LONG BUYING STUFF IN CHINA RANT and Music Exchange Party 1

We have been talking about a music exchange party for ages, even in NYC i was tossing around the idea. Now i finally did it at my new apartment. I have over 500 gb of music and i wanted to see what everyone else had as well. Well it looks like we need to have about 9 more music exchange parties because we were only able to exhange about 6 gb worth of music what with the sample listening and drinking and carrying on.

went with my roomate Nana to eat some kind of lamb soup like thing only there was no lamb meat it was like lamb tripe and cartilige and all that misc stuff. it was ok though because there were these square noodle like things.

Nana and her boyfriend Zizzo who in turn is my boyfriend when she goes to work because he is there all the time. When i go to bed at night, when i wake up in the morning, bam! there he is. but its ok because we were all friends before i became roomates with Nana. we ate this lamb hot pot thing only it was lamb vertebrae with very little meat on them. it was ok and would have been great if there was actually some meat on those backbones.


in china they are always trying to not give you a reciept so they dont have to report that income to the gov't. at the lamb hot pot place they said they would give us a free bottle of "Ke-le" if they didnt have to give us the reciept.


Below is a rant about buying things in china and the state of quality merchandise and selection. I have a short temper and it's amazing that I'm not in jail yet.
I went to walmart. it is not walmart. it looks like they just paid for the rights to licence the walmart name and then cram the store full of crappy chinese products. there were no american products, nothing that you love and hold dear to your heart like in american walmart. no martha stewart home living. no duracell batteries. no Jackie O collection. It seems like a trend that they will buy the rights to use the name of companies and the put their own crappy quality product in there. I bought japanese "House" brand curry at the store and made it and it tasted nothing like the real stuff. Anyway this is a shot from the clothing section. I could expect Walmart china to sell these chinese style jackets but they sell chinese everything. Now i don't love walmart or anything but i was a little miffed because I have been looking for weeks for the right desktop work lamp that uses a bulb higher than a pathetic 40W. I had the perfect lamp in ny that i got from walmart. i went here in BJ and found the same crappy crappy lamps that i had seen everywhere else. anyway it goes on and on like that with me trying to find the things i need to live. like i need a drafting board. they should sell it at any art store but they dont. they don't even have large-ish art store. they just have a row of small stores that have the same crap. I also have tried to buy a keyboard and a mouse amongst many things. just run to the computer store and pick it up right? nope! there aren't even computer stores. there are markets with stalls where they have randoms computer stuff and you have to bargain and play games with them and live in fear that you're getting ripped off or that its fake merchandise. all are very legitimate fears beacuse it happens about every time to me. most chinese people don't care because as long as it kind of works they're fine with it. I am a g-darn proffessional and i need real merchandise that works! anyway everything that i've bought at this one place has been either fake or doesn't work. and i probably got ripped off too after running around to each stall fighting with each person just to see what the market price is for an item. such a waste of time and resources. it would save eveyrone time if you could just buy the stuff and leave. it would save time if you could buy quality items once instead of buying cheap crappy items 5 times. oh yea i tried to buy good quality epson or HP matte printing paper. what an adventure! in the end i was sold some fake paper i found out when i went home. I spend weeks prior to that trying to find a printing place that has an epson or hp inkjet printer to print some art for me. not happening! they all have offset business card and flyer type printers, plotters, or huge 44" wide hp printers. you can imagine the headache of getting it printed once i find it, like cmyk, rgb, bleed, margins, colorspace, sRGB, adobe 1998, printer manages color, photoshop manages color, paper type, paper weight, paper finish, paper manufacturer, etc..... I'm ranting because i've wasted lots of my life here in china trying to buy things.

ok here is the music exchange party going on. Anita is in the stone age and still has cds and ripping thoese cds ate up tons of time.

no one there had ever eaten pancakes, not even anita from spain. so i whipped up a fat stack. they liked it.


a sweet action shot!


afterward we walked over to this bar/lounge near my house that has a reggae party every sunday night. i decided to try out one of the bowties i got in HK after one of the girls told me they knew how to tie one.


cover they eyes of any small children, women, elderly, or pets, especially parrots before you look at this photo! hahahahah too late! because i put this warning under the photo you already have been blinded and turned to stone!!!!! hahahaha! isn't this one of the more hidious things you've seen in the last 6 months to 5 years?

much to my dismay we found that there was the "girl man show" going on in the downstairs level. you can guess what that is. we hung out on the second level


after that we walked to get some chuanr (meat on sticks). lamb chuar is awesome and so is that toasted round bread stuff. above are the electic meters for this row of houses. some had 1000+ of some measureing unit, others had 2 or 3 of some measuring unit and were flashing. my friend said that if you have 2 or 3 left then you will probably not make it through the night and you will have no electricity in the morning.