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...