The Penthouse Boys go to small town China...

Well, the weekend DJ trip had it's ups and its downs:

down: flight delayed by an hour on our way out, so we arrived in Xiamen late.

up: that didn't matter, we started after midnight anyway. Clubs like to have the westerners hang out for a bit before they start DJing, to give the club a good image.

up: the club was packed full of happy people and pretty girls, and the sound system was amazing

up (down for Dave): every employee of the club had a t-shirt with a picture of David on the front. Very funny because the club had _a lot_ of employees, so whenever David turned around, he saw his face staring right back at him.

down: instead of being put up in a hotel in Xiamen, we were driven to Quanzhou right after our gig (at 6 am), arriving there at 7:30am. Not only that, but they only had one room at the hotel for the 3 of us (until 10 am, when another room would become available). Not a great thing to arrive to when you're exhausted.

down: the hotel in Quanzhou was, well, a brothel. In actual fact, it was a "business" hotel, but I'm not convinced that the business is of the "I'll buy out your company", "no, I'll buy out _your_ company" sort.

up: we (Derek, Dave and I) wandered around Quanzhou during the afternoon and had a great time - saw some pretty sights. Quanzhou is "small town" China, I guess, though it still seemed to have approximately the population of Vancouver. I guess size is all relative here.

down: the second club in Quanzhou was less cool than the one in Xiamen. The people who worked there seemed crabby and didn't add to the atmosphere of the club, and the sound system wasn't as good, so our gig didn't feel as good as it did in Xiamen.

up: we still played a great set and danced into the night.

HUGE down: arriving at the airport, we discovered that our travel agent had issued tickets that returned from Guanzhou, instead of Quanzhou. Big difference! After running around talking to various people who didn't speak english, and getting the typical blank looks you get when you try to explain your problems to Chinese official type people, we ended up with tickets to Shanghai leaving 8 hours later.

up (ish): deciding "screw this chinese #%$&@, we're eating at Pizza Hut"

up: killing time waiting for our flight by going bowling. And finding out that _I_ (when the muse strikes me) can actually bowl. I'm as surprised as you. On the last game, I got 6 strikes and 2 spares. Not bad, if I say so myself.

up: getting home and sleeping in my bed. mmmmmmm.....

All in all, it was quite an adventure. At the time, it seemed like an "ordeal", but we muddled through and tried to turn obstacles into positive events.

It was very odd being a white guy in small town china. You really attract attention there, much more than in Shanghai which has a large and visible ex-pat (read: westerners) population. But at the same time it was nice, because lots of cute girls smiled at me just because I stand out. It's nice to get free attention.

One last down, sort of: my gig next week has been cancelled (ostensibly because they're renovating the club), so I won't be doing my "solo tour" this weekend. It's a down because the Xiamen club was quite cool, and I just love DJing, so to not be able to DJ is a bit of a disappointment. But I say it's only sort of a down because I have a huge amount of work to do for Ubi at the moment, and I'm very tired because of it. Having a weekend of rushing around in planes and cars, and staying up late and "partying" (i.e. DJing, but then socialising before and afterwards) is not a good way to recover from a hard week of work. So I'm only a little disappointed about losing the gig.

I have a bunch of pictures from the weekend, but for some reason blogger won't upload them. I'll try again later...

Well, my chinese name (see my previous post) has received only a lukewarm reception. I told it to my artist, and she said "but these are words, it is not a name...". True enough. She's just as guilty, though... Her name is Fan Yin Jia, and she decided that her English name would be "Van". When I told her that a van is a large car, she said "yes, I know, but Van sounds like Fan". The same problem as me. I'd be walking around calling myself "Fortune with mouth", which might have worked in the movie "Dances with Wolves", but in chinese society, and western society, calling yourself a series of words doesn't work (unless you're parents are hippies and you're name is Moonbeam).

For Fan Yin Jia, I suggested "Francesca", which is a pretty Italian name and she's taken to it. Jury is still out on what my Chinese name will be.

This weekend, I go "on tour" with my buddy, roomate and fellow DJ Dave (DJ Slackerton is what he goes by). Tonight we fly to Xiamen for a gig and tomorrow night we play at Quanzhou. Both clubs (they are sister clubs) are called "House Music Club", so I guess it couldn't be clearer that there will be no Hip Hop played there! :-) I'm looking forward to the gigs, though this time I'm just going to be helping Dave out if he wants me to. Next week I go to these same clubs to play gigs on my own - it's my solo tour next week! :-)

This is my first time in China outside of Shanghai. Our other roomate Derek is coming along too, so we'll all be having a mini 2 day vacation together while the Penthouse remains quiet and empty (much to our neighbours' delight, I'm sure).

Some people have asked me to give my location in a form that, say, a geography nut can use to get a ridiculously accurate picture of where I am. So for anyone who has Google Earth, or an equivalently cool program, my coordinates are:
31 degrees, 11' 63.23" North
121 degrees, 25' 35.96" East

Putting the Google Earth hand at that location will be putting the hand on the roof of my and my roomates' penthouse. Please don't click on your mouse when you do this, the Power Of The Internet might cave it in.

Today, my Chinese class came up with my Chinese name: Fa le kuo. Sure, it's pretty much phonetic, but the meanings are what's funny.
Fa = "make a fortune overnight" (this word is the reason why the number 8 is considered lucky in Chinese because the word for Eight - Ba - sounds like Fa)
le = filler word, doesn't mean much I think
kuo = mouth

So, my name means "Make a fortune overnight with your mouth". My Chinese teacher laughed for 5 minutes after we came up with that. :-) I guess it means I'm good at talking. Anybody who happens to be thinking of a different way I could make money with my mouth needs to get their mind out of the gutter. I'm a respectable, upstanding citizen. :-)

Great weekend.

Today you find Falko in a good mood. Why? Well, I had a super great weekend, that's why!

Slowly but surely I'm beginning to appreciate the things that Shanghai has to offer, and that definitely contributes to my great mood. But the best part of the weekend, by far, was my very successful DJ gig on Friday.

My roomate Dave decided a few weeks ago that every DJ gig he gets is a package deal with me - meaning we DJ together as a team (I really appreciate his generosity on this, especially since he already has many connections in the city). On Friday night, we were hired by a promoter to DJ a "Word Cup Party". We would DJ an hour, then a band would play, then we would DJ another hour. The venue would be Boom Boom Room. Dave didn't know much about the gig other than that - neither of us had heard of Boom Boom Room, there wasn't even a Word Cup game that night, so neither of us was sure what kind of World Cup Party this would be, and we also knew nothing of the band. But a gig is a gig, so off we went.

The venue turned out to be a place called "Bourbon Street", on the big ex-pat bar strip in town. The club is fairly big, dressed up as a New Orleans cabaret, with a dodgy reputation to boot. Apparently Bourbon Street was shut down a year ago for a few months because of rampant drug use and dealing. Not exactly classy sounding. But upon entering, I noted that the place was reasonably full - I would say almost a thousand people inside - and not _that_ bad. It had a theme park air to it - the decor reminded me of those two story western piano bars they shown in the movies, only there weren't any cowboys, nor was there a piano. Instead there was a dancefloor, a very big stage (2 stories high) and a loud band playing already on this stage. Unfortunately, the band had only attracted one dancer to the dancefloor, an older guy who was having a REALLY GREAT time (I capitalize because he was really really really excited, comically so). The crowd was almost entirely Chinese, with a very small scattering of rather slimy looking ex-pat men to colour things up.

Dave, unsure of how to start with a crowd like this, passed the honors of beginning the set to me. Halfway through my second track, _FOOM_ the dancefloor was full. It was incredible! 2 tracks filled the floor, which up until that point was completely devoid of people (the tracks were "Magic Number" by De La Soul and Herbert's remix of Louie Austen's "Hoping", for those who are interested). After 2 more tracks, Dave took over for a bit and the party was rocking. At that point, the promoter came up and asked us to play "more vocals" (despite the fact that we had a full dance floor) because the owner wanted that, so we did (scouring our music collection, because neither of us play tracks with lots of singing in them), but it didn't diminish the set nor the energy at all.

So after an hour, the band came back on and were clearly ecstatic to have a crowd in front of them. They played a very fun collection of cheesy pop tunes (all of them covers), getting the audience involved and singing along and all those things a good cover band does. By the end of their set, the people on the dance floor were hot, sweaty and exhausted. So, as a result, we lost a few when we came back on (they went to get drinks), but our last hour of DJing went almost as well as the first.

All in all, I was very happy with the evening. This is the first time I've DJ'd and had such positive crowd reaction. Playing together with Dave was fantastic, because alone either of us would have stressed and maybe not enjoyed ourselves as much. Together, we had fun with it and the pressure was off. We had fun and it reflected in our performance. Also, the owner, managers and promoter were extremely happy with us and asked us if we could play their next party.

So there you have it. I think I'll be doing a DJ gig about once every week or two, so hopefully this is how it will be most of the time: fun and fun and fun!

Time to go. Hope all is well with you all.