thetimespentaway-blog

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Six - Guangzhou (Part Two)

   Guangzhou, after stepping off the train, was like another world. It didn’t feel like the same country. It was hot, especially for November. I’d worn a shirt, pants, hoodie, jacket, and scarf for nearly all of the tour so far. The November air, combined with the suffocating smog, had stifled the sun in the northern parts of China. Down in Guangzhou, we were sitting so much closer to the equator, that I needed a pair of shorts. I didn’t pack any.     The humid air and clear skies were a welcome reprieve. We emerged from an underground station to our familiar cab-hailing scenario and trekked to a hotel. This one was nicer than the others by far. The owner of the hotel’s wife was working reception, and she grabbed her husband straight away when we arrived. Using Mark as a translator, we explained that we were a band from the United States and we’d be playing that night in town. We took photos with the hotel owner. It seemed so odd to me, to be such a spectacle. The area around us was beautiful. The food was the best I’d had all tour. I fell in love with some sort of spicy eggplant dish here. There were shops lining the street, significantly cleaner and more welcoming than where we had gone in China so far. Maybe it was just that being able to see the sun made everything better.     The show was at a huge venue. Fei Livehouse was gigantic, bright, and modern. It was located in some sort of complex, a faux-neighborhood. Around the venue were soccer fields, gift shops, ice cream stores, and a well-lit walkable path. It felt like a welcome center of sorts, or like an outdoor sports complex, with something like a boardwalk running around it. Jeremy and I walked the area, marveling at the difference between where we’d been so far in China and where we found ourselves now.

    There were a bunch of local bands on the show, and a very friendly bartender who spoke a bit of english. She was a blast. She showed us some art she had made, and said she would make some more for us, too, after the show. There was a poster for the show, too, which had me absolutely stoked.     I later learned that the area we were in was called the Redtory Art District. It was a pseudo-warehouse district that had been rehabbed by local artists and hipster-types and made into a cool community of buildings and businesses that breathed life back into an otherwise dead part of town. Honestly, it was badass.     We played to a decent crowd and sold a good amount of merch. We jumped around to the complex around us to find somewhere to have a few beers, and then went back to the hotel. Cody was still in pretty bad shape, but I’m sure he managed to knock a couple back with us nearby. The best part of the show was the hotel owner, who had come to see the American rock band from his hotel play. Live music, from America, staying at the hotel he owned in Guangzhou? Awesome.     I wish I had more photos from this day, but I don’t. I guess I was saving up for the last day in China, which would be tomorrow, in Shenzhen. If Shenzhen were anything like where we just were, it’d be amazing. We would be heading farther south, so anything was possible. I was sad to know that our time was coming to an end in China. I had had such an awesome time learning from Mark and experiencing the weirdest places and foods I’d ever come across. I started to think about whether I’d want to come back to China or Japan first, and the answer was very dependent on the next 24 hours. Southern China? Well, I could get down with that.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Six - Guangzhou (Part One)

   I woke up to a picture of Cody curled on the floor with the caption “CODY DIE” from Mark. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was a joke or not at this point. Cody was so sick from the eggs that there was either no color in his face, or it was entirely red. Feverish, sick at the sight of food and water, and dead tired from not sleeping, Cody was not ready for the train ride we were about to take. Our longest haul yet, we’d be heading south to Guangzhou, several hours away, and our train left between 5 and 6AM.

    It was comical how often Mark would get into screaming matches with cab drivers. We always had to take at least two everywhere we went, because of our luggage and the fact that there were now 7 of us, including Mark and Jeremy. Mark hailed cabs from our hotel to the train station at the crack of dawn. However, not all of the cabs made it to the right train station.     I’d been lucky enough to be in the right cab that took me to the right place, but one of the three cabs started to go to the wrong train station. Once Mark somehow got ahold of the driver and had him deliver our friends to the correct spot, he lost his shit on the driver in front of the station. Mark let a torrent of words out at the guy in a tone I’d not want to be addressed. He was screaming at the dude. After he slammed the door and the driver sped off, Mark told me, “I tell him I will kill his family,” with his signature chuckle and grin. I can’t do anything but smile, either. My eyes are barely open.     A stranger made small talk with me in English, or at least tried, at the train station. He asked where I was going and when. My Chinese was so bad, as evidenced by my inability to pronounce “Tsingtao,” that he did not understand that I was going to Guangzhou. I actually thought that he told me HE was going to Guangzhou, but when he showed me the time his train left, it was not the same as ours. I had already given up on trying to learn Chinese enough to be conversational. This was the nail in the coffin.

    Already prepared for a shitshow of a ride because of Mark’s habit of not paying for the right tickets and us getting routinely booted from our seat, I sat down defeated in what’d be the first of probably 10 seats I’d take on this trip. Cody was pale as a ghost and clutching a puke bag. He threw up at every stop. He threw up right out the open door onto the platform. He threw up in the bathroom, where we decided we’d try our luck at camping out because at one point, the train was completely full, and we were not supposed to be on it at all. It was uncomfortable to be on the train at that point, not knowing what would happen or if there was any security or police that would catch us vagabonds hitching a ride to Guangzhou.    When the sun was up, I could see outside and realized we were not in any area like we had been before. There was bright green foliage. There were mountains and water and there was blue sky. I wasn’t in the smoggy skyscraper-laden wasteland that we’d spent the week in anymore. Now, we were in somewhere that looked almost tropical. To be fair, our train had taken us roughly the equivalent distance of Pennsylvania to Savannah, GA.     Now that we had guitars we could play between shows, Dave and I briefly worked on a tune in our hotel. We’d later demo it around Christmas time in 2016. As I write this, the song has yet to be released, but there’s a working demo of it in my email inbox from this year. The melody has been the same ever since this trip and it sticks with me to this day. I ponder if I’ll do Warped Tour with the band, because the day that we flew to Japan, Jeremy confirmed they’d be on half of it the following summer.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Five - Wuhan

   Wuhan, our next stop, was a blur. I don’t remember the ride nor the hotel. At the venue we were playing, which was a bar of sorts with an island/beach theme, we met the most interesting host of characters I’d find in China.

    The bar reminded me of one of those shows you’d play in America, where the staff seemed virtually clueless as to why you were there, and unaware that their venue even hosted bands. The kind of place where the promoter doesn’t show up, and you have to haggle with the door guy to keep $3 of every ticket, like you were told you could. The stage was more like a pedestal, barely bigger than a kitchen countertop, and tucked into the corner of the restaurant. There was enough room for a drumset and us to stand. We stacked the combo amps we’d be playing out of in front of the stage on the floor. The tables hadn’t been moved.     The green room at this venue was decorated vibrantly with spray paint and murals that all seemed fairly innocent at first glance. There were flowers, mushrooms, psychedelic in nature. The catch was that virtually every organic piece of matter depicted somehow twisted into a dick at some point. It was straight out of Superbad. There were couches and a foosball table in the back. I decided I’d do my best to download a VPN today so that I could check my social networks and email and all of the other things that were completely illegal and banned in the country of China, so I set up shop on a couch and hung around in the back.

    The gang had met someone out in the bar that was a Russian expat. His accent was thick, he looked like shit, and he wanted to play foosball. We obliged.     I don’t remember his name, but he wore a sportcoat and a fedora, and told us that he either lived or had lived in a garage down the alley nearest the bar. He was not allowed back in to Russia. We didn’t pry as to why. When he took his hat off, a few bags of powder and pills fell from his head. Again, no questions were asked.     He kept the guys on their toes playing foosball as I figured out how to bounce my phone’s cell signal off Australian towers to reach Facebook and Instagram. After an unknown amount of time, the next challenger appeared. Small in stature and decidedly African, a man with a very pronounced accent joined the foosball fray. When we asked where he was from, he wouldn’t answer in any specifics. “I am from Africa. I am ALL of Africa.” Kind of lame. We probably would have given someone our home address just for something to talk about at this point.     Africa decides he wants to try sharking us at foosball, but we take Russia and one of our guys to play him in Foosball 2-on-1. It’s heated. There is yelling. There is still no clue as to where this guy is from or how he got here. I rip a post to Facebook and our tag-team wins the match, however controversially. Africa is not pleased about losing.     We take the stage, play for maybe a dozen folks, have some beers, and retreat.

    I feel sick, because the food we ate earlier was utter shit. I had tried to order what I thought looked like some kind of chicken wing. The picture on the wall was deep-fried something or another. When I took my first bite, I gagged. It wasn’t that it tasted bad - there was no real taste at all. I was having trouble trying to stomach it because it had the consistency of a knuckle. It was impossible to chew. I had made my way through a piece or two, but I was so uneasy about it that the anxiety it gave me plagued me through the day and night. What the fuck did I try to eat? Jeremy joked with me that it was horse. We both agreed that the food we had ordered earlier in the trip that was labeled “beef” very well may not have been beef. I didn’t want to think about it any more. Don’t order off the walls. Lesson learned.     Cody, on the other hand, had it much worse than me. He’d eaten some eggs at the same restaurant and they were not done. They were cooked so poorly that I completely avoided what would have been something relatively American, which was already soured entirely by my deep-fried knuckle debacle. Cody got violently ill. Vomiting, shitting, the whole nine yards. He stumbled out on to the street to try to find some place to buy medicine and ended up running into Mark, who probably had just gotten done testing out all of Russia’s hat-drugs. Cody stayed with Mark, sleeping on the floor of Mark’s bathroom in the hotel that night.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Four - Zhengzhou

   The next day was kicked off with a train ride. From Beijing, we were headed south to Zhengzhou to play our third Livehouse. The train rides were not enjoyable. Every other stop it seemed as if I had taken someone’s seat, and I was being asked to move. I didn’t really know any better, and I definitely couldn’t argue. It didn’t help that we started these bullet train journeys at 5 or 6 in the morning most days, herded by Mark and his chainsmoking vulgarity and affinity for pissing off cab drivers.     I made use of my beanie and the neck pillow I’d brought for the 14-hour flights and leaned back in the chairs on the train for however long until the next person alerted me that I was in their seat. When I pulled my beanie down over my eyes and put my new Beats headphones to use, people were less prone to letting me know. I’d like to think maybe they’d just grab another open seat on their way to their destination, which was probably not six hours away, like mine.

    When the train stopped at our destination, Mark lit a cigarette on the platform and hastily collected all of our tickets. Immediately, he threw them out. Sure, whatever, Mark. When I looked at my phone’s WeChat, he had been sending us hilarious GIFs the entire ride, and a picture of him with a girl who I presume he met after the show yesterday. “I was tired, so I only fuck her twice,” he lets us know. Mark is skinny, maybe 5’8-5’10, always wearing a denim vest, slim jeans, knock-off converse, and some punk shirt. His english is hilarious, mostly because he is not the best at not knowing exactly how things are pronounced. He doesn’t miss a lot of words, and I can’t remember many things stumping him other than not knowing the word for what we call cabbage. Getting drinks somewhere on this journey, Mark wanted to know if any of us wanted a Coke, but his accent made it sound a lot more like “do you drink cock?” Unforgettable laughter billowed from all of us for the entire trip at this incident.     Now that our tickets are trashed, Mark makes light of the fare collectors at the end of the platform, explaining that we are dumb American tourists and that we threw out our stubs. The stubs say where you got on the train. Mark, cunning and just the right amount of greasy, gets us through train security having paid virtually nothing by explaining that we had all gotten on the train just two stops prior. It was masterful, but it confirmed that for every train ride we’d be on in this country, we’d be moving around from empty seat to empty seat as soon as someone purchased the ticket for the stretch we were on. We weren’t buying the right tickets at all.

   There is not much I remember about Zhengzhou, other than its Blade Runner 2049-esque exit of the train station. The scene was jarring, even more so than seeing the second tallest building in the world in Shanghai a few days ago. Yellow light washed across the sky.     The 7 Livehouse was easily my favorite venue in China in terms of size and style. Outside, it was built to look like an ancient Greek structure, something like the Acropolis or the Parthenon. Inside, the walls were covered in posters, including one of ours, and Marshall insignia everywhere. The stage was pretty big, and there was a green room of sorts side stage that was behind a door, making it easy to store my stuff.

    Our guitar rentals were delivered to us this day. I got a black Ibanez-style guitar, and Carmen took a gold-top Les Paul look-a-like. I can’t picture Cody’s bass for the life of me. Did he even get one? Can’t say. The problem, or rather Carmen’s problem, was that the guitars didn’t have straps on them when they were delivered. Carmen had decided he wanted to do the entire tour with something like $100 to his name, so he refused to purchase a strap for his guitar, saying that Mark should be the one buying all the equipment, and harboring some sort of distrust for anyone who disagreed with him.     There was a Yamaha piano store next to the Livehouse, oddly enough, so I decided I would go over there and buy a strap for Carmen and I. Luckily for me, there were two guitar straps there, so I bought them both and headed back over to the venue. It was not filling up like yesterday’s show in Beijing. Not even close. Carmen almost thanked me for buying him a guitar strap so that he could play the show that night not sitting in a chair, but didn’t. Maybe he’d offer to pay me back some other time. Probably not.     In the midst of the gig, my amp was not working. The overdrive channel was completely fried. It was disheartening, but I switched over to the clean, cranked the gain, and powered through. The pedals I brought with me, a noise suppressor and a tuner, were no match for the lame-gain mud that the venue’s 4x12 spewed. Fortunately or unfortunately, the huge room was not full by any means, so I shrugged it off. If I was playing through it now, someone else had before, and I was certain I’d not be the last to make do with the 7 Livehouse’s less-than-stellar rig accommodations. The images of Marshall amps adorning the walls made me think back to Japan, where there would be a plethora of head and cab options at every venue, and friendly locals who were more than willing to let us borrow things. Those days were gone. I peeled a tour poster off the wall after we finished and took it back to the room, carefully rolling it and putting it in my suitcase to take home.

    The bathroom at this hotel was equally strange in layout, but the more glaring concern was that our toilet was completely clogged, and there was no toilet paper in sight. We tried to convey to Mark that we needed hotel staff to at least unclog the thing. A maintenance worker came up to our room, dead silent, and before using the plunger to unfuck our mess, hawked the most audible loogie I’d ever been party to. I decided to make my own way down to the front desk to ask for more toilet paper. In the lobby, I struggled mightily with my language barrier, and could not for the life of me explain what I needed to the nice lady at the desk. Using hand signs, drawing pictures, nothing seemed to work. At one point, I thought we had made a breakthrough. She looked at me, excited, smiling, and went into a room behind her. When she returned, she was holding a rubber band. China 1, Me 0.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Three - Beijing

   We took a train to Beijing from Shanghai, and then had a cab driver in a large enough van to carry us and our belongings around escort us to the Great Wall of China.     At the base of the pass we were visiting, I grabbed a coffee and a Snickers bar. It was maybe 7:00AM and after the show and the second time shift in our travels, I was not ready for much activity. The barista drew a smiley face in the foam of my coffee. I sipped and snacked and followed our bundled group out to the base of the stairs that led over the mountainous form of the Great Wall.    

   Juyongguan Pass is one of the three most famous passes of the Great Wall. There are a dozen or so ‘outpost’ like structures along the million-stair path that you can enter and climb. The vantage was breathtaking. The distance between each stair was never the same. Their heights were inconsistent. It made traveling up them even more tiring. Coupled with the fact that it was entirely freezing, it was not an easy hike. I took hundreds of photos, had a handful taken of myself, and Dave, Jeremy, and I reminisced on the history of the band and tried to wrap our heads around how the hell we got here. Carmen, Cody, and Will decided to make a full loop of the pass, and I opted to hang at the 500-some stair level. In hindsight, why the hell didn’t I just keep going?    

   Not too far above where I had decided was the farthest I needed to venture, we perused a souvenir shop built into the Great Wall. I grabbed a bunch of things here. Christmas, after all, was only a month away. I was starting to feel the pinch in my wallet and in the space of my roller-duffel and didn’t end up getting myself anything in particular to remember this moment. I also started to wonder how long the loop was that my friends had embarked on.     We made our way down to the parking lot again and waited for the gang to arrive. They showed up, climbing up some unrelated wall and onto the road in front of the visitor center. Cody and Carmen had snagged actual pieces of the wall or some outpost to bring home with them. Dumb American tourists, all of us.     Some time later, we got into town. Another 7 Days Inn awaited us. We somehow avoided Mark for a significant period of time and made our way down a series of streets to find a place to eat that we had seen on the way in - Satin’s Pizza. To this day, I’m not sure if they intended for it to be Satin or Satan, but either way, they had incredible pizza. It came in a skillet, personal pan-size, and it was nearly the best food I’d tasted in weeks. Of course, I tried my best to enjoy the culture and the cuisine of Japan and China, but no mystery dumpling could satisfy the cravings for creature comfort. I think we pledged to not tell Mark we had gone there if he asked, so that we wouldn’t insult his choice in restaurants.

   In Beijing, we were billed much more appropriately than at the Shanghai show. There were more locals, and more importantly, a crowd. The venue had to have had about 200 people in it, and it was right down the street from our hotel. Scrawled across the wall of the green room was the logo for the band “ISSUES” in thick sharpie, who I can only presume had had the pleasure of playing this venue at some point in their career. I tried to order myself a beer, but I learned that I had no idea how to pronounce Tsingtao. Fortunately, through some finger pointing and nodding, I ended up successful. For the uninitiated, Tsingtao is pronounced something like “shing-dow,” not “sing-tau” as I originally presumed.     I don’t know if there were just no bathrooms at the venue, or very poor ones, but I ended up walking to a public bathroom to take a piss after filling my bladder with the shitty beer. The aroma in that building was pungent, thick, and disgusting. The toilets were trowels in the floor, meant for squatting, and they were not, by any means, clean. It was a particularly disgusting experience. I decided I’d walk back to the hotel next time instead.     Back at the show, my eye was caught. There was a caucasian girl there. Bright blonde hair, lipstick, dressed like she was headed for Warped Tour. My heart raced. Finally, someone who I haven’t shared a vehicle with for two weeks who I can speak in conversational English with. She was talking to someone who I thought looked like they were playing in one of the bands that night in Chinese, so I waited and then sprung my question upon her.     “What brings you to China?”     She looked confused.  She responded, but I have no idea what she said. She replied to me in French. All I could muster was something like “oh! I thought you were American, too.” We did not keep this awkward interaction going. Defeated, I sauntered away to speak english with my friends again. Upstairs in the green room, Carmen was fiddling with a guitar strap that a local had let him borrow. For the life of him, he could not get it to stay on his guitar. We were all so used to straplocks and the assorted ways to keep our guitars attached to our bodies, but they were 3500 miles away. We’d just have to make do.     The show itself was incredible. We had an awesome response from the crowd, who almost seemed to know what we were playing. They were so gracious, and even kept us out for an encore. On stage, though, trouble was brewing, as Carmen’s borrowed gear was not holding up. When we finished the last song in our set and started to hear the calls for another song, or encore, or however the hell you say it in Chinese, Carmen stormed off stage and retreated to the green room.

   What the fuck? I thought it, maybe even out loud I said it. On stage, we were stunned. We made it look like we were going off stage for a quick huddle, but we booked it upstairs to console Carmen and get him to come out. This was the show we had been waiting for in China! Let’s go, man! Alas, Carmen refused to come back out on stage. We looked like stuck-up pricks when the chants for another song died without us returning to the stage, and instead heading to merch, where we could have minimal talks with the showgoers due to our obvious language barrier. Even as a translator in this case, Mark was decent, but not great.     We did, however, meet someone who had been following the band since the first album - the one that we had agreed to remove from digital circulation after signing with CI - and who wanted to buy a copy of it. This was the single most awesome moment of the tour in China, and maybe even Asia as a whole for me. Speak Frantic, a 10-song full-length recorded and released in 2010 digitally, was the piece de resistance of my Carousel Kings career. Here, in Beijing, China, a country with virtually no free access to the internet, someone had found that album, purchased or stole it, listened, and managed to follow the band through the years and then see them come play some four years later at the Mao Livehouse. We took a picture, loaded him with merch, signed anything and everything he wanted, and were elated to have ever met him. Thanks, Speak Frantic China Guy. You fucking rule.

    Did we go out later this night? I don’t know. I know the public bathrooms by the hotel stank to high heaven. The hotel itself, however, continued the trend of being as weird as everything else in China. I’d later find it to be the standard, but the bathroom in the hotel was not constructed with drywall, plaster, or concrete. The walls of the bathroom instead were a fuzzy glass, like you might expect on a shower door. That was weird enough, but when you walked in to the bathroom, you quickly realized that there was no separation whatsoever of the basic bathroom functions. First, a sink, attached to the wall. A toilet next to it. Above three feet beyond that, and six feet off the tile floor, was the shower head. No curtains, tubs, retention methods in the floor. Nothing. You could walk into the shower while you brushed your teeth, and guess what? Your roommate could all but watch. Not exactly what I picture as the pinnacle of privacy, but it was a step above the public disaster looming a block or so away. At least we had western-style toilets now.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day Two - Shanghai

   I don’t remember exactly how or when we woke up, but I do remember briefly visiting what I suppose was the grocery store beneath and next to our hotel. A host of strange fruits and other produce were available. I bought a water and some sort of snack food before returning to the room. Someone brave decided to snoop around the hotel a bit and found that you could take the staircase at the end of the hall upwards to a point where it was no longer inside the building, but in open air along the side. I ventured out, snapped a few photos of the dingy apartment building behind us, the parking lot below us, and whatever was left to be made out in the fog.

    Mark found us and we followed him through the somewhat familiar streets to an area of Shanghai that housed several flea market-like warehouses. There was intense calamity in the buildings, which were filled by vendors in their 10x10 blocks selling knockoff everything. If ever I wanted a pair of Versace sneakers, or a Chanel crewneck, this was the place to get them.     After perusing a few of these buildings, we stumbled out onto a street that was reminiscent of a boardwalk, with shops lining both sides. One side of the street was shops and food stops built into the lowest level of a structure that was either exceptionally old, or meant to look like it was originally an authentic, block-long dojo. We swung into a temple that was tucked into this strip, took some touristy photos, and kept browsing the selection of fake Rolex watches and iPhones.

    Up to this point, I had been using a shitty pair of headphones I bought at K-Mart next to the Goodwill I worked at back home in Pennsylvania. Here, in China, on this stretch of knockoff product heaven, I made an attempt to procure a pair of Beats By Dre. One young girl was tending a stand that sold them and other electronic accessories, so I took to haggling. From somewhere around the 500 yuan they were listed at, we eventually settled on a crisp $20 bill that I hadn’t converted yet through Bank of Weiss. I still use these headphones to this day.

    Myself and the team picked up a few other knick-knacks to give as gifts when we returned home. We knew we’d be seeing The Great Wall on this trip, so most of us opted to save our money and buy some souvenirs that weren’t just logos sewn on or added after the fact to shoddy garments. Cody and Jeremy picked up cones from McDonalds with some weird flavor ice cream. I don’t remember the flavor, but the ice cream was decidedly pink. Jeremy and I also found our way to a store that sold Christmas decorations, all of which were fantastic disasters in terms of their depiction of Santa and the poorly translated english messages that accompanied. The Santa cutout that we procured is probably still taped to the cabinet over the mini-fridge in CI today.     I’ve lost a bit of my sense of timing here, but we ended up taking a train back to the area our hotel was in. The train itself, which ran underground, raced through a subway with its windows wide open. Lining the walls of the tunnel were screens, which with images frozen on them, created a commercial as we zipped by. It was like a flipbook made in class. The advertisement escapes me, but the visual does not. It was pretty awesome. I wondered to myself if that exists in other subways that I’d not yet ridden in Chicago or New York.

    I suppose that later that evening we took a series of cabs to the show, or maybe we walked back the way we had gone the night prior. We didn’t have any gear yet to use in China, unlike in Japan where we had met up with and secured guitars from Fujigen. I ended up purchasing mine from them for $550 and had it mailed back when we continued onward to China. The local band for that night was nice enough to let us use their gear. I ended up playing a black strat-body guitar with a tortoise shell pickguard, which actually played and sounded great. I wondered to myself as to whether or not the cabinet or head I was using was real or a knock-off. Either the 3-4 American patrons who attended our show or the house itself bought us a round of Guinness to enjoy on stage. It tasted delicious compared to the Tsingtao that we would go on to scarf down at the rest of our dates.

   The show, our first in China, was a lot less attended than the ones in Japan. I don’t remember any standout moments from the actual performance, unfortunately. Cody and I snapped a photo or two in the green room with a celebratory PBR can, oddly sized and with a pull-tab top after we played. I suppose we drank and hung out for a bit and made our way back to the room, preparing for the next day, which would be in Beijing.

[thetimespentaway-blog]

Day One - Shanghai

    I can remember getting off the plane and preparing for customs. I had had trouble at every single customs/immigration station so far for some reason. I guess the shaggy haired passport photo that didn't really match up with my new Black Comb cut was a point of contention or something, or all the customs people really hated my Phillies carry-on.     Of course, today was no different, and after watching Cody and the guys zip through the line, handing over their duty-free purchase forms and immigration papers, I stepped up and was confronted about the address of the hotel we were staying at.     “I don't have that on me, I just know the name,” I told the lady calmly.     “Let me see your reservation! Show me!” The lady was barking these orders at me. I was terrified that I was about to blow it for the group. I knew that I had the address in my email, right on the itinerary that I had been instructed to NEVER show anyone, because we had tourist visas, not business visas. With a bag full of merchandise over my shoulder, I reluctantly pulled up the hotel's address, showed it to the lady, and moved through.     “About time, Zell,” somebody remarked.     We pushed on through the airport, up and down escalators, and eventually made our way out to the area where everyone and their mother is either holding a sign, yelling, or trying to be your taxi driver. Cody was about 15 paces ahead of me when Mark, our tour guide, would find him. Tall, skinny, and with pretty decent English, Mark would prove to be the most exciting and funny tour guide that I'd meet. He directed us outside to the tiny van that would take us to our hotel in Shanghai. 

Shanghai on the way to our hotel from the airport.

    Outside is when I first noticed the smog. It was overpowering, amazing, awesome, and disgusting. It was like a dust storm, a yellow layer of fog that blurred out everything. We piled into our taxi van and took off. I snapped a bunch of photos and listened as Mark and the taxi driver spoke in frantic gibberish. The morale seemed to hit a rock bottom right about here for the group.    The 7 Days Inn we arrive at is in a pretty normal place for a hotel, for China, I guess. It was sandwiched between a grocery store and a barber shop, about 4 stories tall, and reeked of cigarettes. Everywhere did. There were probably about 200 scooters parked in front and around the buildings surrounding us, and as soon as we got out of the vehicle, we all knew we were not in Kansas anymore. The weird looks shot at us left and right were discomforting. Japanese people have a general politeness and positive demeanor. China, not so much.     As I roll my suitcase into the 7 Days, an old lady spits on the ground near me. I avoid it and enter the building. Mark is speaking with the front desk. He hands us two room keys and tells us that the rooms we are staying in aren't ready. The group is now pissed. We ride the elevator to the second floor and four of us take one of the rooms, which is small, grungy, and has one large bed and no carpet. Dave and Cody immediately pass out on the bed, Will takes a small corner area next to the TV, and I'm left standing or sitting in the bathroom. I remember Will leaving the room, and myself taking a nap on the ledge he had occupied, using a merch bag as a pillow and curling into a ball to fit.

    After waking up some hours later, perhaps around 5pm, Mark tells us we are going to eat. We walk about 30 feet to the right of our hotel to a nondescript restaurant. It looks terrible and dirty. We head to the second floor as Mark explains to us that they have great dumplings. I want to tell Mark I would love an apple dumpling, but he orders all of us beers (room temperature) and I start to down mine, thinking that if I get drunk anything will be good. I start to think I should have pregamed my meal with a protein bar.     The dumplings eventually come, after Mark shouts “FUYA!!” a few times, which I learn means “waiter” in Chinese. I think he has amended the order maybe 5 times now. The deep fried dumplings sit on the glass lazy susan in the center of our table until one of us decides to be brave. We called them ��Chinese Mystery Meat Dumplings,” but Mark told us they were pork. I don't know if I believe him to this day, but they really weren't too bad. We end up with a few other courses before the everyone finishes eating. Mark has been chainsmoking through the entire meal.     After dinner, we decide to walk around Shanghai a little. Will and Carm retreat to the hotel. They are clearly not enjoying life in China so far. We end up taking some laundry down to a laundromat and haggling with the lady about how much it will cost us. I spend about $15 to get 5 or 6 shirts and a dozen pairs of socks washed, but it's definitely worth it. A quick stop at Family Mart to buy some beer, and we're off. Mark takes us to a bank so I can withdraw some yuan, and then we go to the venue we'll be playing at the next day. He tells us it's one of 4 famous Livehouses in China, the Yuyintang Livehouse.

    A short walk later, past a knockoff Burger King called Burger KDS and several massage parlours, over a street bridge and past a handful of vendors, we cross a street next to a rail station and arrive at the venue. It's very cool inside and reminds me of a typical American venue. There's a bar downstairs, a pretty nice stage, seating, and upstairs we find a foosball table and the band room. We all sit down to have a beer, which I opt to switch to a whiskey and coke instead. I order Dave a Tequila Sunrise because he wants something fruity. Jeremy, Cody, and Mark go upstairs to play foosball while Dave and I knock back two or three more beverages and talk about CK and Warped Tour and my future with the band.

    The commotion upstairs piques my curiosity, and I check it out to learn that Cody and Jeremy are playing the owner of the Livehouse at foosball. I'm fairly drunk at this point, but find it necessary to order a Carlsberg and hang out. I trade a mojito flavored cigarette off of a dude sitting on a couch upstairs in exchange for one of my American smokes. After the owner of the Livehouse beats either Cody or Jeremy 2 out of 3 times, we make the trek back to the hotel, acquire our actual rooms, and split up.     Cody and I share a room and hop on the wifi, and learn of the Chinese internet block. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, or anything. Mark tells me to download an app called WeChat- it's the only way to communicate in China, apparently. 13 hours ahead of my parents, I text them to let them know we're safe and sound, but not exactly thrilled. Cody and Jeremy decide they want to go out on the town still, and I hang back. I fall asleep sometime later before they return, alone in my room in the first communist country I've ever been to, thinking about how my stomach will react to the mystery dumplings I ate earlier.