We found an office we’re looking at renting here in Kunming. It’s in BeiChen (the north foreign corner). It’s not big, but seems adequate, it’s on the first floor at the very back of the complex.

We’re looking at building in a rehearsal space, office and storage for audio equipment yet to be purchased. It wouldn’t quite be enough if we get into warehousing microphones, cables and things of that sort, but it’s a start. We still need to get to that point before worrying about it.

In an effort to share my experience in Kunming and keep my blog updated, I thought I’d write about a few key things that have begun to fall into place in the past couple of weeks.

I’ve hired my first Chinese employee. I’m not sure if I can legitimately call him an employee, but he works for me. We meet almost everyday, so that he can attempt to correct all the mistakes I pickup from the other “laowei” and / or my own feeble attempts to put together grammatically correct sentences in Mandarin. Leon has been great. He’s eager to solve all my problems. I love it!

This week, he found me a great deal on a Suzuki scooter. 99% of the scooters on the road in China are now electric and I’m still not convinced that they’re all that practical. Needless to say, now you can see me booting around Kunming on my new scooter not worried about when my battery will run out. Note: in Kunming, motorized scooters are not allowed. On top of that, I don’t even have a Canadian motorcycle license, much less a license to drive in China.

Today, I was invited to stop by a small recording studio. It’s the better one of the two that I’ve seen so far here in Kunming and so far, I’m not very impressed. Of course, they were very impressed by the small amount of advise I was able to offer them -based on what I know about recording in the west.

I spent the past week sourcing sound equipment. I have a lot more work to do. I’ve only really scratched the surface. I’m hoping to find some audio related work here in China, but I think I will have to leave Kunming for that to happen. Perhaps I will try out Taiwan at some point. They speak Mandarin there as well. Since moving to China, I haven’t had the chance to do any audio related work. This past week I enjoyed spending an afternoon setting up and tuning a sound system. I realized in doing that, how much I love doing sound engineering. The more time I spend doing audio work; the more experience I get; the more I enjoy doing it; the easier it is to get great sound out of any system [almost].

Kunming-out.

I sent the boss a text message this morning. His reply, “Did you want to work?”. So, tonight I’m working in Cambridge at the ‘Warehouse’, op’ing a rock show. This kind of work is fun, it’s exciting, challenging and stressful, but really enjoy it.

In other news, I got burned really bad at the beach yesterday.
-back of the legs, worst ever.