hi,nice girl,glad to know you

There is an english language social networking site here called weliveinbeijing.com - I have access to FB and Twitter so was quite happy ignoring it completely until one of my Electric Shadettes suggested we advertise our screenings there. So I've joined and am befriending anyone who asks in an effort to get the word to out as many Beijingers as possible.

Here is a selection of messages I've received from my new pals:

"hi,nice girl,glad to know you"

"how r u there babe?"

"Hi pretty, Glad to meet you on this website I am 100% made in China by the way :)"

"hi how are u cute ?nice to meet u here my friend, wanna be ur friend?"


Also, apparently to aide this burgeoning dating scene, names appear in either blue or pink depending on whether the user is male of female. Sophisticated stuff.

Dirty Fingernails, Dusty Knees and We All Learn Something

I feel like I have spent this week wholly on my hands and knees flicking through pile upon pile of dusty dirty plastic sleeve encased DVDs. I can't possibly have spent a full 7 days doing that, and yet...

One stays in China for a certain amount of time and finds oneself becomes a little more "local" in the way one operates - at least that's my current excuse and I do believe I'll be sticking to it for now. Amongst the myriad of activities that I fill my time with here, nestles our film club, where every so often with timely irregularity we screen films in a small cafe in 798, the art district.

A quick rewind and recap to summarise my 17 months of film based adventures: there are a whole host of reasons that most films from most countries don't make it to cinema screens here, suffice to say the result is that the cinematic landscape is as barren and dry as, well, as the rest of the city in the height of the airless summer days. And so it happened that mere weeks after my arrival with nary a clue as to how best involve myself with getting back on the filmmaking horse, I started plotting and scheming and planning and dreaming for ways in which to adorn this city with cinematic baubles.

Having never worked with any UK based film festivals, galleries or other forum for the public sharing of films, I can't accurately compare the experience with doing it China style. But things here certainly feel more loose and fluid than the health and safety happy environment at home. If you do business out here you might start getting anxious at the apparent lack of planning, organisation and general forward thinking. But you would start to go mad if you stayed in your British/ Western head. And so you become used to doing things in a new way, you don't quite plan every small detail. You start to think things will just fall into place. You relax. You take your eye off the ball. But, dear reader, beware, as a wise fellow recently said to me "assumption is the mother of all fuck ups". This is how I found myself, hours before an informal screening in a small cafe, sans advertised film.

I've often tried to explain the prevalence of pirate DVDs here by saying to friends "I wouldn't even know where to buy genuine DVDs". Well, yesterday minus one vital ingredient to a successful film screening I tried to find out how you buy a genuine DVD, with authentic Chinese subtitles. I failed. I went to every not-quite-legit DVD shop within the third ring road. I failed. I literally looked at hundreds of films and on my hands and knees I went through boxes of uncategorised discs in flimsy plastic sleeves encrusted with grime and I failed. Dirt under my fingernails, dust on my knees, sorrow in my heart and sheer infuriating self-loathing in my head, I picked myself up, mentally bashed myself against a brick wall and showed a different film.

It wasn't the end of the world, and I learned a lesson. Yup. It's like an episode of Saved by the Bell right here, the one where Jessie gets addicted to ProPlus springs to mind, and like Jessie I learned that lesson good. I also learned that the DVD shop in Xinjiekou has an amazing selection, that the man in the art film shop on Nanluoguxiang speaks more English than I realised, and that the DVD shop on the West side of Yaxiu is cheaper than on the East, despite the fact I thought they were run by the same guy.

Tiger Paws and Ten Foot Roses.

A few months ago I spent hours hunched over my computer in my wee office, rain and wind howling outside the window, the sky a vile pollution-tinged shade of purple-y yellow, and tapped out an eloquent yet efficient and wryly humorous summary of my time in Beijing from the most previous blog post to date. And accidentally deleted it. Being the grown up lady type I am, I went in an almighty huff and refused to go anywhere near the blog till... well, now.

So here we are, 1 year and 4 months on. Cripes. Today is 春节 Spring Festival - aka Chinese New Year, the first day of the Year of the Tiger. What will this year bring? Well no spring for a start (the Year of the Ox had 2 apparently, so that's that..). Because of this, I have been advised not to get married or have any babies this year because it would be unlucky. So, ok, ok I'll try not to.

Last year we were invited to our neighbour's flat for a midnight meal of jaozi (dumplings) and watched the sky light up with thousands of fireworks, this year though they had their family staying so we were left to our own devices. So last night, I found myself having drinks with friends and as we were wandering back through the streets a man proffered a half-smoked cigarette at me, I smiled bemusedly at him until I saw him gesturing at a brightly coloured box in the pavement and realised I was being invited to participate in an age old Chinese New Year tradition - setting off masses of fireworks in the street mere inches from people, cars, buses and overhead tram lines. Naturally I enthusiastically took this opportunity to risk having my face melted onto my hand bag and spent a good 20 minutes lighting a whole range of fireworks, as more cigarettes were lit and handed to me, a never ending supply of whizzers, bangers, and general sources of ooh-aah-ness were brought out of this fellow's house. Eventually my friends called me away, probably for the best as a rogue component of someone else's fireworks had just ooh-ed and aah-ed right into my knee and burned through two layers of tights.

Having had a fitful sleep interrupted at 20 minute intervals by unnecessarily loud explosions of pure Chun Jie joy I joined approximately 98% of Beijing's native population and hopped on a subway to my nearest Temple Fair. Despite going with my friend Shirley, who is a genuine Beijingren and goes to at least one temple fair every single Spring Festival, we managed to get lost in the grounds and ended up at the performance area just as it was finishing and so managed to see nothing of any cultural worth. We did however play some fun fair type games (of the hooplah type which one never wins, and sure enough with my unrivalled hand to eye co-ordination, we never won) and had a pleasant time browsing the stalls selling an enterprising mix of New Year and Valentines paraphernalia. I bought Shirley an inexplicable hair band with rabbit ears and she got me an enormous plush red rose and we both looked longingly (but skintingly) at the inflatable ten ton weights, fake sugared haw berry sticks and huge tiger paws-gloves with claws. We ended the day by drinking the world's most expensive and tiny hot chocolate in a small bar which never quite managed to get the door shut and thereby left us frozen throughout. Good times.