strange days have found us

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it has definitely been a weird few days.

when i wrote the last entry, we'd just played our gigs in chengdu and were headed to changsha the next day. alas, that was not to be, cos we missed the train due to an unusual amount of traffic on the roads. luckily, there was a ticket-lady who spoke english and let us change the tickets to the next day, free of charge.

as we drove to the train station, the city was overrun with people carrying placards. at first i thought they were protesters, but they turned out to be advertisers (again, i had to remind myself that i was in china, and not at home - protesters aren't looked upon quite so kindly here). they were everywhere, and with their all-pervasive presence, you almost didn't notice all the khaki and blue uniforms running around. yep, soldiers and cops. lili, the owner of the jah bar, had told us the night before that a soldier and a cop had come into the bar looking for tibetans. as a result of this, we were smoking outside, and keeping a close eye out for uniforms. there was a very strange vibe in the city, lili told us. not nice. they were closing down the tibetan quarter, and trying to keep everything under wraps. not wanting people to panic. but suddenly, i was feeling paranoid. websites were being shut down or banned, and even the loophole websites sometimes couldn't get you to what you want. i've come to expect that some websites don't work in china (wikipedia is one), but i couldn't even access travelblog. i managed to get to it today through a link from my email, but i wasn't sure that that would work.

so. we spent another lazy day in chengdu with sascha, and promised ourselves we'd actually manage to catch the train the next day.
luckily, it all worked out, and 24 hours after we were meant to be, we were headed towards changsha, and some uncertainty but hopefully some gigs.

after another 21 hour uncomfortable train ride (what is there to say? this time we were all split up, so i couldn't even bitch to kt about how bored i was), we got to changsha at 7:30am. and waited. and waited. after two hours, meng ni, didier's girlfriend and our guide/translator/acting manager for this part of the tour finally arrived. more traffic problems, she said.
i'm not sure if the others really knew what was going on, but i was certainly clueless, so when meng ni said we were going to xiangtan, and we should take a bus right now, and it would take us one hour to get there, i was slightly confused (weren't we playing in changsha?), but ready to go along with whatever.

we all got on the bus and promptly fell asleep, and when we woke up, we were in the birthplace of chairman mao.

i can't say much about xiangtan itself, partly cos we weren't there for very long, and partly cos there doesn't seem to be much to say. it was a standard chinese city, not a very big one, and it looked more or less like every other city i'd been to. we had a good time there, though, and were very well looked-after by our host jian yi, who was the owner of the rock bar where we played.
we met meng ni's friend nate first, and i initially thought we were staying with him, but no, then it was off to jian yi's place. thankfully meng ni was there to translate for us, otherwise it would have been a whole lot more confusing. we arrived, and were shown our beds (beds! kt and i had to share, but still, beds!), and told to make ourselves at home in the very clean and very nice apartment we now found ourselves in. we rolled a spliff and sat back and let the train journey evaporate off us.

we played the following day, after a leisurely sleep-in and a fantastic (if slightly weird) lunch with jian yi's parents and pretty wife, in their even more pristine apartment. jian yi's mother had come around earlier in the day to clean the place, and then hurried us over to her house, where she prepared some vegetarian and vegan dishes especially for us.
everything about the gig went well. we had a bass guitar that worked pretty well, the mics were good and we'd done a decent soundcheck, and the beer was flowing freely (every time they saw our jug was empty, it was refilled), the crowd was fantastic, with lots of english-speaking chinese who laughed at our jokes, and yelled "fuck yeah!" when we asked them to, and clapped and smiled and sang along. this was especially cool cos we didn't know any of them - jian yi had seen us play in dali, and we'd met nate earlier that day, but apart from that, all anyone else knew about us was that we were called fungal horse, and had a funny picture of us on a poster in the bar. the rock bar itself was pretty cool, too - a genuinely "underground" bar, built into the space underneath the road, wth a park outside and a suitably seedy vibe about it. and, like mickey says, you know it's a good place when the owner starts rolling up as soon as you get there.

the next day, meng ni told us jian yi was taking us to the countryside. the countryside? well, not exactly. more like a little island that the taxi driver drove us to, with a lot of small farms and some industrial area across the river. it was a nice day out, though, and we discovered a fantastic abandoned building that we wandered around in for a while. meng ni has been talking about holding a festival there or something, which would be fantastic, and much easier to organise in china than back home, cos there's less shit to worry about with insurance and public liability and so forth. you just do it, and if something goes wrong, you deal with it.

the day was ended with another great meal (we didn't pay for any of our food or taxis or anything, really, the whole time we were there - jian yi was a very generous host), this time cooked by the local farmers with fresh vegetables from their crops. full of cabbage, cauliflower, and greens, we went back to the ranch to have a few drinks and then sleep for a few hours, before our train the next day.

at 4am we were up again, and out the door by 4:30 to get the train to wuhan, where we would play that night. we got to the station in good time, and ate some tasty but overpriced fried noodles whilst we waited. then we got on the train and i had my first experience on the hard sleeper. it was ok. there weren't many places to sit by the time we got on the train, and trying to fit my stuff anywhere was hard, but i managed. i even dozed off a few times.
finally, five hours later, we arrived in wuhan. warmer and brighter (blue sky!) than rainy xiangtan, it seemed like a pretty cool place to be. there were roadworks around the station, but eventually we managed to find a taxi, and headed to meng ni's friend's apartment. a very cute dreadlocked girl (chao chi, meng ni's best friend) came to meet us, and we went to her incredibly clean, white, new apartment (even more so than jian yi's mum's place. mind you, she and her boyfriend only moved in a month ago). we settled in, and all of us alternated having a lie-down and showering, whilst chao chi and meng ni prepared a fantastic lunch for us. we ate until we couldn't eat any more, and then it was time for the soundcheck.

the vox bar is the most "rock n roll" venue we've played at by far. it's much bigger than anywhere else we've played, with a very rock bar feel. the stage is huge, and set well above the floor. there's a side room where the band can hang out and prepare, and that's where you go on and off stage from. the floors are grimy, it smells like cigarettes and beer, and people have written chalk messages all over the walls (most of which are blackboards, which was pretty cool). it's obvious that a lot of bands play there - there were amps, the mics and a drumkit already set up when we arrived. wuhan is one of the major alternative music centres of china - chengdu and beijing are the only other two that seem to have the kind of name for themselves that wuhan does. since travelling in china, i've heard a lot about people booking tours for bands, and they always mention wuhan.

the soundcheck went ok - some stuff was lost in translation, but managing to explain that kt wanted more sustain on her mic was a high point. we even managed to find a bass, which ended up being a bit dodgy, with really low action (mick tried to fix it, with limited success. at least he made it playable). we found out that they charged 25 kuai at the door, and we would get 70%!o(MISSING)f that, as well as free drinks. actually, apparently it was only meant to be one free drink, but we didn't know that, and ended up getting a couple of beers each. apparently 25 kuai is the standard door charge here in wuhan, but it sounded pretty steep to us.

the gig was probably one of the least fun ones we've played (second to the weird corporate one back in kunming, of course). the crowd filled maybe a third of the huge venue, and were mostly unresponsive, with some polite clapping at the end of songs, and that was about it. there was none of the yelling and singing along and clapping and laughing we've come to expect (although i did get some applause from one guy after one of my clarinet solos, which was nice). a couple of people looked interested, and the second set definitely seemed to go down better than the first, but it wasn't great. the sound onstage was weird, with the mids and treble and bass all out of whack on our instrumental mics, and the bass detuning itself, and the volume levels on the instruments and vocals generally being all wrong. but, we perservered. i think we were all pretty buggered, but we did the best we could (my voice is trashed at the moment due to another respiratory ailment - damn the pollution in this country!), and we got 650 kuai for our efforts (they gave us the whole of the door money cos there wasn't much of it). not too long after we finished our second set, we headed back home, where i promptly fell fast asleep.

today has been full of sleep, and discovering that my ipod works again (yay! i thought it was broken. train rides will be much more tolerable now), and some tasty street food. tomorrow we head back to changsha for a gig at some bar whose owners meng ni doesn't like very much (but hopefully the gig itself will be better than last night's), and then we're racing to hong kong for our gig there on the 27th. mick has a date with christina on the 26th, but maybe kt and i will leave the following day and continue this tour in the style it has been begun, with arriving only five or so hours before we're due to soundcheck. we don't know where we're staying in hong kong, and time is running out, but as usual, we will improvise......... someone's bound to have a couch!

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