maxiewawa

The other day Mitch requested this song; Mitch, this is for you!

Yesterday was Andrew Harvey’s birthday, Harvey this is for you too!

Thursday is Ada’s birthday, Ada, grattis på födelsedagen!

Cliff’s getting married on Saturday, congratulations Clifford!

If you’d like to request a song, by all means leave your suggestion as a reply to this post. I’ll do my best.

At around 10am, we heard the deafening sound of fireworks.

The practice of letting off fireworks is on special occasions is one Chinese practice that I hate.

I like to think that I’m open minded about other peoples’ cultures and beliefs, but fireworks always get my blood boiling.

For any occasion, no matter how unimportant, someone always feels the need, usually in the AM hours of a Saturday, when the civilised world appreciates a little sleep, to let off fireworks.

If the school down the street wakes me up with singing, or if the restaurant across the road wakes me with music, I don’t mind so much. At least someone is enjoying it.

But fireworks don’t do anything other than make a loud noise. Even the people who let them off don’t seem to really want to. They usually light the fuse, scamper back, and take cover with a grim look.

I just don’t see the point. They’re loud, and don’t do anything other than make life just that little bit more annoying for everyone in earshot.

On my way to lunch. I noticed a huddle had formed on the opposite side of the road. I also spied the white helmet of a police officer at the center so I ran over to have a look.

A dark guy with a satchel was also at the center, examining the handlebars of an electric bike, under the watchful eye of the policeman, and fifteen or so old men who had formed a huddle around them.

“Not so bad,” proclaimed the policeman. “And the other one?”

The scrum of smelly old guys parted as he made his way through it to another electric bike that was propped up nearby. The huddle re-formed around him and the second bike. Its owner was standing next to it anxiously.

“Nothing. No damage at all.”

He made his way back to the first bike, the huddle dispersing around the second bike and coalescing once again around it, him, and the man who was still examining its handle bars.

“Two hundred. At least.” said the man meekly, as he noticed that everyone had rejoined him.

“Look, I’m not going to repeat myself again, that’s totally unreasonable. You’re not going to get two hundred.”

One of the old guys shouted his agreement.

“It’s broken though, it’s completely destroyed, I…” he mumbled.

“There’s damage, I’ll give you that, but there’s no way that it’s two hundred’s worth. You don’t want me to give him a ticket now, do you? He’ll get booked, you’ll have a broken bike, no one wins. It’s not as if you can’t still ride it.” said the policeman firmly.

“No one wins!” said the same old man. I think he was trying to be helpful.

“You take the money, you can fix your handlebars, get a new helmet, and fix your phone. Good as new.”

“Two hundred. I’m not sure I can even ride it.” he was saying.

“It’s fine. You can agree to a hundred, like he’s offering. That’s a reasonable price. You can get all the damage repaired.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s going to take two hundred to fix all of this…” he said faintly. But the general consensus among the unemployed elderly men, and those cyclists who had stopped to watch was that two hundred was way too much.

“Two hundred? For that?! You’re kidding! I’ll fix it right now, for fifty!” someone shouted.

“Look. One-fifty. Tell him one-fifty.” said the owner of the damaged bike.

“Give me the money.” said the police officer to the owner of the undamaged bike. He handed over a 100RMB bill.

“Here you are,” said the policeman, giving it to him.

“But one-fifty…” he began, but stopped mid-sentence.

He took the note.

Immediately, the mood lifted. The rider of the undamaged bike rode off, with a hundred RMB less in his wallet, but without getting a traffic ticket. The crowd seemed thoroughly satisfied that the right thing had been done. But the guy with the damaged bike, despite the old guys telling him he was doing the right thing seemed a little pissed off with the whole situation.

Another day has passed, and another tune that I’ve recorded.

My Pocket Pod has run out of batteries, so I’m taking a moment away from scrubbing away at the guitar.

Everything sounds really great. I have some isolating in-ear headphones, so the Pocket Pod, which models various amps and sounds, sounds fantastic. My playing is a bit all-over-the-place, particularly with a bit of a latency in my recording equipment (my trusty Apple Mac!) so it’s a bit floppy.

Listen to today’s track here. http://media.libsyn.com/media/maxiewawa/mozzle.mp3

Is anyone in Shanghai interested in playing together? Let me know if you’re out there!

I’ve gone and done it. We have a new baby in our family, her name is Les Paul.

I got a new Les Paul Standard electric guitar just this evening. I’ve plugged her into my Pocket Line 6 and started rocking off.

I’ve taken time off since getting it only to write this post, and to record this little tune. It’s not the shredding extravaganza that I’m planning, but it will have to do for now.

Thanks to ISpyShanghai for the recommendation, it was the funny shaped guitar that I saw hanging in the window that made me think “Hey, isn’t that the same guitar as that guy online has?” that made me go into the shop in the first place.

As I said, a short post, and a short tune. The tune is here: http://media.libsyn.com/media/maxiewawa/golden_valley.mp3 , and I’m sorry everything isn’t longer, I have a cool new guitar (as I just said!) and I’m getting to know it.

The tune is actually “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”, but Australians my age and older will always know it as “Golden Valley Fruit Snack” from an ad which sold them.

This is the 6th post in a series where I’m documenting how I’m teaching English to my student. Her first language is Japanese.

One thing that Aika has been messing up lately is numbers. She’s been getting ‘thirteen’ and ‘thirty’ mixed up, ‘fourteen’ and ‘forty’, ‘fifteen’ and ‘fifty’ (etc) mixed up.

It’s not hard to do for beginners too. A lot of the time we leave off the ‘n’ at the end of the ‘teen’ numbers and let the stress of the different words convey meaning.

So my assignment for this week is to get her saying her numbers right.

I was buying something at a small stationary shop today. It was a small room run by a middle aged woman. My purchase cost 10RMB and I luckily had exactly enough 1RMB coins and notes to pay for it.

But as I counted out my change, the lady serving me held one note up.

“What the?”

I had noticed the strange note after I first received it. I’d examined it a s she was now, had shrugged, and stuffed it in my pocket.

Written across the note on one side is tightly compacted Chinese. There are no spaces, and every square centimeter is taken up in some kind of written rant.

I’m not sure what it all says, but it’s clearly the ramblings of some loony.

The first line is something about the diabolical party blaspheming against Buddha. Hurting the noble munks, spreading blasphemous ideas…. or something.

Anyway, the woman frowned at it.

“This is bullshit.” (or words to that effect!) “I um… don’t want it…” she said hesitatingly.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what IT said, I only looked carefully at what was written on it just now.

Her reaction wasn’t so much one of disgust as one of confusion. She didn’t know what to do. She should have just done what I did, shrugged and pocketed the money, and tried to hand it off to someone else.

“They’re cazy, all of them. They sometimes stick things under your door… If you went to a bank with that they’d probably punish you. If I gave that to someone they might think that I wrote it…”

She wasn’t angry or anything, in retrospect I think she might have been afraid that I had written it or something.

“Well I didn’t bloody well write it!” I said. Or words to that effect. (There isn’t an exact translation for “bloody well” in Chinese, but I think you get the gist of it.)

I showed her the change in my pocket.

“Look, other than the 9RMB that I’ve already given you, I only have 6 jiao, which is 4 jiao short of the 10RMB that my purchase costs. So unless you accept my 1 RMB not that features the ramblings of a madman, you’re going to have to give me the thing for 9.60.”

Then she did the strangest thing.

She nodded.

I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve never known anyone to turn down money. 4 jiao isn’t a lot, but it’s SOMETHING.  But she didn’t want anything to do with the 1 RMB note with the funny writing.

And it obviously wasn’t something that offended her as a person living in the PRC, it was just something that she wasn’t comfortable with.

But the strangest thing was her reaction when I offered to buy the item for a lower price, without using the offending note. I only said it as a joke, but she agreed immediately!

The Chinese are, at their root, practical, and I’v never heard of anyone willingly accept a loss in that way. And this wasn’t just a metaphorical loss of “face” or anything, this was a hard, financial loss, albeit a small one.

I recorded this the week before leaving for Hong Kong; I never got around to letting everyone know about it. It’s actually a tune by the band Weezer. They do it a lot differently to how I did it though. I’ve included my version and Weezer’s versions on this post.

My version of “Dreamin’”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrI6xvQQoWg
Weezer’s original version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHG5NnsydnE

1pm Busy day! I set out for lunch in track pants, cardigan and a beanie. Plan to have noodles, which I don’t usually enjoy.

———
1:30 pm
On the trip to hong kong my Shure headphones broke. the electric lead for the left ear which has been pretty bad for a while almost snapped through. I only had them for a year too.

The earphones are designed so that they loop around your ears. Anyone who has had experience with electronics will tell you that sustained stress on any wire is bad for it. I wouldn’t recommend any “around the ear” headphones from Shure for this reason. They’re just going to break eventually.

Anyway, I have taken them to a little old man who has a stall on TianJin road who fixes things.

—-

1: 50 pm

when I showed them to him, he nodded, said in a thick Shanghai accent that replacing the lead wouldn’t be a problem, and he has taken them inside his workshop, a tiny dark apartment on TianJin road.

After 10 minutes or so, he still hasn’t emerged; I am worried because when I gave him my broken headphones, they were attached to my not-broken iPod. I’m picturing him now, sneaking out the back door listening to my Korean lessons on his stolen iPod through my Shure headphones that only work in one ear.

——————————
2:23 pm

Another guy who worked in the same shop/stall out the front came out after another 10 minutes. He apologised for the wait and sait that the older guy was looking around upstairs for some tools. He asked where I was from and commented on my nice earphones. I was still a bit suspicious though. Somehow I got it into my head that the old guy was prising open my iPod to switch out the battery for an older one, or the hard disk for a smaller one.

After we finished our conversation and the other guy wandered off, the older guy eventually emerged. My headphones were fixed!

It looks like he has used a soldering iron or something to melt the plastic coating (or some other plastic stuff) and smear it over the exposed wire. Looks a bit rough, but is obviously the reason he took so long. For only 15 RMB I can’t complain. (I would hazard a guess that 15 RMB is about 3 dollars US, but I think it’s about 4 dollars US now… sorry to remind everyone about the plunging value of the US$!)

And there is no doubt that he didn’t touch my ipod at all. When I pressed “Play” it started up again at the exact same spot where I had stopped playback before.

I feel a little guilty now about suspecting him of doing anything shonky.

Early on Sunday morning, Aika and I set off from Shanghai’s 红桥(HongQiao) airport for 深圳 (ShenZhen). ShenZhen is the closest mainland Chinese city to 香港 (Hong Kong). By flying to ShenZhen instead of directly to Hong Kong we saved quite a bit on our airfare.

The occasion we were celebrating was the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Everyone in mainland China gets a week’s holiday (well technically we get less than that, since we have to work on weekends to make up for the holidays we get) so we were off to Hong Kong.

We had a great time, and got back last night.

I carried a little notebook around with me; I like to write things down that I need to remember. Usually I scrawl things on my phone, but since I wasn’t carrying a phone around with me, I used the low-tech option of a paper notebook.

The notebook turned out to be a kind of a diary. Whenever we took a break from wandering around Hong Kong, I took a moment to write down something funny that happened, or where we had been. I’ll fill you in on what I wrote in a later post.

So this is just a short post to let everyone know that I’m still here. Or, more precisely, that I wasn’t here but am now.