Canadian Songwriter, Performer and Audio Professional; living an exciting story in Asia.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Moving…
I’ve spent the last little while finding a house, preparing to move, and hulling an enormous amount of stuff to my new apartment ( how do I have so much stuff?! )
Finally, at last, I’m sitting in my new office relaxing and catching up on email, Facebook and all the stuff between. The place isn’t nearly setup yet, but I have my studio monitors on the desk, with the desk situated approximately 3 feet from the walls. I have no stove, a leaking water pipe and a crap load of boxes to unpack… but I finally have usable desk space again!
Dreaming of the Future
Suki and I were openly sharing this evening. We talked about future careers, passions and life together. Eventually we started talking about NGO’s involved with slavery and similar issues. We are both passionate about the subject and are exploring a few ideas.
I’d like to know which of the organizations I previously tracked with are already involved in some way in China or have interest in getting started.
Please keep this in mind as we explore these options.
I’m Engaged
It’s true, I’m engaged to a girl named 郭哲 －yes, I know you have no idea what that says… it’s all Chinese to you. Well, it actually is Chinese, and so is she. She’s 22, studying law and has big, chinese, cartoon-like eyes. You can call her, Suki.
We haven’t made any plans as of yet, but here’s how the story goes:
We met in October of 2010, after my friend 全权 QuanQuan invited me out to church with him. Not long after, driving her home on my scooter became routine we looked forward to. When December came, it was time for me to make a visit back home to Canada. We talked on the phone and sent messages back and forth almost every day that month. Back in China, I found a new apartment, lost a guitar, learned some Chinese, met her family, played some music and spent a lot of time with Suki.
The next trip home would be an interesting one. As I was preparing to leave, we were talking about the future. We talked and talked; sometimes she didn’t want to talk. My Chinese is greatly in need of improvement, but her english helps compensate. I would be away, originally, for two month, which soon turned into three (a very long time). By the time I arrived in Canada, about one month after leaving China, I managed to persuade my little sister into going ring shopping with me.
Finally, I had a ring made by a great jeweller in Paris (Ontario). It’s half white gold and half yellow, because she’s Asian and I’m white………………… On July 13th at about 4:30pm I found a nice spot, under a Jade tree, on top of a mountain. She said nothing. She just kept looking at me, then hugging me, then looking at me again and nodding, then hugging me…. for about five minutes. It was awesome.
I thought I’d add to my ‘wild foreigner’ image by picking up boarding again. My friend Evan Champagne planted the idea. Hangin’ out with Drew Fraser; a pro-skater living here in Kunming made it happen. Thanks guys, I’m havin’ a blast with it!
Life in Kunming
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.
