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Neat Things

Trying to explain why things happen in China is sometimes quite difficult so please bear with me and try to see

the humour or situation from my point of view………..

Late on a Saturday evening I was called by one of my students asking if there was any way I would be able to

help out a new hotel very close to us. I asked how and he said that they needed some westerners to look the

part of businessmen in making a small advertisement for the hotel. He said it would be on Sunday morning and

shouldn’t take too long. Innocently I said sure, why not! What was suppose to be a short session turned into a

12 hour marathon taking multiple shoots at the Hotel, the airport, in different suites at the hotel, etc. etc.

etc…………… I must admit it was kind of fun. They will be showing this commercial (about 1 min.) around all of

China. They will be giving me a copy of the VCD (I’ll explain later what a VCD is. Fred you are going to love

this) They fed us and gave us lots to drink (real expensive Western food) and marched us all over the place

shooting miles of film. Anyway they gave us 500 ¥ and a whole bunch of coupons for the pool, spa and best of

all 3 coupons for meals at the Western restaurant with a value of 100¥ each. So at the end of the day it was

worth it. Now I am a TV celebrity in China. The one problem that has arisen is that now I seem to be in

demand………LOL. This Saturday they have asked me to be on a local TV show where I have been asked to

talk about how Westerners deal with failure. Boy did they pick the right guy!!!!! Promise to let you all know how

that went after the fact.

VCD’s….. You won’t believe this! When I left for China it was just before the release of the new Planet of the

Apes movie in North America. I was a little pissed that I was going to miss it. If I had known what it was really

like I wouldn’t have bothered to be upset. Anyway I arrive here in China and in my apartment is a VCD/DVD/CD

player. Guess what, it plays my DVD’s I brought with me! Now here is the interesting part. While out on one of

my shopping sessions that week I see what appears to be a movie rental store. I go in and there along the walls

are literally thousands of DVD’s and VCD’s. VCD’s are cheap knock offs of DVD’s. Guess what? The price is

6¥ each. That’s about 1$ CDN. And there in front of me is the new Planet of the Apes movie in VCD format. I

purchase it and take it home to play. (remember TV here is all in Chinese so I don’t watch it). The movie plays

beautifully although there are Chinese subtitles throughout the movie, but who cares! Late on after purchasing

more VCD’s you see how they do it. They sneak a camera into the movie in NA and film the show. It’s hilarious

because sometimes you see people moving around in front of the camera, getting up to use the bathroom, what

a hoot! You also get to occasionally here them laughing, talking opening candy wrappers etc. DVD’s are better

but they are direct copies of already released movies (with the subtitles added) but like I said who cares for 6 ¥ .

The only bad part is that occasionally the disk replication is very poor so it will stick or hang up part way through

the movie so you have to dick with the fast fwd. and reverse to get it by that spot but all in all it is worth it. By the

way VCD’s play on any computer CD drive so it’s pretty cool. You can also buy just about any type of computer

program here for the same price 6 ¥ . MS Office Premier, any graphics program. A geeks dream.

My Journals

China Pictures