I can finally breathe the smokey air.  We are in a medium sized room, two 70 inch super nice TV's are on one wall projecting all the karaoke videos, many nice cushy couches line the opposite wall, and there are tables and chairs, and a fridge.  It is a nice room.  The sound system was the most overkill I have ever seen in my whole life as a musician.  This room maybe holds fifty people, and we are talking 8 speakers, bigggg speakers, lots of reverb, lots of delay, really loud, lots of feedback, oh man a sound mans nightmare.  The karaoke machine itself is something out of Star Trek, two touch screens in opposite corners, with wall controls also if you want to turn on the original vocals (is that illegal?) or skip the song, or volume up and down, or effects.  "Beam me straight to the BeeGee's Scotty".  Bottles of Grey Goose are being consumed like water, and some of the people from the morning shift who have already been at the party for hours are passing out.  Everyone wants us to sing, but the English selection of songs was maybe a total of one hundred tunes.  Anyone who goes to Karaoke in the states knows that a typical selection may consist of thousands and thousands of songs, so it was difficult to find a good one out of just a mere one hundred tunes. They did have my go to, which is 'Stayin' Alive'.  They also had Pink, Avril Lavigne, Jewel, Taylor Swift, Linkin Park, and Bon Jovi.  Ouch.  Everyone is waiting for us to sing so we put our songs in the que, the BeeGee's tune and Michael Jackson.  Everyone knows Billy Jean right?  Not true.  Nobody in the room knew it at all as me and Deybis were belting it out - but they did give us some pity cheers and  clapped on beat one and three for the whole tune (hah!).  Stayin' Alive went just as well.

Then our friends decided to just pick random English songs and give us the mics.  "Wo Men Bu Jer Dao" supposedly meaning "We do not know" magically stopped working, and nobody could understand all of a sudden...

Brittany Spears, Taylor Swift, Cheetah Girls, some random dance tunes that everybody knows and recognize but not a soul know the names or bands performing them pass by.  Then it is straight onto Incubus, Bon Jovi, and thank god, Maroon 5 (Damn you Adam for having such a high voice).

Check out this giant television ceiling!

I eventually moved to the other side of the room, and the singing went back to being all in Chinese.  At the table some of the girls were playing a complicated drinking game with wagering... some kind of three card Chinese poker, but utilizing lucky and unlucky numbers.   Too much for me to grasp so when the deck came to me, I taught them a very basic, and easy American drinking game.  F*** the Dealer.  It involves predicting the next card.  You get two tries, and between them the dealer gives you a hint, higher or lower.  If you get either of the guesses right, the dealer has to drink.  If you get them both wrong, you have to drink the difference between your last guess and the correct value of the card.  The dealer has to stump three people in a row to pass the deck.  As the game progresses, it becomes easier and easier to guess the correct card because you can see what has been layed out on the table.  Thus, the last dealer gets totally f***ed.  They loved this game, and it was played for litterally three hours.

At about three in the morning, re-inforcements showed up.  They consisted of all of our friends that work while we perform, the night shift.  Throw another twenty people into the mix!  Chaos!

There is a special word used here while people are partying or drinking.  "Gambay" is the word, and it is the ultimate challenge.  When someone says that to you, you have to finish your entire drink.  This is taken very seriously here, its not like in the USA where you can say, "Oh no thanks..." or, "I have had enough".  From a Chinese to a Chinese, there is no backing out of this without a big loss of face.  The seriousness of it has to do with the way people hide embarrassment in this culture.  This also explains to me why there are so many 'pukers' at our club (see above blog post).  Lucky for me, as a 'ignorant' American, I could just pretend I did not know what Gambay meant.  This saved my ass, because it was getting thrown at me like crazy.

The whole face/status/embarrassment culture here also helps to explain the popularity of these private karaoke rooms.  I never fully understood them because in the USA part of the fun is you have to shame yourself in front of a room full of strangers.  Here, the private karaoke room is like a haven where people can let loose and go nuts in a culture that is very in control, and introverted.  It was really cool to be invited and to be a part of.  Eventually everybody started to get tired and at about 6:30 in the morning we all walked home.

The next day, a lot of the girls were to embarrassed to talk to me like normal (I received a lot of drunken "I like yooooouuuuss") and everyone at the club was back to normal, serious, efficient and all business.  I will never forget that experience for the rest of my life, although I had a few similar experiences in Vietnam and Thailand, this one was the most extreme.  I am also having more and more fun, now that I am getting used to living in China.  I am building quite a network of friends here, which is nice.  I am the type of person that has a lot of friends, but those friends might not be friends with each other.  In China, for the first time in my life I am kind of experiencing what it is like to have 'co-workers' (outside of band mates).  While we are playing these first few months at Atmosphere I see the same people every day, and it is nice to get to know them.  Being a freelance musician can be a lonely profession strangely, especially as a pianist where the majority of work and performances are played solo.

Cheers,
M

P.S.  Sorry that my writing lacks structure, I just kind of sit down and blast through these blog posts.  What you are reading is a direct line of thought from my brain... I think I have some focusing issues!!!  : )

What a mess!

This is a short note about how coffee, and my quest to find proper coffee in China is expanding my cultural horizons.

At least one time every day, some times two, I will have a meal in the staff mess at the building we work in.  I have comped meals at restaurants nearby, but eating at a restaurant over and over again gets a little boring, not to mention that during the hours that we are taking our meals the restaurants are barren wastelands of empty tables and bored staff.  Because of this, you are continually being 'helped' and it gets a little obnoxious, so we opt to eat at the jam packed staff mess.  The food maybe a little more questionable, maybe mysterious is a better word for it, but it is loud and packed and has a good energy about the place, not to mention it is easy for a 'Handsome American' to make friends there.

Since the mess is cafeteria style, and busy, and nobody that works down there speaks a lick of English, we usually just follow suit.  We get in line, grab our red trays, and take little dishes of food from different 'lunch ladies' as we walk down the assembly line of mystery meats and strange 'green vegetables'.  Portions are pre-set for some items, like grilled chicken and cartilage skewers, but for other items such as tofu and mystery meat sausage, or cauliflower/broccoli stir fry you can take as much as you want.

Every time I walk into the mess, the cooks all chat among themselves, then serve me up on my own white tray, separate from everyone else.  They would heap a huge amount of rice on to the tray, and then load it up with so much food it would be impossible to eat half of it.  Then my buddy Deybis would follow behind me, and get a portion half the size that they gave me.  He would have to argue with the lunch ladies to get extra.  The staff reasoning was that I am huge, and American, and need lots of food.  (Deybis is Colombian  After a week of this debacle  and me throwing away and wasting a lot of food I convinced them that i can eat a normal amount, and that if I am hungry, I can come back and get more.  This was hard for the cooks to understand.

To get to the point, there is a crazy looking Chinese coffee machine down there that does not look like anything I have ever seen before.  I have been waiting to watch somebody use it first before I try my hand at it in front of two hundred watching people.  Trust me, I would be watched very closely, and as a expert coffee drinker I can not afford to screw up!

It was one of these days while I was eyeing the machine that I saw what appeared to be a giant glass container of drip coffee off to the right of the machine, somehow I had never seen it before.  Nobody was taking anything from it.  Strange.  I lie in wait like a Nile Crocodile...

Two days later, I have not seen anybody make espresso or take any of the drip coffee.  At this point, I can no longer control myself, and I grab a big cup and go to the drip coffee container, pull the tap filling up an entire cup.  There, that was easy!  And it was not a big deal, no problem.  I take the cup back to my table, where I take a big whiff.  Smells sweet, a lot of the coffee here is.  Dang, thought it would maybe be a nice dark roast...  I raise the cup to my lips, and take a gulp, it is scalding hot.

It was hot Coca-Cola with Ginger.

My disappointment was unbelievable!  I was sitting with Tiffany and Deybis as my world came crashing down around me.  They cheered me up, saying I could always go grab coffee at Starbucks.  "I don't wanna be the guy in China drinking Starbucks though..." I replied.  As a rule for myself, I always commit to two tries of food or drink.  This might be something I picked up off of a cooking television show, but it makes sense.  Sometimes the first taste is such a shock that you can not really get a good feel for what you are really experiencing.  I take another swig of the hot soda.  Actually, not bad.  Bubbly, hot like coffee... and spicy as hell because there was so much ginger in it.  As a matter of fact, I kind of like it.  It could never stand up to my expectations of the thick, dark, bean juice that I love and am naturally addicted to being from Seattle, but on its own this warm soda was okay.

Intrigued, I asked around.  "Henry", one of the guys from the gym informed me that it is a Chinese cold remedy to take hot Coca-Cola with lots of ginger.  Hmm, interesting - maybe that is why not that many people were drinking it, nobody was sick.  I would encourage anybody who is feeling under the weather to try this back home - it is actually pretty good.  Every day now when I enter the staff mess, the first thing I do is pour myself a large glass of this Coke - Tea.  Supposedly you can also buy it in a yellow Coke can around town...

M