You likely heard of the recent mudslide in China which killed, I think, well over one thousand people.  Yesterday, was a Memorial Day for the victims.  I only learned about this late last night.  So, what did this entail?  Shutting down all entertainment businesses like theaters, dance clubs, and Karaoke bars.  All TV within China just showed a blue screen, reminiscent of Windows, with some text informing the viewer that today was a memorial day for the victims of the Gansu mudslide.

I was in the LuoHu part of Shenzhen (in DongMen specifically), a place that’s notorious for fake goods, counterfeit, and thieves.  All around a pretty interesting place to just observe.  I happened to see one of these little kid thieves in action for the first time.  I’ve been robbed once in China, back in 2007, also in Luohu, when a thief somehow managed to open my small pocket on my backpack and extract my iPod.  A pretty amazing feat – that zipper was tough to open, yet this thief did without any awareness from me.

I wasn’t the victim this time, but, as I was crossing on top of one of the pedestrian bridges, I noticed a kid tip-toeing back down the stairs, almost in Bugs Bunny cartoon fashion.  Seriously, the only thing that was missing was the pizzicato violins to punctuate the tip toes.  He had his back arched, both arms extending up with wrists pointed down.  Classic caricature thief pose.  The target was a Chinese man, talking on his mobile phone, with a pouch slung over his shoulder – think of it as a man purse.  These things are popular out here.

Out of curiosity, I turned around and walked to the top of the stairs and watched the thief in pursuit.  I was waiting for the opportunity to yell out.  It almost seemed like the target had some sort of premonition, he moved his right hand on the bag and scooted it in front of him, all the while still on the phone.  At the same time, an skinny ugly man came from behind me and stood right next to me on the top of the stairs.  I looked left at him and notice he was just staring at me, almost a glare.  I didn’t realize what was going on at first and just stared back thinking, “another starer…”.  After a couple or three seconds (a long time in terms of stairs), he went down the stairs to the kid who had given up on the target.  I turned away, looking back to see them both staring back at me.  It slowly sunk in that this was a thieving team.  I’d heard of this before.  The kids do the work and there’s an adult nearby to watch and monitor them, and get them out of trouble when something goes wrong.  Should the thief be caught, the adult can jump in really quick and make up some sort of nonsense like, “Stop harassing my son!  What’s wrong with you!” and make lots of noise as to embarrass the victim into just moving on.

When it comes to these thieves, I’ve been told that most people will not say or do anything to warn or help anyone.  That all goes back to the, “best to keep your mouth shut” culture in China.  When you hear of all this nonsense like the Cultural Revolution and so on, you begin to understand why the culture unfortunately developed this way.  I’m hoping there are no nonsensical Good Samaritan laws on the books though.  I didn’t think these were real, but just looked it up on Wikipedia.  How’s that for a change of topic?

Before heading to Shanghai, and while I was there, numerous people asked if I was going to the Shanghai Expo which is, as far as I can tell, the equivalent of a World’s Fair.  It has drawn thousands of extra visitors to Shanghai and lasts a full six months.  Well, I couldn’t find a compelling reason to go.  Hearing that there were long waiting lines sealed the deal.  Why do I want to do this?  OK, on to the real story:

The real reason for going to Shanghai was to have another CMIC retreat with Chris.  Peter and Chris had been to Shenzhen twice before, and since Peter’s trip to the US freed up a bed, the idea to spend some time working closely with Chris was hatched.  Well, I stayed about five full days and we worked every day from morning until bedtime only breaking for meals and the World Cup match between Argentina and Germany.

Well, I can’t argue at all with the results of the trip:

• Peter and I blasted through a release of the 1.1 software the day I arrived.  Actually, he upgraded the servers with all the changes while we were asleep and I made sure the system was running as expected the next morning.  A few bugs were discovered (as well as some fraudsters), but we took care of it quickly.
• Chris and I, working side-by-side, cranked out the callback feature making it possible to initiate calls as well as send calls.  I knew we could get this done during the trip, but I was surprised that we got it working end-to-end in just two full days.
• I bumped up my bash command line skillz several notches by just sitting with Chris and asking questions.  I really hope to be able to zip around the shell soon.
• Chris took me on a survey of the Ruby on Rails development system, which looks like a real pleasure to program in.  I can’t wait to learn it inside and out.  I also spent some time alone working on some sample code and problems.

Some fun things we did:

• We worked in some great locations, notably:  1) The Park Hyatt Cafe at the millionth floor (ok, 91st) of the International Financial Center (IFC) building.  We enjoyed expensive (and decent) cappuccino and the best view in the city.  2) Mocha Cafe in People’s Square Park.  This place is hidden behind the entrance to an art museum.  It appears to be unknown to the masses because, despite its size, there were only a couple of parties there.  We enjoyed a hot lunch in the humid pre-storm afternoon, then escaped inside to AC while it poured outside.  It felt good to crank out more code while looking out onto the park in a thunderstorm.
• Watching the Germany – Argentina game in a German restaurant.  We got the best seat in the house simply by asking, “Can we put a table HERE?” From experience, I predicted that Germany would win and that if Argentina got behind, they’d fall apart.  Neither of those was incorrect.  The Germans in the restaurant were quite mean to poor ole sad-looking Maradona whenever his face was shown on the TV.
• Enjoyed the Monday special at Malone’s:  a 50 RMB colossal hamburger at Malone’s.  I hadn’t had a hamburger like that in months.  My was it tasty!  I respect Chris for eating another half of one, including the fries and the pint of beer it came with.  He said the week before he ate two.  Respect.

Some innerestin’ things:

• Shanghai felt so different this time around.  I guess the last time I was there with Robert, we frequented visited Suzhou, got scammed by tea show representatives, bought knock-off ties on the street, and witnessed rats skittering through local hole-in-the-wall restaurants.  But this time, I had to make a special effort to speak Chinese, it seemed like.  Every single restaurant was full of foreigners and most every waitress spoke fine English.  It was good to get back to Shenzhen for this reason.
• Shanghai was also quite expensive this time around, restaurants especially.  Granted, we didn’t do any street food, but even the Chinese restaurants was at least 130 per person (a little over $19 USD).  I guess the cheapest was an Indian restaurant with a lunch special.  That cost us 91 RMB.
• There were tons of foreigners.  Plenty were quite obnoxious.  ‘Nuff said.
• The Chinese were generally more behaved and urbane.  I saw no egregious violations like peeing in the street and only one spitting incident.

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I was at a Karaoke party for an hour or so a cupla weeks ago.  One of the girls sang this song (in the Tibetan language, which is not simply a dialect of Mandarin).  Anyway, it totally floored me.  I just found it strikingly original and interesting, simply from a musical perspective.  The title means something like:  “Ten thousand things growing (or living, or being born)”. The text is Buddhist scripture, but I don’t know what it means.  Maybe I can hunt that down.  Here’s the video:

This is one massive story.  It would take a novelette to describe everything, but I’ll try to hit on the main points here.  First a little background:  Davide and I started collaborating on music together.  DJ + Guitar:  A pretty interesting combo, right?  Yeah, I think so.  Anyway, we complement each others’ skill very well.  It was back in November, 2009, I think, sitting together at a La Mian in Nanshan eating Hong Shao Tu Dou Fan (a cheap meat, potato, and rice dish), that Davide first proposed sharing musical ideas.  That seems like a long long time ago, but there were many discussions in between, many many tests and proposals, experiments and so on, that led up to a performance together in Hainan.

Another key moment was when I was showing Davide the “Creating a Relic” video and the intro to the original version of “Outside My Window” came on.  “Oh, what’s that?!  That sounds like a good song to do!”  Why?  The nice simple 16th note intervals at the beginning of the song.  We worked a long time on the song, trying out dozens and dozens of different ideas, while at the same time testing out brand new software (fortunately, we both use Macs) both for recording and for guitar effects.  We learned a ton as we went and reworked ideas multiple times.

In between, we had the opportunity to play at one of Davide’s friend’s Farewell to China party.  Here, we just did a simple version of “I Got a Feeling” (or is it “I Gotta Feeling”?) by the Black-Eyed Peas, intermixed with the “Long Train Running” and “Smoke on the Water” (I thought I’d never play “Smoke on the Water” seriously, but I did…ok, maybe not so seriously).  That performance was fun, not bad; we made a video of it, but it wasn’t one tenth the excitement of Hainan.

Other ideas germinated as well:  Why not make a promotional video for the song?  I’ve got an HD video camera, know how to edit using high end video software like Final Cut and Premiere Pro (I still prefer Premiere!), and possess a green screen and lights!  Even as we began working on a video for Outside My Window, promoters became interested when they heard this news.  We worked extremely long hours before the show in Hainan on the video so we could show it on a big screen that we thought might be there.

The interesting thing about the gig, which was arranged by a Chinese DJ colleague named “Yutise”, was that we could learn almost nothing about it in advance.  Even after the show was over, we really don’t understand the purpose of it.  Davide warned of this multiple times:  “That’s China.  Even if they tell you what it is and describe it to you, it may be completely different by the time you get there.”  We heard numbers of attendees like “two thousand”, “twenty thousand”, and even…”two million”.  Well, “two million”; I knew that wasn’t possible.  The title of the show was “International Electronic Music Festival”.  OK, that sounds great, but why is it being held in Haikou, Hainan of all places.  If anything, you’d think it would be held in Sanya, the beach resort of the island.  These are just some examples of the various questions that we had that were never answered, not that we didn’t try.  That kinda made it fun though.

“The Company” bought our plane tickets, booked our hotel room, and picked us up at the airport.  Although, we didn’t realize who our contact was.  A man came up to us waving a pink sign with Chinese characters all over it.  I looked intently and couldn’t understand it.  Surely, this wasn’t for us.  We sat down and called Yutise who informed us that our contact was indeed already there.  A few minutes later, the man came up to us again, this time with mobile phone in hand.  Written in English were our names.  OK, let’s go!

The city of Haikou was nicer than I was expecting.  It was very hot and humid, definitely tropical.  But the city looked reasonably well cared for and the waterfront approach to the hotel lined with palm trees and parks was inviting.  The hotel was right across from the water; the opposite side of the street was a huge park.  Another pink banner greeted us when we arrived.  There were several staff members dressed in festive blue tropical shirts.  Here, we met “Xiao Dong” and his wife who did a great job in taking care of us.  We were issued our hotel room card keys randomly and went to our rooms.  We both lucked out in our own way:  Davide’s room was awesome, with a chilly AC.  My room was the big suite with a view of the water, but the AC could never chill the room down that cold.  We were both happy and settled on the idea of switching rooms the second night.

We attended a government dinner for the tourism minister of Haikou where we started piecing together the purpose of the show, though still it’s not entirely clear.  The pink banners were also at the dinner.  We eventually learned that they had something to do with a wedding festival of sixty couples, held in the large park across from the hotel.  As far as we could tell, the first performance was a partially a celebration of this event.  Yet, there were two performances.  We still don’t really know the true purpose, although we do know that the organizers were very happy with it and called it a success.

Yutise informed us that we needed to get to the stage now!  We protested that we had to change; I was still dressed like a computer programmer!  No time, no time!  Well, I don’t recall how it all worked out, but we ended up going to the stage for a “sound check” and then returning to the hotel, changed, and returned back to the stage.  I don’t even know what the purpose of the sound check was.  We didn’t check our sound once; we just plugged everything into the laptop and verified that we heard our music.  OK, we could have done that in the hotel.  Bizarre.

Returning back to the stage at night was a thrill, and terrifying!  The stage now was lit up, LCD screen going with all sorts of images, lights flashing all over the place, and even some fireworks now and then.  I remember approaching the stage from behind and hearing the swell of the crowd.  Would I be able to do this?  “Suuuuure”, I thought.  The music is not technically demanding.  There’s no reason to not be able to pull this off.  Because of my lack of performance time, my ability really dials back quite a bit.  I don’t feel nearly as flexible or limber to play challenging music.  But, I knew I could do this.

“Outside My Window” rocked the house!  Especially the second night.  The first night was a little chaotic, and I hit one sour note (an F natural over a nice D major progression) that sounded utterly apparent and horrible to me, though I know that an audience frequently misses these things.  Oh well, there’s nothing to do but move on and keep on enjoying.  But, the second night was smooth as silk, much more fun, and much more relaxed.  Even though the part I created for the guitar was really simple, I still needed to focus quite a bit on the fingering.  I didn’t look up that much.  The first time I did though, right after the beat really kicked in, I looked up for a flash and only saw hundreds of hands in the air.  I won’t forget that vision for a long time.

The intro to “Outside My Window” on night two (for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I can say “I love the guitar sound!”):

0:00 – Davide, speaking through his headphones:  Women ai ni!! (“We Love you” in Chinese), followed by me laughing
0:08 – Song starts (we came up with this version the night before!)
0:12 – MC says something in Chinese.  I can’t make it out.
1:07 – Electro synth enters.  Picking notes on guitar more aggressively.  The “Guitar Rig” software responds very nicely to this.
1:20 – Nice new melody on guitar (night before!).
1:37 – I really like the build-up here, while sampled guitar plays new melody.
1:51 – Kick it!

As fantastic as the song was on night two, it started out roughly with a technical misconfiguration.  I won’t go into all the reasons that lead up to that, but Davide had to start the set alone and debug the problem as he performed.  A simple setting change of either the outputs or inputs configuration on the computer got us going again.

Misadventures in between performances:

• Various late night meals and snacks with various friendly staff members.
• A rough meal on a side street in downtown Haikou.  We were stared at quite a bit.  Folks were shocked that we could speak the language.
• A foul-smelling outdoor restaurant with not a single customer wanted to charge us 500 RMB (about $75) for a crab.
• Davide’s CD fell off the stage and into the sand.  “Quick!  Wash them and find a replacement case!”
• Hurry, hurry, rush, rush, no time to change!  Then we get to the venue and wait around for an hour and a half.
• “Check out this awesome hotel room!  This is a great place to play AOE!”
• Expressing our gratitude at given coconuts to drink when we first arrived, we were gifted them multiple times per day throughout the trip.  This meant frequent trips to the bathroom.
• The press:  “How do you feel about Hainan?” and “How did you learn about Haikou?” I had to think fast for a substitute answer for not knowing anything about it before the show.  Although, now I’m a strong endorser.
• Handing out CDs, getting mobbed eventually.

In the end, I thought the name “International Electronic Music Festival” was a misnomer.  It didn’t seem to be much of a festival and the only thing that made it international was Davide and me.  But, the show was awesome, so much fun.  The folks were really nice and took care of us.  We filmed the second night (the adapter wasn’t connected well enough to charge the battery the first night!)

One amazing thing that I realized is that opportunities can come at any time.  When I was younger, I thought it would be cool to be a “rock star”.  Looking back, I feel happy with the way things worked out or, more accurately, are working out, but I always hoped that I could do more performances.  That’s one area where I was severely lacking.  Well, “later in life”, this opportunity has come up, and in such a grand and enjoyable way.  I hope there are more to come; we’ll work to make it happen.

Here are some pics from my little beat-up camera.  We’re still trying to hunt down some other professional pictures as well as footage from the big camera on the crane above the audience.

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Chinese, generally, are lousy dressers.  And I acknowledge that I’m not much of a great dresser myself, but I’ve seen some pretty egregious violations here in China.  No, nothing overly revealing or offensive, which is more common in the US, but just a complete lack of caring about something as simple as matching.  Women, naturally, are much better at the men than this, but the women tend to be generally better at most things.  Well, enough of that, just have a look at this picture (surreptitiously snapped with the iPhone)!

Wow, feels like I’m turning a corner with Chinese.  Even though I don’t regularly “study” now, I do still talk to lots of folks in Chinese and pay attention to new words and phrases.  Here’s a sign that I’m turning a corner.  I’m starting to recognize parts of different words appearing in other words.

Here’s what I mean:  In Chinese, all characters in the written language are just one syllable.  In fact, there is no basic word that’s more than one syllable, hence mono-syllabic language.  More complex words are just combinations of these basic words.  I’ve never encountered a more complex word that’s beyond three characters.  In fact, the longest words I know are just for modern objects, something like “hair conditioner” or “wireless network”.

So here’s my recent example of words that I learned and how they fit in with other words:

can (tone 1) jia (tone 1):  means to attend something, like a meeting or a class.  The “c”, by the way, is pronounced like a “ts” together.

can (tone 1) guan (tone 1):  means to go on a tour of some place, like when you’re traveling.

guan (tone 1) ling (tone 3):  is part of the bigger phrase that I know:  “huan ying guan ling”, which is what you hear every time you go to a restaurant.  It’s basically “You’re welcome to visit this place”.

See the correlation of all the basic words.  I learned “can jia” when learning how to ask about attending yoga classes.  I knew “huan ying guan ling” from a long time ago, and I knew that “huan ying” was “welcome” and “guan ling” was “visiting place”.  So, when I learned “can guan” it was easy to understand the derivation of the word, something like “attending visit”.  Pretty neat, huh?

Finally got around to finishing up my Cerro Chirripo, Costa Rica, movie. Here’s the original story, if you’d like to read it.

I told myself that I’d never be an English teacher in China.  It just seems that most every foreigner in China is an English teacher.  So, not wanting to be like the average foreigner in China, I simply said that I wouldn’t teach English, even though I enjoy teaching.  When Davide‘s wife first asked me to teach at her fledgling English school, I declined saying that I was too busy (true!).

But, when she sent me a desperate text message saying that a teacher had canceled at the last minute (a common problem among those bums), what could I say?  So, I showed up and winged a class.  Turns out it was a lot of fun and quite easy.  There wasn’t much more to do than just talk, ask them to repeat, and correct pronunciation.  OK, a little more than that, but still easy if you’re willing to be a bit of an actor and have a good time with the kids, there’s really nothing to it.

The kids can be totally rambunctious, much wilder than western kids.  And the parents, who enjoy watching too, will usually not do anything.  When they do scowl at the kids, the rebuke only has effect for maybe one minute.  However, the last class that I taught (a duo of the better English speakers), one of the girls just would not behave at all.  Her mom happened to be inside the office.  After telling the girl to sit down and behave for the 25th time, I stood up and knocked on the door.  The kids immediately got quiet.  I told the mom to have a talk with her daughter and tell her to behave.  Well, the end result was a fit of crying and I had to teach the remainder of the class as a 1:1.  Oh yeah, and because that disruption was so big, I felt like I needed to improvise a game.  So, I came up with sort of a charades game:  We took turns drawing on the whiteboard.  The other person would think of an animal or object and describe it.  The other would draw it.  The result was often funny.  I’m only able to do this game with this one student, who lived in Toronto for a while.  Impossible for the other students.

Most of their English ability is deceptively bad.  They have a decent amount of vocabulary, but when I got bold in one class and suggested that we started working on basic sentences, I was shocked at how hard this was for them.  Sentences like, “Are you awake?” and “I’m going to school.” took a lot of effort!  I wonder how they’re teaching English in the native schools?  Guess I’ll learn more about all this as I go along.

Oh, here’s another interesting thing, our classroom is in an apartment that’s been converted into a school.  This is quite common in China.  There’s some sort of after-school school being conducted in an apartment on the first floor of my building.  Not sure the legality of this (I suspect there’s no issue with it), but this is quite common.  There’s an old lady in an apartment under the school that I teach at who periodically complains about the shouting kids.  Can’t say I blame her.  They do love to shout.

Here’s a shot right before class.  Normally, there are five students in this class: