Chengdu Bike Ride with Music

Another video memento of Chengdu. This is what it looked like to bike from my apartment to Tian Fu Square (天府广场) in the centre of town. In December.

The great song playing is by Mongolian 布仁巴雅尔 (Bu Ren Ba Ya Er). One of Natalie's favourites.

Bike Ride with Friends (video)

I'm going to share a video from this past May. Back in May I couldn't, but now I have a YouTube account so you all get to see my top top secret secret videos. Speaking of which, when something is really secret, you're supposed to put it on the bottom not the top. Just FYI.

This is Michelle (pink) Maria (red) Natalie (blue) and Brien (dude) riding home from ZhaoJue temple 昭觉寺 in Chengdu. It's about an hour's ride from the TV tower 电视塔。We played badminton there, until a monk told us to stop. Oops. Another monk had told us we were allowed!

All I Really Need Duet

My brother Benjamin has been working at a preschool in Ottawa for a while now, and since he left Ottawa this week, he got together with Doug from his band, The Fox and the Hound, and recorded (in only two hours) a CD of some of the songs he's been playing for the kids. One track mysteriously got deleted, however, and so when he came through Montreal yesterday he asked me to re-record it with him as a duet. The song is one I've played here before, "All I Really Need" by Raffi. We did a few takes and I'm posting the one where we cracked up because midway through the first verse, we both sing the same wrong line. So we went with it.

Kelamayi， 克拉玛依

After the stans I went back to Urumqi to meet my friend Reshalati, who was coming up from Chengdu to visit family. Waiting for her at the station, however, I got to be useful and help a lovely English stranger who needed help finding lodging. Long story short, her name was Sarah, she had lunch with Reshalati and me and we all decided to travel together up north to Kelamayi, the heart of XinJiang's oil country, where one of Reshalati's Uighur uncle is ... basically an oil tycoon. It's complicated. He's also a government official. Anyway, we went. It turned out, however, that due to XinJiang 's foreigner laws, not only were we not allowed to stay at his home, we weren't even allowed to set foot inside. This was embarrassing to him, as host, but apparently being a Party bigshot doesn't translate into getting to bend the rules, but actually needing to follow them really strictly. So that weekend we stayed in a hotel, and every day were treated out to breakfast, lunch and dinner by the Uncle's entourage. We never actually met Uncle the entire weekend. He was "in meetings" the whole time. We were, however, driven all over the territory by a chauffeur and one of the Uncle's assistants. If you can imagine, we were driven to our hotel in a luxury sedan, but half an hour later we left in a luxury SUV, because they were worried the car was too small for us. It was posh and a half. Kelamayi is a big city, but before oil was discovered fifty years ago, it simply didn't exist. Seriously. The place has a populist oil legend you can read here. We saw billions of dollars of water gushing in from Russia here, and finally, ghost city: here.

Talking about Chengdu (我想念成都）

Here's a radio piece on Chengdu I didn't like at all. The reporter tells the wide-eyed story of what was obviously her first trip to China, and passes it off as informed reporting on how "[this] backwater city in western China became an urban metropolis overnight."

It's filled with:
bogus facts like "Chengdu suffers blackouts for two to five days every week." trite observations like "young couples laughed, nuzzled and walked arm-in-arm in a way that would have shocked earlier generations of straight-laced Communist youth." and (try not to barf!) "Chengdu is a place full of right angles and contradictions."

Wasn't "place of contradictions" banned as clichéd and meaningless in like 1994*? Needless to say, she never mentions any actual contradictons.

I'll leave you with her closing, which I think you'll find deliciously ridiculous and just a little sad, given that this is really all she has to say about "the newest Chinese boomtown".

"In the end, I stopped trying to tease through Chengdu's many contradictions and, instead, embraced the one thing that for me remained absolutely, unvaryingly good and true: the food. Szechwan is known the world over for its fiery cuisine, and no matter where or what I ate in Chengdu, I always ate like an empress. I had one of the best meals of my life in a state-run dumpling house. Sitting on a hard bench surrounded by office workers and students, I feasted on a 75-cent bowl of tender meat dumplings floating in an oily, spicy sauce. I still think about those dumplings, probably more often than I should say."

Awwwwwwww, listening to vapid reporting on Chengdu makes me miss it even more.**






*Along with "Land of contrasts"
**And not because I think 6 kuai worth of pork jiaozi is "eating like an empress".

Growin' up: the song

First song on here in a while, I know. I'm working on earning back my readership. Listenership. This is an old favourite of mine by Bruce Springsteen, that hard-rocking, rough-folking leftist.

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