11/14 Tuesday

I went exploring on my bike, realizing the true convenience of it. No more waiting for and squeezing onto buses and no more paying for taxis. I can see why there are literally several million bikes out on the streets here in Beijing.

You must be sure to get into bike lanes on the roadways, otherwise you’ll be battling cars for room, and it is always safest to go on the inside of a bus that has stopped, rather than around its outside if it happens to suddenly turn into the street again. Luckily, even if you do go on the outside, the buses are very slow to accelerate so you can usually avoid being hit.

There are all sorts of people you see when biking. There are guys on sleek road bikes that you’d find in the US, there are people that go silently by on electric powered bikes, there are school kids on mountain bikes bought by their parents, there are old women on rusty leisure bikes, there are struggling men on old flat-bed tricycles carrying enormously tall loads of trash or produce, there are delivery boys carrying boxes of food or electronics, one hand on the handlebar and one to steady the package. We are all helmet-less, on missions of varying degrees of urgency.

I stopped at a bike repair joint on the corner of a road near the music school to get my tires inflated, my brakes tightened, and an electronic noise maker installed for 10 yuan. The man was extremely nice, and impressed by my Chinese. He was especially pleased that I bought the noise make from him. In fact, he did all of my repairs for free after I bought it.

I prepared for my interview tomorrow, and looked up online how to teach a demo class of English, as they would be expecting me to teach one.

11/13 Monday

Today I acquired a bike from Terry. She decided it was too cold by now to be biking. I took it all the way back to the music school from the Cummins office, riding on the side of the fourth ring road, avoiding stopping buses, turning taxis, and grocery-laden people along the way. As dangerous as it may look, I found that as long as I stay alongside another cyclist or in the middle of a pack, the motor vehicles are much less likely to attempt to run me over. Bicycles are extremely cheap, and to buy a new from a large store costs about 200-300 yuan, and second-hand ones can be gotten for 30-80 yuan. There are bicycle repair stands all over Beijing, with men who will tighten brakes, inflate your tires, replace your seat, or bend your wheel back to normal, all for pennies.

I began my search for some exercise, and chose soccer because I packed a pair of cleats. I looked up some teams in Beijing, and sent a couple of emails out. I almost immediately got a response from at team called the Barbarians, and was invited to join them in a game on Saturday. I accepted and got some of the details. Here is the Barbarian homepage: http://www.beijingbarbarians.com

11/12 Sunday

I am getting tons of responses for my online post at schools all over the city already.

I went out with my Malaysian friend, Jason, from the music school to a place called Xue Yuan Lu, or University Street, where tons of students from nearby colleges go to hang out and shop. The trip was four quick stops on the bus, and cost only 1 yuan. The food selection there is pretty good, with multinational restaurants, and the main shopping building on the 4th ring road has hundreds of stalls selling all sorts of clothes and accessories.

On the way out of the shopping center we stopped to try some food from a stall, picking out some small egg-sandwiches for 2 yuan a piece, and a couple sweet rice balls for 1 yuan. The egg sandwiches were good, but the rice balls were pretty bland. We asked the woman about the rice balls but she said she didn’t make them and had gotten them somewhere else; she was only responsible for the egg sandwiches.

In my apartment, I sat down with all my teacher advertisement responses in my email mailbox and sorted them out, sending my resume and picture or my phone number to some of the places.

At night I decided to take a walk with my camera, and headed over towards the Olympic construction zone where they are building the main stadium, the Bird’s Nest, and also an indoor stadium that is enclosed by something that looks like bubble wrap. The construction site is about a 10 minute walk from the gates of the music school.

I walked down the main street dividing the zone after slipping through a security checkpoint with a crowd of Chinese people. About a third of the way across the site, I took a right hand turn down a smaller street that headed towards the bubble wrap building. The street was lined with temporary dormitories for the construction site workers. I think that the construction workers usually do not own their own homes, and move with the housing provided by the construction company. The rooms looked small, and several people were bunked up in each room. I saw bands of the workers heading out into the streets around the site, and more returning to their beds. The street became dirt, and soon I was standing 75 yards away from the bubble wrap building. I stopped to take some pictures, and turned to the bird’s nest stadium which was farther away. There were still people working on the Bird’s Nest, and erratic flashes from torches and sparks lit up the side of the metal structure. I continued down the main street and turned off again, this time closer to the bird’s nest. I was able to get up pretty close to the nest and take some pictures of it. There were constantly dump trucks and construction pieces barreling up and down the street, kicking up tons of dust that got into my eyes.

On one of the curbs I saw something really gruesome: a dead mouse with blood coming out of its mouth. There were no marks on it as though it had come to this end from some disease.

I left the construction site and returned home to work on the pictures I had just taken.

11/11 Saturday

Today I woke up well rested from staying in Lac’s place. I had taken advantage of his nice shower the night before, and had the most terrific looking bed-head when I walked out of his guest bedroom. I went with Lac and Ali, who lives close by, to meet up with Caroline and Terry for breakfast. They were going to head out to the Great Wall while I looked for a job in the nearby district of Jian Wai SoHo. It was very fortuitous that I had to stay at Lac’s, because I had been planning to go English-teaching job hunting at some point over the weekend, and now I was presented with the perfect opportunity to hit Soho. I went to a copy center, hand wrote (neatly) some English teaching experience into my resume, as well as my China contact information, and had a pile of 12 copies in no time. I went to the two largest buildings in Soho, and first found the place that had been recommended by my Chinese teacher, Yue Laoshi, called Vivid English Club. They ended up being the most enthusiastic of the bunch, and said that they’d call within a week. I found a couple of other places, but only managed to hand out 2 more resumes. I then needed to head back to my apartment to recharge my cell phone, as it had completely died.

I took the subway from Soho in the east, past Tian An Men square, and transferred in the west to the ring line. I then took that to the point directly under the Music School, and got off there. I looked for a bus at several stops that would go my way, but none ever appeared. I ended up walking from the second ring road to the fourth ring road, the equivalent to about an hour and a half of brisk paced walking.

I posted some advertisements of myself as an English teacher online for free at a site that does classifieds for the Beijing area, and am hoping that there are many people who check the site regularly.

More about my shower: steadily flowing hot water is hard to obtain in my shower. First off, I realized that igniting the hot water heater with the shower was not possible, and that I would have to do it with one of the sinks. This is due to the fact that I have on-demand hot water, with the heating unit stationed in my kitchen. My first successful shower was had by igniting the heater using my kitchen sink, shutting it off, and then running back to the shower. This shower lasted 3 minutes before the heater turned off. Later, I realized that I could ignite the unit with the sink that was actually in the bathroom, but that the heater would shut off immediately after I turned off the tap.

I can now have a decent shower by letting the bathroom sink run just enough to keep the heater going. Unfortunately, the process decreases the strength of the shower because the two are on the same pipe.

11/10 Friday

I went out for a sushi dinner with Lac, Terry, Caroline, and a guy named Ali from Germany. Very good sushi for 5 people was, in total, a little over $60. And that is considered expensive.
We went to a bar called Browns until around midnight. The crowd there is really weird, consisting of older white men, and mid-thirties Chinese women.

It was too late for me to return to my dormitory, so I went and stayed at Lac’s apartment. His place has two bedrooms and is really nice.

I stayed up late talking with him and have come to really respect what he’s done with his life.

He is 26 years old, and is opening a consulting firm in China as soon as the government gives him a permit. Right now he is running a consulting firm but it’s pretty much under the counter. He is completely self built, and started his company a year and a half ago by using the money he made off of renting out an online server and going in on e-commerce. From there he now has several employees, a business partner in Africa, and a number of clients.

He was born in Vietnam, but his family was kicked out and sent to a refugee camp in Hong Kong when he was young. They moved to Canada, and he went through the public school system there. His main language is French. He got 2 masters degrees at Canadian Colleges, and didn’t go to grad school.

All this, however, isn’t what impressed me the most. Lac has been traveling ever since he got out of college. He has gone to every country in Europe except 3, and has also been to countries in South America, Africa, and much of Asia. He has been allowed to do this through his e-commerce business (all he needs is an internet connection), and through the money he makes off of it. He has traveled much of the world, and plans to do more soon, as soon as his firm is up and running. He is leading a very simple life right now, and will soon be working entirely for himself. He is not interested in how much money he makes, just so much as he’s making something. And just so much as he’s making a service in the business world.

Lac also has a great taste for film, and showed me his small but astoundingly good looking set of foreign films (as in, foreign from Hollywood).

11/9 Thursday

I slept better last night.

First thing in the morning, I located my landlady and told her about my horrendous showering experience. She came up and looked, told me to never touch the red lever again, and said that someone would be up to fix it in the afternoon.

I went to the internet center at the school and arranged to have my room granted internet access. There were all these various different types of internet connections one could get, ranging in speed and monthly bandwidth. I took the standard package of 2000mb/month, as I would only be using it for viewing text based web pages.

In the afternoon, the repairman came to fix my pipe, and replaced the valve unit. He said my hot water would work too.

I met a guy who lives next door to me. He is a Chinese from Malaysia, and is in his last year here at the music school. He is now preparing for his final concert in opera singing.

11/8 Wednesday

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I slept through both lunch and breakfast at the dining hall.

I did more shopping for my place at a large super market, and returned in time for dinner at the dining hall.

Later that night, I decided it was time to try the shower. I was not convinced that I would get hot water in the first place. I turned it on and let it run, with the ‘hot’ knob on full throttle. The water remained cold for about four minutes before I decided that something was wrong. I tried turning a red lever on the cold hot-water pipe. This is where my evening got ugly.

The valve burst, sending the lever flying across the room, as well as dozens of small bits of rusted pipe, carried by a jet of water. I tried to stop it with my finder but it was coming out too fast and just sprayed all over the place. I eventually got my hands on the lever, and jammed it back in. I was soaked and shivering at this point. The water still trickled out and I had to apply pressure to the handle to keep it from shooting out again. I thought I might end up there all night holding the lever in, but luckily I was in reach of my towel rack. I grabbed one of my hand towels and made a bandage around the lever and pipe. It held, but water had already soaked the towel and it was pouring out through the threads. My land lady had showed me where the main water pipe was, so I dashed there and looked for a switch off knob. I found it, and with quite a large amount of force, managed to close the valve. There was still water in the system, so it continued to leak for quite some time. I decided to deal with the rest in the morning.

11/7 Tuesday

Today I moved in to my apartment!

I unpacked most of my stuff and decided to try my bed.

You cannot believe how incredibly comfortable a bed feels after almost 3 weeks of sleeping on the floor. I lay in it all afternoon.

11/6 Monday

I went to meet Yue Laoshi, the Chinese teacher who taught me Chinese during my summer 2004 trip abroad, and my 2005 term abroad at the China Music Conservatory. I took the subway to the #13 line and headed to the north west of the city. The #13 line is more modern than the inner city lines and uses electronic ticket readers very similar to those found in Japan. The main lines in Beijing still use paper tickets and paper-tearers, and don’t have electronic ticket dispensers. From the station I took a cab to the Music Conservatory. The cab driver didn’t know where the Conservatory was, but after pulling out his taxi bible, with all possible destinations in it, we found it.

When I got to the school, I found that I couldn’t get in the main gate due to the construction. It seemed that the entire campus was under scaffolding, and the sound of construction was everywhere. I located yue laoshi, and talked to her for a while about housing and my future plans.

She showed me my housing option, which would be in the main dormitory building on campus. My apartment was on the 17th floor (out of 20) and had a kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, and a small windowed/screened-in balcony. I would be paying 2,400 yuan for the month, plus the electric and water bill. It didn’t seem cheap at first, but compared to the states, it is the equivalent of paying about $10 a night, a bargain.

11/5 Sunday

After waking up, we went out to lunch with Caroline, Terry, and Lac at a Dim Sum restaurant. The food was pretty good, but I still prefer my favorite Dim Sum restaurant in Beijing: Jin Ding Xuan.

I went with Terry to try to find some new clothes, since we both packed extremely light and knew we were in for a really cold winter. We went to a shopping area called Xi Dan, which is only a couple of stops away from Wang Fu Jing to the west. However, we ended up not buying anything because we were too overwhelmed by the swelling crowds, the yelling salespeople and the enormous amount of low quality stuff that might fall apart within a week. The stores farther down the main street were predominantly shopped at by Chinese people, and we didn’t see a foreigner the entire time.

11/4 Saturday

We slept in and had a relaxing weekend-day reading and talking.

In the evening, we went to dinner at Outback Steakhouse with Caroline and Terry, as well as 3 people in the television business. The woman, Mei Xue, who was with us when Colm was acting in the CCTV show, brought along two of her friends, one a dancer, and the other a TV producer. The two dancers were quite young, at 22 and 24 years old, and the director was around 40. They all decided to go home after dinner (at the director’s bidding).

Because half our party had gone home, we decided to go out and try a club called Mix. This was a large club with three dance floors, enormous screens showing music videos, and bartenders who spit fire and threw it as well. It was very cool.

11/3 Friday

After getting a good 10 hours of sleep, we woke up at 11:00.

We ate breakfast, woke up, and prepared for the day until around 2:30, when we headed over to Terry’s apartment to prepare for a Friday movie night for Cummins employees. Her apartment is very well suited for parties as it is one big, long room, with an inlet for a kitchen and two small rooms coming off for the bathroom and the laundry room. We borrowed a projector from the office, and hooked it up to Colm’s laptop. We shown the projector directly on one of the large white walls, and arranged her two large couches to make an amazing home theater setup.

After the festivities, Colm, Terry, Caroline and I went to have dessert at Bellagios and were there until around midnight talking.

We were thinking about going clubbing but found that we were too exhausted, so we decided to go get massages instead. I decided to try a male masseuse, which apparently many guys will not do, and found that they can apply more pressure in the massage, which I liked. Girls seem to be better at pressure points and smaller things, but guys can really exert more force.

11/2 Thursday

I showed Colm the dumpling place I have been going to near the Peninsula Hotel for lunch. The meal was cheap and good.

After lunch, Colm and I went to the Hilton hotel a few buildings down from the apartments in the Oriental Plaza complex. We ordered some tea and sat down in some comfy chairs to relax and get some work done. Colm caught up on events in America and in the world with a couple of magazines, while I plugged in my laptop to catch up on some missed reporting.

At around six o’clock Colm met and interviewed a boy who is interested in going to Choate. He is currently in an international school in Beijing as a 9th grader, and would like to transfer this year to choate or go next year to repeat his freshman year. His father was the “father of the internet” in China according to Colm, and owns Yahoo China as well as a few other dot coms. I met and talked to the boy with Colm after the interview. He seems very nice, and a good fit for Choate. He enjoys ping pong and swimming. We were also able to meet with his parents and answer their questions about Choate. He seems to have been very well raised, and his parents want exactly what Choate can offer him.

We stayed at the Hilton a while longer reading and writing before we went to have dinner. We watched a movie called ‘Click’ with Adam Sandler, and even thought I only watched the first and last 20 minutes of it, because I was online in the other room, I found it quite entertaining.

11/1 Wednesday

Apparently the ‘candy bombs’ were a big hit.

Today I went with Colm to Zhong Guan Cun. We brought his Palm smart phone in hopes of it getting repaired. We were also looking for some cool gadgetry.

We found a place to get his phone repaired after visiting a couple stores. The screen wasn't working, and all of the other vendors said it was broken, but the guy at this final place opened it and reconnected a cable in a few seconds and voila it worked! It still needed work, and the man agreed to do it for a very low cost. He also replaced the phone’s scratched casing for Colm.

Pirated software lives on. After asking around, we finally found a guy who would give us a copy of XP Pro for around 15 yuan, but made us promise we wouldn't tell anyone (especially the authorities!!). It appeared, because they took so long to get it to us and it was on a CD-RW with the key written in magic marker, that they had just burned the disc on some computer in another part of the building. Colm needed a copy to attempt to restore his old laptop computer. He had lost the disk, but still had a legitimate CD-key.

I bought a mouse pad for 3 yuan. It is extremely flimsy and of poor quality, but it does the job.

We found a really cool gadget that can play scrolling pictures on an LCD screen like a picture frame. There were many models but we eventually picked a Philips one because it was high resolution and bright. Colm ended up buying it, fulfilling his requirement to walk out with at least one cool piece of technology.

Coming home from Zhong Guan Cun, we went looking for an inflatable mattress (for me and future guests at Colm’s) but ended up at a camping store which was very expensive. I hardly even knew that camping was something that was done in China, and to find such a store devoted to it (it looked like a small version of a Trail Blazer) was a real surprise. Apparently there must be a market for the stuff.

Colm invited a friend to come along to a restaurant from Singapore next to his apartment building called My Humble House. It was anything but humble, and the food was really good. The desserts are all served with a steaming chunk of dry ice that is floating in water. The friend who came along used to work at Humble House, but now is working at IBM. She takes English classes near the apartment, and seems really nice.

Delay

Whoa sorry about the delay. I have been moving around quite a lot, settling in again, and looking for a job. I will resume posting again!

10/31 Tuesday

I was able to get to Kai Fa Qu today in around 25 minutes, without encountering much traffic.

When I got to the Cummins Kai Fa Qu office, I was told that I would be going out to do some community service for the company. I was literally handed an English text book, told what the last lesson taught was, and sent to the classroom. I had no idea what level these people were at, whether they were used to doing just oral practice, or what things I needed to focus on with them The students were a bunch of around 30 of Beijing’s senior citizens. I had fun teaching them, and also realized just how complicated English can be. For example, I tried to explain the use of the word ‘like’, but was pretty lost for words. I also further realized how ridiculous some English words sound through attempting to teach their pronunciation, especially, "U-m-b-r-e-l-l-a-". I taught for almost 2 hours.

After returning from the classroom, I ate lunch in the company canteen. The food there was extremely healthy and good, including vegetables, fish, tofu, and rice. Even before I saw the sign on the door that said 'canteen' as I was leaving, I thought of the place as a canteen. It just had a 'canteen’ aura...a very cheap and efficient setup but substantial healthy food for hard workers.

I went with a couple of the workers after finishing lunch, to the workshop floor where they had a ping pong table. They played doubles, and I paired up with the man who had driven me to teach English. I was rusty, and he wasn’t very consistent, so we ended up losing pretty badly every time.

After ping pong, I learned how to assemble, clean, and calibrate a fuel injector for a 6-cylinder Cummins 1600 Horse Power engine. A fuel injector pretty much looks like an enormous bullet, and delivers a squirt of fuel into the cylinder of the engine, where the fuel is ignited, and the explosion pushes the piston down. I was given a special pair of clothes and shoes to enter the fuel injector workshop. I had to bathe the injector in an enormous tub of pure gasoline at one point while cleaning it, and was nearly up to my elbows in the black stuff. I helped the young guy teaching me how to work with the injector with his English, focusing on some of the technical terms for the parts.

I returned home by taxi. Unfortunately the traffic was terrible, and it took over an hour to return home. I slept in the car.

At night, Colm and I went to the Cummins office building to help the interns complete the 200 'candy bombs' we bought the candy for on Sunday. We placed them on all the Cummins employees’ desks for them to find the next morning.

10/30 Monday

I was supposed to start work today, but because of all the impending political activity (the Africa Summit), the traffic would be extremely bad getting out to Kai Fa Qu early in the morning and it wasn’t worth it.

I slept in, and then went out with Terry to help guide the mayor of Columbus around the Forbidden City. It was his last full day in Beijing, and he was taking a quick tour of some of the sights.

When I arrived at the entrance to the Forbidden City, I didn’t have enough money to get into the city (the group was already inside) but a random man outside of the ticket office lent me 10 yuan so I could afford to get in. He must have seen me trying to get a student discount with my Choate I.D. card (“Chinese students only!”), and heard that I didn’t have enough to pay for the full ticket. I was extremely impressed by his generosity, and when asked how I could repay him, he jokingly said, “Send it in the post!”

After the Forbidden City, we took the Mayor to Silk Alley. I told a girl at a tie shop there, on the ‘Silk’ floor, that the mayor was my father, and saying that helped him get a better price on a bunch of silk ties. The people running the shops always appear to appreciate when someone knows how to speak Chinese.

I went with Terry to see where she and the other intern live. The apartment is conveniently located right behind the Cummins office building. Her apartment was pretty nice and very large, complete with a full kitchen and laundry room. The only problem she had encountered was that brown water was coming out of her sink when I visited her, and sometimes she has no water at all. Also, the windows seem to leak a lot, and she has to sleep on the couch, away from her bed next to the window, in order to keep warm.

I went to a nearby dumpling restaurant with her and ordered 60 dumplings with various fillings. We finished them all. After walking that off for a bit we went to a nice dessert place called Bellagios which is Taiwanese. There we shared an enormous strawberry-yoghurt smoothie.

10/29 Sunday

I slept in until 12:00.

At around 1:00 I went walking around Beijing with one of the Cummins interns, Terry. We tried to find Hou Hai Park to sit down and eat/talk, but ended up finding Bei Hai Park instead. At that point we had been looking, without a map, for around two hours, and were desperately hungry. So, we found a random restaurant and ordered some noodles. I got tomato and egg noodles, while she got beef noodles. We decided to head back home after that, as it became apparent that our search would be futile (we asked quite a few people on the street where Hou Hai was, and all pointed north and said it was far away).

After returning from our walk, we sat down in Wang Fu Jing to wait for the other intern, Caroline, and Lak. After around half an hour, they showed up. We all went shopping for candy to put on 200 peoples' desks in the Cummins office, as part of an effort to improve office relations and social life (it’s just a start).

After our shopping, we decided to go try a famous dumpling restaurant called Din Tai Fung. It was a long taxi ride, but well worth the wait. The service was excellent and the food delicious. The dumplings were a bit too rich for my liking, however. We ordered and ate every type of dumpling on the menu. Some of the dumplings (they demonstrate when they bring them out), are eaten in a special way. One, you put in soup and eat, while another you eat plain, and another you are supposed to use soy sauce and/or vinegar.

I had a quiet evening at home, reading, and watching some TV.

10/28 Saturday

I decided to go to Tian An Men square to look around and to do some photography. It was a nice day with a surprisingly blue sky. The square was crowded as usual, but it was packed into a slightly smaller space to make room for 2008 Olympics exhibits. There were two massive models of some of the Olympic Complexes, as well as two massive displays for the 5 Chinese mascots, all Panda Bears, with the names BeiBei, JingJing, HuanHuan, YingYing, and NiNi. All of their names combined say “Beijing Huanying Ni” which means “Beijing Welcomes You”.

Also occupying the square was a large billboard advertising the Africa Summit in Beijing. The Chinese are courting the Africans for their untapped mass of natural resources, which China is currently in need of. Throughout the city, lights have gone up, displays and billboards have been erected reading, “Africa: Friendship, peace, cooperation and development".

I met the mayor of Columbus, Illinois for a dinner of Peking Duck with Colm. The dinner was held at a Famous Peking duck restaurant called Chuan Ju De in Wang Fu Jing. The family that started the business used to prepare Peking Duck for the emperor. Because the mayor was a Foreign Dignitary, we were able to get a special room designated for government officials. Columbus is interested in doing a sister city program with a city in China, and the mayor toured about 7 different cities during his stay. The sister city program is one that encourages cultural exchange and understanding.

After saying goodbye to Colm, the mayor, and his entourage, I joined up with the Cummins interns, Terry and Caroline, as well as their friend Lak, who is Vietnamese. We went to a Halloween party at an apartment owned by a couple of British guys working in China. The apartment was really hard to find, and after getting off the taxi, we accidentally ended up looking in the Korean sector of the area for a good half an hour. Addresses in China can be really confusing, and most security guards at the gates have no clue of their surroundings. They are only there to stop and question suspicious looking people trying to enter into the apartments. Finally, after having 4 security guards collaborate, unsuccessfully, to figure out where we were going, one of the owners of the apartment found us.

The party was fun, and people had some really funky costumes including a straw/grass man who was wearing, well, straw and grass, a guy who had strapped a functioning fog-maker to his butt and was wearing a gas mask, and a guy who had dressed up in Cultural Revolution gear. Yet again, we were costume-less, but I had my Mao bag which was good enough.

After the party, a bunch of us went to an underground club called Vix. The music was decent, and the place was packed with costumed dancers. We got too tired to dance at around 5am, and returned to our homes by taxi. Outside of the club, my ears were still ringing and I was half deaf for a while (I think I will give my ear drums a break for a while). On the way home I could already see people starting to work at construction sites, and opening up their small shops. I tried not to wake Colm when I got to the apartment.

10/27 Friday

Today was an especially crazy day.

Colm took off from work today because he was invited to act in a TV show for CCTV (China Central Television). The TV series that Colm was invited to be on is called "Waiting at the Airport" and is about things that people do/see while in the airport. In this particular show, Colm would be playing the part of an American who came over to meet a Chinese girl he had met online. The driver took us to Kai Fa Qu, where the studio was. The studio happened to be right near the Cummins Distribution center in Kai Fa Qu.

We came to an enormous complex that looked like an airport terminal (how fitting). It was very hard to find the entrance to where the studio was, as most of the building was unmarked and abandoned looking. Finally we saw a bunch of people standing outside a door in the rear of the complex, and asked them if the place behind them was indeed the studio. They said it was, and Colm and I got out and went inside. The inside of the building, as we entered, was totally gutted, aside from some rickety tables and chairs set up on the floor. We were taken upstairs, only to meet more dimly lit gutted space plus a few doors opening into smaller rooms. Through one of the doors was something that resembled a dressing/make-up room. There, where it was better lit, we put our stuff down and were introduced to the director and some of the actresses for the show.

Colm was given the script for the scenes he would be doing, and we were both taken aback by the amount of lines he would be memorizing. Mind you, the script was all in Chinese. Some of the characters were ones that neither Colm nor I had ever seen before. Colm's friend, Mei Xue, who teaches at the School of Dance in Beijing, came along and was able to help him with the script. Colm managed to talk to the director about the length of his lines, getting permission to simplify and shorten many of the tougher parts. For the next hour or so, Colm studied his lines and practiced them with some of the actresses.

The set, which was on the ground floor, could be seen from an overlook on the second floor. It looked like an airport, complete with VIP lounge, restaurant, bar, duty free shop, snack shop, travel agency, and police station. There were airport signs hung out all over the place, pointing in the direction of luggage, terminals, gates, bathrooms, and security. At one point, when I was actually on the set, I had to wonder if it really had been a scrapped airport. The building even had the look of an airport, and the signs looked authentic enough. The duty free had real wine bottles in it, and the snack shop real food.

When Colm started shooting, the crew moved the cameras and lights to the Police Station section of the set. After that, they moved to the travel agency, and the bar. In the police station, they shot a couple scenes in which Colm had to be crying (trying to locate the girl he met online), so they put some drops in his eyes that induced tearing. They tried to shoot in smaller clips so that Colm could memorize his lines more effectively. Colm proved to be a good actor and was able to perfect the clips after a couple of takes.

I talked with one of the male actors who asked if Colm had ever been in any movies in the US. We also talked about my experience in China so far, and how I learned to speak Chinese.

As I mentioned before, the complex looked abandoned, and I was very surprised that CCTV had a studio in such a dilapidated building. I was more surprised, and horrified, however, to find a bucket of dead fish in the bathroom. This further set the studio, in my mind, into the ranks of 'ghetto'.

At around 7:00 pm, I went with Colm’s driver to Dominos to get pizza for the 2 Cummins interns who had come to watch, as well as for Colm and myself. I wanted to order 4 pizzas but ended up getting 5 plus a sampler box of appetizers. There was a promotion going on that gave you 2 free pizzas if you ordered 3, or 1 free pizza if you ordered 2, so I had to either get too little or too much. We could always eat the leftovers for breakfast/lunch/dinner over the next few days.

Colm ended up acting for over 8 hours (we got there at around 1:00, and got out after 10:00). I was tired from just watching and taking pictures. The other actors and actresses would have to stay until around 2:00am in order to finish the particular episode of the show.

After leaving the studio, Colm, the interns, and I went to a club that was holding a masquerade night (a pre-Halloween celebration), but we didn't have any costumes. The lack of costumes didn’t matter as long as we paid for tickets. There was free champagne with the entrance charge, and the place got drunk bone-dry by around 1:30.
After dancing until around 2:30, we ate leftover pizza out of the back of Colm's driver's car. We saw the interns off, and returned home tired and content.