Back in Thailand
This time on Koh Chang, an island in close proximity to Cambodia which I haven't been to before. Even still, everything is familiar. Been to a handful of islands in Thailand, been to them all. The day after tomorrow I'll head back to Bangkok to meet my father and sister, who are arriving from Yokohama, Japan. I guess they went to see temples or something. I heard they went to some meal in a fancy restaurant where they were served by geishas. Sounds neat.
Tomorrow I'll finish the book I'm reading, Blink. :whatup:
束河
After spending a few days in Shu He, I'm back in the Yunnan capitol of Kunming.
Shu He is a small mountain town next to Lijiang, which is a major tourist attraction in Southern China. I didn't see more than a handful of foreigners there, but about 10,000 chinese tourists, each group complete with a tourguide toting a group flag and yelling into a megaphone. Chinese tourists are really obnoxious, by the way. Shu He itself is incredibly beautiful, though. Most of my time there was spent sitting around doing almost nothing, in the company of half a dozen friends, or out taking photographs. After only a few days there I felt like I had seen almost everything there and was ready to leave. There were a few mountains that I didn't climb which I'm sure must be fun, but I'll save that for next time. Because of the people that I was in the company of (including Wang Lei, a semi-famous underground musician, and his band, who are rasta Chinese who chain-smoke joints, Guo Guo, owner of the Hemp House, and stoner from Belgium named Matt). Needless to say, I was higher than I needed to be and ended up feeling like I wasted time by being crippled on the couch.
Such is ShuHe, I believe. I ended up having to leave a day early due to my laptop charger spontaneously breaking. Due to gigs this weekend, making sure that I either get it repaired or buy a new one within 2 days is of great importance, and I definitely wouldn't be able to find anything like that without returning to a big city. So last night I took a 10-hour night bus from Lijiang back to Kunming. The night bus wasn't so bad at all; I slept in an upper area to the very back of the bus, next to two small children. They fell asleep almost instantly so I listened to music for a short period before nodding off myself. I woke up at 4:30am to find that we'd arrived in Kunming almost 3 hours ahead of schedule. Not wanting to check into a hotel for 2 nights, I got into a taxi and found an internet bar where I sat for a few hours watching youtube clips. I stumbled upon some Bill O'Reilly clips which made me want to punch him in the throat. O'Reilly is a master at making total strangers hate his guts, there were about 1,000 comments on each of the videos wishing slow death upon him. The clip where Steven Colbert was a featured guest on the O'Reilly Factor nearly made me laugh tears.
In the late morning I checked into a local hotel, ate lunch, and spent the next 5 hours or so studying Chinese. It's been a while since I've sat down and studied hard in one sitting, but I had a solid session today. I reviewed a lot of characters that I use in normal speech but am less familiar with the characters, and added about 25 new words. Some of questionable use, many political in nature, but all very interesting. I was chatting online with a friend in Chengdu who wished me luck in an interesting way - he said 上帝保佑你, which translated means something like "the emperor above (God) blesses and protects you". Chinese is such an elegant, poetic language and English seems so stale and boring by comparison. I can't picture myself learning English as a second or third language and having a great time doing it. The five hours I spent studying flew by.
Tomorrow at 7:40am I catch a flight to Wuhan, one of the three furnaces (ridiculously hot cities to be in during summertime), where I have a show tomorrow, and then another in Xi'an on Saturday. And then I return to Chengdu and this short five-city tour will come to an end. The sun has just set and it's raining now. I'm not looking forward to waking up tomorrow before the sun has risen, but I'm anxious to see if the show especially in Xi'an lives up to how I remember my last gig there being (off the wall fun & crazy).
再见
Chongqing: City of Celebration
I've gone months now without writing in here at all, largely because of a lack of travel. After having been mainly located in Chengdu for several years now, it's become increasingly rare that I find something new and inspiring to write about, but a recent trip back to Chongqing has me somewhat rejuvenated. The show was at Falling Club (爱上) again, which is a club that has never failed to draw a full house before, but I was skeptical this time because the party was on a Sunday night. I can't remember the last time I've DJ'd anywhere on a Sunday, but lo and behold, Falling Club in 解放北 (Freedom Square in the center of Chongqing) was active as ever, and the club was a roadblock. The gig itself didn't live up to the glory of the previous Saturday night that I was there, but it was fairly epic when I was able to play trip hop for 30 minutes before finishing. In most cities and clubs the bosses would insist on me not being too adventurous with the playlist, but Chongqing stands apart.
Before the beginning of my set there was a fashion show inside the club. I'd seen this only once before at Buzz in Washington DC and didn't expect to see anything like that. The first thing that clued me in were all the photographers with big cameras and flashes constantly flickering - and then the six foot tall Chinese model. I didn't get to see much of the show as I was in the "green room" (also janitorial closet) with Afeng the promoter, rolling joints and talking about the night. When the fashion show ended and the stage was disassembled in moments and I opened with DJ Krush. There was a camera and spotlight on the booth, but the great part was that the images from the camera were projected all around the club on projectors. Glimpsing at the projected images of me around the club was like looking into a mirror. Twice in the middle of my set I was told to turn the music down so an MC could speak. Turns out the MC was really announcing lottery numbers for consolation prizes offered by the sponsor. So, in the middle of people dancing, the music stops and the MC runs through a quick dialogue/commercial for Chivas before reading off long numbers to have people come to the front of the club to collect prizes, the crown of which was a bottle of Chivas so large it wouldn't fit on a table and had to be seated on a tripod. The promoter dragged me into a smelly stall in the toilet after the show to give me the cash. No idea why it was such a secretive affair, but I got out of there and hit a few other clubs before passing out in my hotel after chatting with Preemo on googletalk.
The next day I caught up with Fu, my favorite friend in Chongqing. I don't think I've written about Fu, but he's an old friend of Sascha's to whom I was introduced 18 months ago or so. He's a friendly local music aficionado who has a shop in 解放北 that sells art and music. Learning to understand what he's saying has taken me a while to become even fairly proficient at; he speaks quickly and in a lot of local dialect which I don't study. Most Chinese people make an effort to speak more clearly to foreigners knowing that mandarin isn't our native language, but Fu doesn't subscribe to this practice and instead raps away about whatever is on his mind. It couldn't be better practice for listening comprehension, and this trip was the first time I'd ever really had long conversations and understood everything. Hanging out in the evening with him and two of his friends, Dong Dong and Xiao Lu, we smoked joints (they are passionate hash smokers), drank beer, and chatted in the Irish bar. I heard a story about their unified and perilous mission to import a Skid Row record in 1987, them hearing a guitar effects pedal for the first time and freaking out not knowing where that sound was coming from, to plans for a 30,000 person party headlined by Paul Van Dyk in Chongqing later this year.
I wasn't too anxious to return to Chengdu but I have to make sure that posters and fliers for the party this weekend get handled (Downtempo Pilots (Dave and I) this Saturday at the Hemp House).
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the next trip to Chongqing. :sax:
Dave’s Round-the-World-Blog
My old friend and roommate Dave is preparing to embark on a trip around the world.
Taking the opportunity to quit his job and travel for at least a year around the world is something most people can only dream of - I have enormous respect for the ambition and courage it takes to make sacrifices to realize such distant dreams. The mental preparation required for a year long journey through foreign lands is simultaneously dizzying and fascinating, and you can follow his progress on his blog at GoBackPacking.com.
With any luck I'll have the opportunity to catch up with Dave as he passes through the mighty 'Republic. I still have writing an article for his site on my mind. Stay tuned: Dave seems to be on top of maintaining a steady flow of engaging reading material for the travel-minded.
Qing Cheng Mountain
Yesterday I went with Andre and Brendon on a daytrip to Qing Cheng Shan (Azure City Mountain) which is two-hours outside of Chengdu. After eating at 祖母厨房 （Grandma's Kitchen) for breakfast we went to 茶店子车站 (chadianzi bus station) and got tickets to Qing Cheng Shan and were on our way.
Qing Cheng Shan is the birthplace of Daoism - a mountain dotted with temples and dozens of peaks. Compared to Emei Shan it's an easy climb, taking half a day, so we arrived at the peak just in time to see the sunset. At the peak of the mountain was a temple and tall pagoda that rose high over the trees which we climbed up to to rest after the long hike and watch the sun set over distant peaks. I tried to get as many valuable photos along the way that I could, and I've arranged them in a gallery here.
Great Wall of Chengdu
A week ago I heard that there was a great wall near Chengdu - it wasn't explained as a great wall in english, but by the name of the great wall in Chinese, which was peculiar. An hour-long bus ride out of the city revealed the city of Luodai, provind the backdrop for the wall, and a refuge of the "Hakka" minority people.
I noticed they were difficult to understand when I was there, but afterwards learned that it's because they speak Hakka dialect, not really normal mandarin or even Chengdu dialect. The towns walking district was filled with people, buying and selling, and riding bikes along the cobblestone road below the ancient architecture lining the street. The throughfare was beautiful and led straight to the wall, which, while obviously not as long, seemed to be about the same height off the ground as the real wall which is very high. At the top of the hill was a small Buddhist temple, and after checking that out, I started the path back to Chengdu.
:china:
I brought a few photos back with me-
Here's a link to the gallery of my favorites
Jiuzhaigou
24 hours in the wet wilderness, miles from the nearest person. The enduring pattering of rain dropping on the blue tent with lightning illuminating everything. And then, my personal favorite, the constant low rumble of thunder echoing off the mountains around us, bouncing back and forth. It didn't start, stop, and continue again; it started and rumbled for a minute at a time. I've never heard anything like that.
Daoist Temple
After spending the day climbing around the mountain, exploring the gardens and hillsides, the sun was falling behind the distant mountain peaks and a 10-foot high door to a Daoist temple stood before us. The log laid horizontally on the door keeping it locked was lifted by a monk who let us look inside after Sascha peeked inside and asked politely in Sichuan dialect if we could pass through and have a look. Shocked that foreigners who speak Chinese had found their way to this temple, we were guided through the grounds and various courtyards by a monk who lived in the temple along with 10 others. I felt lucky just to be let inside, but the courtyards revealed an unbelievably well-kept location, lush with gardens and decorated by beautifully ornate statues, sculptures, and scriptures. The monk who guided us through the temple as we chatted provided a backstory to every detail - from the meaning of the enormous characters carved into the thick wall which we couldn't decypher, the sculpture of the car-sized turtle which protects the monestary, to the intricate stone dragons which sit atop the buildings to ward off hostile spirits. He taught us the ying yang fist position which traditional Daoists practice and meditate with and ceremoniously beat the gong while we paid tribute in the great hall by kneeling in front of the brooding figure of the first emperor of the Shu Dynasty.
As we said our thanks and goodbyes as we stepped out, a light rain started to fall as the darkness set in and we began the 30 minute walk along the river which led to the road.
To Chungking and Back Again
A few hours ago I arrived back at home in Chengdu after spending half of the weekend in Chongqing, playing on Saturday night at one of my favorite clubs in China called Cotton Club. This was my second time in Chongqing (pronounced "Chong
Ching") in a month and this show was a totally different environment than the last one at "Falling", but further solidified Chongqing as my favorite city to DJ in.
Several weeks ago an American, Joe, called me representing the club and expressed interest in booking me to play funk, soul, reggae, and hip hop. A general roots-oriented set, which is an extraordinarily uncommon request in China - especially in western China. I was immediately excited because this is the kind of music that I'd rather be DJ'ing these days. To be honest, I'm getting bored of listening to and playing house music entirely. Fortunately, last time I was in Chongqing I was able to play an entire breaks set and have people go nuts, but even that doesn't trump being able to play Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, and E-40 to a throbbing dancefloor with an exploding b-boy circle. Fortunately a Swedish photographer was there to capture some photos of the ambience in the room which wasn't short of incredible. When I stepped into the club at 10pm the place was already packed. I really can't say enough good things about Cotton Club and the Chongqing nightlife scene in general. I went with Jovian who VJ'ed right beside me, and Sascha who returned to Chongqing to finish writing his story on the city.
4 Girl Mountain
I've been reading a lot about this place and can't wait to go. My priority this fall is to see as much of Sichuan province as possible - a beautiful region which I've barely seen, despite having lived in the capitol for over a year. There are a number of places that I'm interested in going (Jiuzhaigou, Kanding, Dege), but 4 Girl Mountain is one I've been reading and learning about recently.
Four Girl Mountain gets its name from a famous local legend. It is said that the place was once hard-hit by chilling northern winds, which devastated the locals' livelihoods.
One day, four sisters from some remote southern region turned into four mountains to shield the place from the northerly attacks. The area then became warm and sunlit, with rich harvests of grains and fruits. In honor of the four sisters' great deed, local people named the mountains after them. The tallest peak is over 6,000m high and has never been climbed! Seems like a great surrounding area to hike and camp. I'll just post some photos-
