The Soundtrack of My Week

I thought I might mention one thing about the music festival I went to last week. The name Midi is not related to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) which is the way synthesizers and other digital musical instruments communicate. The name is from the Chinese 迷笛 (midi), which as close as I can tell translates as “crazy flute.”

Friday’s excursion to the festival was not the end of the week’s musical activities. RR and I went to the final night of the Apres Midi shows at Star Live to see P.K.14 and The Soundtrack of Our Lives. P.K.14 is a local band whose music I had heard before (you can hear it on their MySpace page). They’re a little on the punk side, but play well enough to be within my sphere of acceptability. TSOOL is a Swedish band I like quite a bit. I reviewed one of their albums in an issue of Exposé, and I had heard most of their others.

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post was the fact that RR and I had dinner at a Russian restaurant called Traktir before the Tuesday night show. We had walked by the place many times (it’s on the path between home and office), but never been in. The customers consisted in large part of actual Russians, which we took as a good sign. If Russians go there, it’s probably good and maybe even authentic. We hit a snag right off when we found that our beer selections (Baltika 5 and 9) were not available, so we had to settle for 6 (or whichever is the red one). It’s a pretty good beer, so all was not lost. RR ordered the stroganoff, and I chose the breaded carp fillets with mashed potatoes. Aside from the slowness of the service, the meal was good. When we were about halfway through our meal, a pair of musicians took to the stage for our entertainment. There was a female singer and a guy playing keyboards with programmed backing. They did a few tunes in Russian (pop songs I’d guess), and then launched into a bizarre selection of music from around the world, including the strangest version of John Denver’s “Country Roads” I ever hope to hear.

For Saturday night we decided to skip the Russian place and get pizza at Napoli across the street. We’ve both been there several times, and the pizza is pretty reliable, though the service is slow. Musically, Napoli serves up a constant diet of Enya, which I must say is remarkably poor music to eat pizza by.
The show at Star Live was great. P.K.14 is an interesting band that might best be called post-punk – not that that is a very meaningful label. The singer reminds me more than a little of David Byrne on the early Talking Heads records, though the musical backing is much more aggressive than the Heads ever displayed in the studio. They had a tendency to go off on instrumental tangents, and some of the songs certainly topped the six or seven minute range.
Then The Soundtrack of Our Lives took the stage. Luckily it was a big stage, since there are six guys in the band. Leader Ebbot Lundberg is a very charismatic performer in spite of not physically fitting the image of “rock star.” The band was very good, tight but not over-rehearsed, and a lot of fun to watch and listen to.
After the show, we hung around and got to chat a little with Mr. Lundberg, acquiring some CDs in the process.

It was back to work on Monday, though it turned out virtually all of our Chinese staff took that day off as well. There were only a half dozen or so people in the office.

On Tuesday some of us went bowling to celebrate BG’s birthday. We went to the Gongti 100, and this time I took my camera. These are my own shots of what is supposed to be the world’s largest bowling alley.
This was taken from the vicinity of lane 9 looking towards lane 100.
Here is our gang on lanes 31-32.

For the record, BG had high score on the first game, with a personal best 174. For the second game, I had the highest with 123 – not my personal best, but good enough in this crowd! Our friend LW managed to finish on a Magic Number and win a cap as a prize.

After bowling for an hour or so, we went across the street to The Pavillion, where TG had previously dropped off a cake.

We had dinner, and afterwards they brought out this vision of deliciousness.

Afterwards, the manager came over and presented BG with a stuffed bear. She said she had decided to start a new tradition: that people who celebrated their birthdays there would get complimentary bears.
I mentioned in the last post that the water features here at Seasons Park were filled for the holidays. Here are a couple of pictures I took. Today when I got home from work, I found they’ve all been drained again. Sigh.
In other news, I did finally get my work permit. I’m good for a year on this, and will need to renew it next spring.

In other, less interesting or pleasant news, my sinuses have finally found something here they don’t like. I think it’s probably just the dust. Every day for the last couple weeks, I’ve had to take something to stop my nose from running and for headaches.

Bowling for peace

On Thursday evening, fourteen of us from the office went bowling at Gongti 100. The 100 in the name refers to the number of lanes at the bowling alley. I didn't take my camera – I'll have to go back sometime and snap a few shots. It's really huge.
This is a picture I stole off someone else's website (I promise to replace it with my own as soon as I can). We got lanes 25-27, split into three teams. My team was the one with only four people, so we took turns bowling the fifth line. In the first game we came in second place by a small margin, but in the second game we really took off and topped the second-place team by forty points or so. I only managed a 111, nowhere near my personal best, and my wrist was feeling pretty sore by the time we finished. One thing that was remarkably consistent about my performance was that every time I got a strike or spare, I did really terrible the next frame. Consistent in my inconsistency. Anyway, everyone seemed to have a pretty good time. I don't know if this kind of outing for "team-building" is done much here. I enjoyed the chance to spend some time with the Chinese half of our office. Sometimes I feel like there's an invisible wall across the middle of the office, with the Americans over on one side and the Chinese on the other. That's one kind of wall I hope falls over time (and I'm sure the eventual improvement of our language skills will help). As we were leaving, I asked one of the women if this had been more fun than staying home watching TV. She said no. I had noticed that she seemed to be enjoying herself earlier, so either she misunderstood my question or she really enjoys TV.

When I turned on the TV this morning (something I really don't do very often), there was car racing on ESPN and Larry King on CNN, so I started flipping channels and ended up on BTV-8, which is a music channel. They were doing a show on Korean music, and the hostess was speaking in English. I caught part of a video by a singer called Bada that was pretty good, more rock than is usual for K-Pop. In the "Up and Coming" segment, they showed a clip for Kim Ah-joong’s version of the Blondie song "Maria". It's from a movie that she stars in called 200 Pound Beauty, and from what I could gather in the video, the plot concerns an overweight girl who is a clumsy misfit. There are of scenes of her embarrassing herself by trying to wear trendy clothes and being dorky in front of cute guys. Then she goes to a hospital and has some sort of operation, and when she comes out, she's thin and beautiful. Now guys trip over their feet when she walks by. Somehow she becomes a pop star and there are scenes of her onstage with lights and pyrotechnics. Musically, it's pretty close to the original version, though much of it is translated into Korean. It looks like you can watch it on YouTube. (Internet's being really slow here today, so I can't get it to load myself – someone let me know if it's really there.) If an American movie had the same plot, I suspect it would be boycotted for its treatment of overweight people, much as Shallow Hal was a few years ago. I don't know if that makes Americans superior in sensitivity, or just reflects cultural differences. Or maybe sometimes you just have to find humor in something without examining it too closely for political correctness.

Later...

Watching TV here can be annoyingly similar to in the US in one respect: certain commercials get repeated way too frequently. On CNN, one of the biggest advertisers is Malaysia Airlines, and I must admit one of their ads amuses me. Their catch-phrase is "Wish you had more time? Book online with Malaysia Airlines." Nothing special, huh? No prizes to the one who came up with that line. But some of the images they put with it are good. My favorite shows a man in a business suit hurrying into an office, glancing at his watch and looking harried. He passes a table that has a coffee maker, a bin labeled COFFEE and a bin labeled SUGAR. The coffee pot holds only water. He looks at the pot longingly, checks his watch again, shakes his head, and starts to walk away. Then he turns back, puts a scoop of coffee grounds into his mouth, adds a scoop of sugar and a glass of water, swishes it around in his mouth, and goes upon his way. Then the slogan comes up on the screen.

And I just have to add that no matter how much cricket gets covered here on ESPN, the game is still completely opaque to me, less understandable than quidditch. No wonder it didn't catch on outside of the British empire.