We spent most of December playing in China. We flew into Hong Kong and spent a couple days off wandering around tropical parks and street markets thinking we were pretty adventurous travellers. But we hadn’t seen anything yet! Once in mainland China, we were taken, with police escorts, to luxurious banquets where people found our constant flow of cultural faux-pas hilarious. Later, I would discover that I had inadvertently challenged a high-up politician to chug several glasses of wine in a row. I thought “ganbei” translated to a polite “cheers”, but in fact it means “drain your glass”.
On the other hand, we also ate in the filthiest of alleys. Some locals in Guangzhou took us to a late-night hot pot restaurant where we ate among drunk, shouting gamblers and eventually became ourselves drunk, shouting gamblers. The bathrooms in this particular establishment – like most places in China – had no toilets, just holes in the ground. They were so dirty that I literally peed on a rat as it scurried across the urinal trough to nibble on something I think was vomit.
Our shows were fantastic. Some of the places we played, cities of 10 million people, had never had a live band playing original music before. These virgin audiences were very excited and lined up for an hour afterward to have photos taken with us. Somewhere out there are thousands of pictures of us looking oddly tall and doing the peace sign.
(Some very creative English over there… dairy section = Daintily Tasted)
After three weeks of amazing food, people and sights, we were sad to leave. But we stuffed our suitcases as full as we possibly could with our haggled-over market goods and some mouth-numbing Sichuan peppers and vowed to return as soon as possible.
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