maxiewawa

In case you didn’t already know!

Find me here: http://www.facebook.com/maxiewawa

One thing that I’ve been doing a lot more of recently is reading. As you can imagine there isn’t as much English reading material in China as Australia, so I’ve overloaded myself with reading material recently.

I’m going through “The Killing Joke” by Anthony Horowitz. As a kid I loved his books and he’s recently written The Killing Joke, which, as Wikipedia informs me, is his first adult novel. He writes very weird books; interesting stories that get weirder as you go along.

I’ve also borrowed “The Afghan” by Frederick Forsythe, and the latest edition of Popular Science and SMARTHOUSE.

I’m also working my way through a transcript of the first episode of “Prison Break” that includes the Korean transcript (got it in Seoul) and the latest issue of コナン名探偵 (Conan the Detective) that I got in 成田空港 (Narita Airport, in Japan) on the way home.

I’m sure that after my week away at Coffs Harbour I’ll have read all, or a substantial amount of them!

As I mentioned, don’t expect any posts for the next week. I’ll be away. Sorry! That doesn’t mean that I won’t be posting about what happens during the week, but probably not regularly.

An original by Max Roberts.

My first musical video since arriving in Sydney! Exciting!

I just wanted to do something simple to start out with. I’ve got a lot of instruments and equipment that I haven’t used in a long time, so this is just something to test that everything still works and I know how to use it.

For the record, I used a DIgi 002 rack to record everything on Pro Tools LE (not sure what version…

An SM57 to record everything acoustic…

The “family” are a Hofna acoustic guitar (that’s not a spelling mistake), a GIbson Les Paul 100, Fender Jazz bass, Roland XP-30, and a Kawai upright piano. The Les Paul went through a Line 6 pocket pod.

“Footage” was shot on a casio stills digital camera (sorry, can’t find it so not sure of the model) and put together on iMovie.

mp3 link: http://media.libsyn.com/media/maxiewawa/Testing_Testing….mp3
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln2F-vPyrFA
TuDou: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/W2RggDPKyp0/
podcast feed: http://maxiewawa.libsyn.com/rss

Due to popular demand, and the fact that China bl0cks YouTube, I’ve put up my latest video on TuDou, the Chinese equivalent.

I’ll put up each video on a Chinese video site from now on, so users in 中国大陆 can see them!

Here it is: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/agvs1qY4HDM/

Mum has been wanting a traditional Chinese drum for a while, and the one that I bought her in Shanghai finally arrived. I got Aika to film her reaction.

It’s a kind of drum that is used in dancing. You dance and drum at the same time. I remember every morning as I walked down Nanjing East road there would be hordes of old ladies drumming/dancing up a storm.

Now mum has one of her own!

Aika and I flew home not directly from Seoul, but via Tokyo. It was much cheaper, and we didn’t mind stopping over for one last time in Aika’s native country before coming back to mine.

We sat next to a nice American guy who turned out to be an officer in the National Guard. He told us his story; he was a reservist before 9/11, and has been a full time soldier since then. He travels the world teaching people how to use a certain kind of American artillery. He showed us pictures of him in Kuwait, Iraq (inside the “Green Zone”, and the room where Saddam was tried), France (Normandy), the USA, and a few others I don’t remember.

He said that he flew around the world a lot, and had obviously been to a lot of dangerous places. He said that LA was one of the most scary places that he’d ever been to… he said that “At least in Iraq I had a gun!” in that Southern USA accent he had.

Anyway, at one point Aika asked him what his most scary day was. He didn’t have to think long at all, he told us this story, which I’m paraphrasing to you.

“While we were in Iraq, we’d have to leave the Green Zone, which is the ‘safe’ zone every day and go out to the Red Zone, where it’s not so safe.

“One day we were driving down this narrow highway, when there was a loud explosion.

“It shook us up, but everyone was ok. Standard procedure when something like this happens is to wait for the explosives team to arrive on the scene, and verify that there isn’t any unexploded ordinance around the vehicle or vehicles.

“So after confirming that no one was hurt, we had to contact the explosives team and wait for them to show up.

“But our convoy was so big that it blocked traffic in both directions. Since we weren’t going anywhere, neither was anybody else, so the entire convoy, and an increasingly large and angry line of Iraqi civilian vehicles was backing up behind and in front of us.

“As the sun started to set, I started to get worried. At a certain time around dusk, it gets too dark to see what’s happening around you, but too light to use your night vision goggles.

“So someone out there had already attacked us with some kind of improvised explosive. They probably had set the device specifically to attack us. – They would have known that we were travelling down this road, and would have had to manually detonate the bomb.

“So they, without a doubt, knew where we were, and were trying to kill us.

“And the only advantage we had, our night vision goggles, weren’t working.

“After about 4 hours of this, the team finally arrived. Lucky they did too, because they found that there had been not one but two anti tank mines that had been set on the overpass that we had just driven under. Only one had gone off.

“This was lucky for us; one mine was strong enough, but had both mines detonated at the same time, we probably wouldn’t have survived.

“That was a bad day.”

I remember the way he said that last line with a wry grin on his face. He was at pains to say that not all days were “bad days”, but I understood that that was a particularly “bad day”.

I’m not sure if I’ve captured the drama of his story, as I mentioned I’m just paraphrasing. But the next time Aika or I feel scared by sudden turbulence on a flight, I’ll picture myself in an American hum-vee, squinting in the fading light
for someone who’s just tried to kill me and might try again very soon, trying to concentrate through the din of the blasts thousands of gridlocked Iraqis, with my trusty night vision goggles sitting useless on the seat next to me.

Turbulence probably won’t seem so bad when compared with that!

Yes, I’m back in Sydney, probably for good. I’m exhausted, and experiencing some strange kind of culture shock, (I left my home of almost 5 years, spent a week in a country whose language I’ve been studying but where I’d never actually been, to come back to where I spent the first 20 or so years of my life) so this post will be brief. – I’m still working out how everything works here, which is all the more peculiar since everything is entirely familiar.

More to come.

Phew! Just got back from a day, a night and a morning in 江村 (sorry, can’t remember the Korean name) which involved scooter riding, drinking, meat and games. Met a lot of fun people, and took approximately zero photos though (still no battery!). Everyone else had a camera though, some had more than one, some had more than two ［高云안녕!］so there will sure be enough to show later.

Leaving for Sydney tomorrow! Nice to go home, but it’s always sad saying goodbye to everyone.

(I wrote this in Paris Baguette on Fuzhou Lu, in a little exercise book.)

We’ve been hearing pops.

It started a few nights ago. We were at home, watching a DVD in our bedroom, when there has been an audible pop from somewhere near the kitchen.

The sound is unmistakeable, because it is usually such a shock when one hears it.

You probably know what I mean. You turn on a light, or plug in an appliance, and there’s a loud pop, an alarming flash of blue light, and all the lights turn off.

You instinctively call out to anyone in earshot that it’s ok, that you know where the fusebox is, and you’ll take care of it.

So the other night, as Aika and I were watching an episode of “Oliver’s Twist”, you can imagine our surprise when we heard that exact kind of pop. We looked at each other in alarm, and wandered around the apartment, unplugging appliances and checking power points for scorch marks.

Nothing.

We went back to watching our DVD.

Over the course of that night, we heard that pop a few other times. And the night after that too. It got to the point that I started thinking that it had to be something else. After all, if it was an electrical short circuit, shouldn’t there be a flash? Shouldn’t all the lights go off? Shouldn’t the circuit breaker kick in? None of these things happened. So by this morning, when I heard the popping sound again, I had actually dismissed the possibility that the sound was electrical.

I work from home and usually sit in front of a desk in front of the TV. This was the first time that I had heard the popping noise when I wasn’t in another room, so this time I could hear that it was coming from near the kitchen. I decided to investigate, so put my laptop on our dining table and started working there, as it is much closer to our kitchen, and the source of the sound. I thought that if I sat a little closer to the sound, I’d be able to hear more clearly what it was the next time it went off.

I didn’t have to wait long. POP!

It sounded like it was coming from the floor. Perhaps the floorboards creaking? Impossible. Nothing creaks that loudly! Were their any electrical wires running under our wooden floorboards? I didn’t think so. I shrugged and went back to work.

POP!

Another few minutes had gone by when I heard another pop the biggest so far. I was quite sure that it was coming from underneath the floorboards or perhaps next door. But NO ONE lives next door to us on that side. Next to that wall is only…

I had a terrible realisation.

Next to our apartment is the room which houses the engine and winch that operate our building’s lift (elevator). I am not sure exactly what goes on in there; I have only seen the inside of it once. – One afternoon on my way home there was a maintainance guy working on something in there and he had left the door open. I can’t describe what was in the room other than there was a lot of machinery and presumably a lot of electricity. Imagine a lift, and how big the engine that is needed to lift it, and then consider how much electricity such an engine requires, and finally try to imagine the sparks that are created when such an electric flow malfunctions in some way, and you might imagine the panic that sprouted in me.

If something had gone wrong in that room, it might mean that those popping sounds WERE in fact electrical discharges, and that was bad for me, being next door.

I freaked out a little. Over the last few days I have been trying to convince Aika that it can’t POSSIBLY be something electrical that is making those noises. – The first night we heard them, we unplugged everything electrical that we have, and still the noise persisted, so I had eliminated the possibility that they were electrical from my mind.

It hadn’t occured to me that they might be electrical sounds coming from OUTSIDE the apartment.

So while the sudden realisation that they might actually BE electrical discharges didn’t quite make me shit a brick, they did cause me to squeeze my cheeks somewhat.

I did something that’s quite funny in hindsight. Safety first though!

There are some cheap shoes that were popular for a while called CROCs. They are made of cheap plastic, and look like clogs. Aika and I have a pair each. Well, I put on Aika’s pink pair, and stuffed them into my own pair, so that I was wearing two pairs of CROCs at the same time. Only Aika’s didn’t fit entirely into mine so it looked like I was in high heels. Plastic high heels… My reasoning was scientific: Electricity always looks to reach earth through the fastest route, so I thought that by insulating myself I’d not get electrocuted. I could barely walk though.

I went to the guardroom at the entrance to our complex, and explained what was going on. The guard said that he’d send someone up.

I went back to the apartment to wait. While I waited, there was another pop. At this point I wasn’t absolutely sure that these sounds were even electrical in origin, but I was sufficiently freaked out to say “bugger this” and dashed out of the house. Better to be safe than sorry. Anything was better than sitting at home waiting to be electrocuted!

I went downstairs to wait for the lift. It occured to me as I was waiting that my downstairs neighbors might be able to help. Those pops were pretty loud and they would have heard them.

One of the apartments was empty, but the other was answered by a man in work clothes. I nervously explained that I had been hearing what I thought were electrical discharges and was worried that we were all about to be electrocuted by a bolt of lightning. I was prepared for the incredulous look and the language problems, but his reqction wasn’t anything like that.

“Yeah, that’s us.” he said.

I was shocked, relieved, angry and terrified all at once.

“Wa…?”

“We’re doing some work upstairs.”

“But there was a big bang…”

“Yeah, I know.”

I think that I have a healthy fear of electricity. Anything that involves something more complicated than plugging in something, anything that involves sparks and scorch marks makes me nervous.

This is why I had trouble understanding that a) these guys knew that they were causing these electrical bangs and b) they didn’t really find anything remarkable in that.

This just freaked me out even more. I threw some things into my gym bag and rushed out the door.

I spent about an hour at the gym, got some lunch and came home, then got back to work.

It was quiet for a while, but after about an hour I heard another pop, followed by another. I put on my high heels and went back downstairs.

There was a large group of people in the apartment this time. I talked to an older guy who seemed similarly unconcerned about electric explosions.

I think it’s not unreasonable to be concerned that the electric bangs coming from my neighbours’ apartment will harm me. I have left the apartment, maybe out of an over abundance of caution, but I feel that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this, Aika is at work, and I sincerely hope that my neighbours are sitting around waiting for the wiring to be fixed, and aren’t smouldering corpses, victims of a freak electrical explosion.