Baby, I'm a Star! And Other Updates

- For a month or so, my Chinese friend, Jake, has been hyping Christmas Eve. This is because Jake works for a production company that organizes foreigners to perform in different banquet halls around the city for some major bucks on Christmas Eve. Jake has guaranteed each of us 1000 RMB ($150) for just performing on that night! That is a little under a 1/3 of my monthly salary.

Anyway, it is looking like I'll be performing a couple. A British guy named Rick will be performing a couple of Beatles songs and "Save Tonight" by Eagle Eye Cherry with me and I might be doing a duet with my friend Angela (Sonny and Cher? The Mamas and The Papas?)

In preparation for this, some of us went to a photography studio last night to get promotional photos taken. I brought my guitar and struck a number of poses ranging from pensive, introspective, fun-loving, and hey-I'm-an-extremely-attractive American-who-will-drive-your-daughters-crazy look. Actually I felt mildly uncomfortable and I'm unsure whether or not any of my photographs turned out that well. It was slightly intimidating having three Chinese men telling me how to pose when I couldn't understand them. Luckily, Jake was there to translate. I've never taken press/promotional photographs so I really had no idea what was going on.

While my shoot took about 10 minutes the girls I came with went all out. They applied different layers of makeup, changed clothes, and did multiple shoots. A couple of the Belarussian girls I came with have done modeling before so they were much more comfortable in front of the camera than I was.

Besides Christmas Eve, I guess I will also be playing a show in a couple of weeks so I need to start learning these songs (God, I hate "Save Tonight", someone shoot me). Not sure how much I will get paid but it should be decent.

Hopefully I will be able to get these photographs from my "press shoot" and then I can post them here.

I'll try to not let all this stardom go to my head...hah.

- I recently got a job teaching Neurologists English. I will be teaching them for the next two weeks because, apparently, they have a doctor from Israel visiting them (I have no idea why) so they want to improve their English so they can better communicate with him. They are paying me 200 for 2 hours a day (which is absolutely amazing) plus some extra dough for the taxi rides. These doctors have a great sense of humor and are willing to learn so I don't think it will be bad. One thing I have noticed is that hospitals in China are not nearly as clean as they should be. I saw many nurses leaving the elevator with trashbags full of hazardous material (I can't think of a better word for it...but it includes dirty syringes and bloody bandages...medical waste...? I think I'm losing a lot of my vocabulary here...) and one of the trash bags literally had blood leaking out of the top of it. Not only that, but the nurses were not wearing any gloves. In fact, no nurses in the entire hospital, even when peering into patients' rooms, were wearing latex gloves. The bathroom they led me to was more clean than my restrooms I've been to in China, but there were definitely several flies flying around and the smell wasn't so pleasant.

- Halloween Night! I've been watching an absurd amount of Trailer Park Boys in my free time (for those of you who don't know, TPB is a Canadian show about...you've guessed it...some guys who live in a trailer park and it's one of the funniest shows ever) so I decided to be white trash for Halloween. Throughout the week before Halloween my Norwegian friend Bjorn kept on asking me what I was planning on being for Halloween and I also asked him. He said, "I really just want to find a huge teddy bear that I can put over myself." I seriously thought he was joking, but sure enough, when he came into the apartment we were pregaming he was wearing a humongous teddy bear costume. You had to lift the head of the bear to see Bjorn's face. It was absolutely ridiculous and photographs will appear here as soon as they surface elsewhere. Anyway, it was like foreigner-palooza at my friend Sable's apartment. There were about 30 of us: all the Drake people, two Italian girls, two New York girls, a couple British dudes, the Norwegian friends, Bence (the Hungarian metalhead), Fabian (Argentenian dude), and a gaggle of our Chinese friends. We went to karaoke and I think the highlight for me was singing "Can I Play with Madness" by Iron Maiden with Bence while standing on a table making metal poses and faces. Later we went to a club and had quite a bit of fun there too.

- (Most) everyone here is very excited that Obama is our new president. We celebrated a bit last night but I did not stay out too long because I had to teach the Neurologists this morning. I had to restrain myself from laughing out loud but one of the Neurologists was very excited to talk to me about Obama.

She said, "It is the first black president you have had in a long time."
I hesitated, "Well...actually, Obama IS the first black president."
she replied, "Abraham Lincoln was not black?"
I said, "No, he was definitely white."

- This really has nothing to do with my adventures in China, but it's mildly amusing especially considering one of my friends from Drake is Polish but was raised in Indonesia (Hi Piotr!). Especially look at the photograph of the writer in the left hand corner: http://www.indonesiamatters.com/1680/how-to-get-a-bule-man/

"China smells like poopy." - Nick Strandell (for those of you who don't know him, he is a friend of mine from Drake and that is a direct quote)...thanks Strandeezy