Last nights gig was fun, although I didn’t drink much to regain my strength from drinking too much the night before last. It was in the Victoria Grand Hotel, which is the nicest in the city. I still think it’s reasonably cheap, at $100US a night for the most economical room, although Kim disagreed with me. I had the chance to meet a lot of people last night. They brought another DJ from Shanghai there who spoke English. We were hanging out and drinking Rocky Mountain in the booth, exchanged numbers so hopefully we can hang out and drop some tunes while I’m in town. Toward the end of the night while taking down a projector a power cable dropped down and landed on the bar right in front of a girl who tapped me to get my attention. She ends up being a Wenzhou-native named Vivian who happens to also speak English (does everyone speak English here now?). We talked for a few minutes, exchanged numbers, and made plans to go swimming tomorrow. She says she knows of an outdoor pool which I’m ecstatic about; the only one I’ve been able to find thus far has been a stupid olympic size indoor pool with lanes. I want to bask in the summer sun and just swim and float around in circles although a high diving board¬†would really make an outstanding swimming experience. Vivian really seems like the¬†antithesis of the two dancers from the previous night. She’s relatively demure, very cute and polite, and doesn’t (to my knowledge) dance almost naked in front of hundreds of people. I can certainly appreciate the spectrum.
They have a tremendous ping pong room where we had a ping pong championship after dinner. I didn’t win, but I held my own against the mighty Chinese contenders who are fantastic ping pong sportsmen. Sometimes in the afternoon I watch professional ping pong on TV. I like ping pong, but it’s akin to watching professional wrestling to me. They treat it very much like a real sport and you can see the tension in the air around the players; this is no in-your-parents-basement ping pong, this is serious Chinese business.
I want to get an electronic english-chinese dictionary but the ones here don’t include pinyin which makes them useless to me since I can’t identify more than maybe 100 characters. I looked into the Palm option – I get acquire a Palm and load some software on it which will translate for me, and additionally allows me to enter Chinese characters with the stylus which it can interpret. Fairly badass, but also quite an investment.
Speaking of electronics, I had a guy approach me on the street this morning and try to sell me a really nice stolen cell phone. He offered it at 1200rmb; I didn’t really want it, so I said 200 and kept walking. He said okay, and I picked it up and looked at it. It was a Samsung, one of the sliding-faceplate models, but I don’t need two cell phones so I passed.
I will finally go to the computer mall here today to get some portable speakers. I listen to the iPod constantly (I’m listening to Patty Cakes’ “Let It Go” drum & bass mix now), but to really achieve champion form I need some speakers to play reggae when I’m reading in my hotel room with the window open.
Oh, there’s a Coors boss here who called himself Captain Coors. He’s not very pirate-like, but the name still has charm to spare.