Water PARK?!

As I should have guessed beforehand going to a water park here wouldn't hold a candle to anything I've been to in the US. I went with two of my friends from last year who had lived here for a while but had never been during water park hours. The cool thing about this place is at night on the weekend they turn the beach/wave pool section into an outdoor night club. It was a pretty costly experience for the park not having a whole lot to do. The ticket only includes entry then you have to fork over extra for a locker and then a raft. If you don't get a raft you are limited to two rides in the whole park... seems like it should be included. I didn't expect the men to be wearing less in the clothing department than females. But as was the case I got to witness some oh so unsightly older Asian men in speedos and in some cases just boxer briefs. The concept of a line is difficult to grasp here. Being three stories in the air and having to push your way to get anywhere close to making it to the ride itself is a bit harrowing of an experience. The place consists of two "ride" structures that are identical to one another except one you can only use a raft and the other you use an orange mat. As I mentioned before there is a beach/wave pool which gets turned on every 20 minutes or so. There is a pretty nice but slightly dangerous children area. They have a few small slides in there that look like a yellow submarine, a pirate ship being attacked by a kraken, and a larger fort looking place. In the same area is the dangerous part. There's a section with a cargo net with floating "lilies" that you are supposed to make your way across without falling off. If any child unsupervised decides to fall they are conveniently at neck level to the cargo net. Luckily we didn't see any deaths. I had fun using it though! There was also one with the same concept but just a long rope instead. The last part was a lazy river running around the entire park. It was super congested and you had to fight your way through other people in some parts if you ever wanted to move. It was by far the best attraction in the park. It's mainly just water shooting out at you from various places in random intervals and a "spooky" cave, but the best part is the rapids. It is also super dangerous but oh so fun. For a good five minutes you get slammed against the walls and other people in rafts. Many people flip over and I could easily see a few concussions being the norm there. We went around on that part at least five times throughout the course of the day. It worried me when there was a family with toddlers and even babies going on that section. There is one warning that there is dangerous rapids ahead but doesn't really post an age limit or too much more info than that. The other cool thing about the park was the music. The first song that was playing when we got into the park was MOVE BITCH GET OUT THE WAY! well I'm not sure what the name of the song is but that's at least the chorus. Nothing more fun than a park full of kids listening to inappropriate lyrics, SUPAMAN THAT HOE! They played some Daft Punk and various other newish dance music. All and all we stayed as long as we could without getting completely bored. That and there was lightening visible and heading in our direction. In any normal water park they'd have closed everything down the first sight of lightening. It was quite the experience and I'm sure I'll get myself wrangled into doing some more random shit like this throughout the year.

Gantry

So far so good on this end. I've been staying pretty busy between work, working out, going out, take outs, shake outs, and shout outs. I have yet to really study any Chinese to get a leg up before school starts. Every time I attempt to start I run to the tv and put on an episode of Criminal Minds. It isn't a very good show but I love Inigo Montoya thus my new addiction. Friday night was the Handsome Furs concert at Yuyintang. It was fucking amazing! The venue was relatively small and unorganized. They let people in before the show started in order to increase their drinking sales and then attempted to round everyone up out of the bar to make some sort of line. One of the guys was saying don't worry just hang out inside and another one was trying to get us out and whatever I didn't care I just went to pee upstairs instead. A little while later they attempted to completely take my ticket away instead of ripping it. I interjected with me and possibly other concert goers might want it for a keepsake.... silly people. The layout of the club was a little odd as it seemed more like a former restaurant that they mashed up. Of course they never installed any real means of air conditioning the place. They had four little room fans attached to the ceiling over the stage which by the time Handsome Furs played had all shorted out due to the humidity but I doubt they would have been much use anyways. Once you entered the door to the left was a small room that during bar hours was used for the one foosball table. They re-purposed it for the merch room. Straight ahead was a small room with three tables, the stairway to the second floor, and at the end an exit for outside. To the right was the a square bar followed by a raised area that is tucked right behind the sound booth which holds seating for a few people. Right in front of that area is the relatively standing room and the stage. The first band was strange in a goodish way. Musically they weren't very spectacular but they made up for it in other ways. They consisted of three members a drummer/lead singer, a bass player, and an extra symbols player. The last one just seemed like a friend of the lead singer/drummer and added him in the band for fun. The bass player was a deadpan ambiguous Asian girl while the other two were crazy wild British dudes. The way he sung was by placing his mouth completely over the microphone and spazzing out with drums. At one point he stood up on his drum kit and was banging the symbols with his microphone, which was highly entertaining. The next band Duck! Fight! Goose! tried very hard to seem like they were a good band. I enjoyed them a lot less than the first band and wish them all the best at keeping any fans as they SUCK! RIGHT! YES? As for Handsome Furs they were fucking godly. They are a husband and wife duo of rockingness. She mainly plays the synths/keyboard and other techy stuff all the while kicking her legs out to the side when she got really into it. They played until their faces fell off from all the sweat. It was an amazing show and all the more awesome being right in front of them. There was crowd surfing and moshing going on throughout their entire set. In the US they ban a lot of that from music venues which is fucking lame. The only problem with that was that my hand was still hurt from falling on it wrong. I ended up being the only person in one area to stop this guy from falling while moshing. If it wasn't for the adrenaline I would have been in serious pain. I ended up grabbing an awesome Handsome Furs poster before I left which looks very similar to the picture I posted beforehand. Well I had forgotten to finish this post from earlier this month so Ill leave it at this. LATER SPACE COWBOY!

New Day of Today

So gar fo hood... I must say that this jet lag is kicking my ass. I've been staying pretty busy to attempt get into the swing of things. My dad and I have been training every day since we have been here and I hope to be in some kind of shape by the time school starts. Today I went in to do some work for the school. It is almost time for orientation so they needed me to get the welcome packets and handouts ready. I'm quite the machine when it comes to the busy work that is thrown at me. Because of the intense storm that hit today right as I rode home for lunch I only managed to work for two hours and finished most of everything, yay! After work my dad and I hit the gym which didn't have the a/c turned on so it was only a pleasant dead heat of 110. On that note I feel like such an old man. After the first set of work outs my lower back was in such intense pain I had to do a whole different exercise than me padre. I hope nothing is seriously wrong with me and it is just from sitting on that uncomfortable seat on the plane ride here. Well after sweating off a few tons of water weight I biked back home to make dinner for the family plus my mom's coworker. I amazingly timed everything to finish right when her coworker was supposed to arrive only to find out that the microwave clock is twenty minutes fast. In other news I found out a way to unlock my iphone so I don't have to purchase a new phone. Tomorrow I'm going to go downtown to buy a sim card for it and buy tickets for the Handsome Furs show that is on Friday! I'm going to bring my camera and post a video/pictures from the show. Now I just have to fight off an hour or so of sleepiness before I can lay in bed. Tomorrow I'm going to post a crap ton of music on my other blog to attempt to offset the past two months of laziness.

P.S. Day five of no smoking and still going strong. Luckily I have yet to go into a nicofiend rage.

Day One

This past month I have spent more time flying and sitting in airports than I ever have. From Boston to Detroit to Shanghai to Beijing to Xiamen to Shanghai to Detroit to Boston to Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale to Detroit and finally back to Shanghai! This is my fourth time coming to China and it seems I won't be leaving until my Visa expires sometime July 2011. So I lost my weekend coming here to a five hour layover in Detroit spent napping in the Delta Sky Lounge, which, my father deemed necessary to pay 90 USD to use for three hours. What you got for the money was nicer seats to relax in; all you can eat apples and cookies; all you can drink coffee, apple juice, and orange juice; and the use of a shower. I'm not really sure we got our money worth but it's nice to feel slightly fancy every once and a while.To kill the last bit of time before the flight to Shanghai I purchased Stephen King's new book, Under The Dome. It's 1000 plus pages of Kingyness and I only managed to get 200 pages in before landing. The reason behind that was two glasses of wine and two benodryl that knocked my ass out for nine of the fourteen hour flight. There weren't any in flight movies that I particularly wanted to watch or hadn't already seen. So I spent the fourteen hours just listening to music, sleeping, reading, and playing a little bit of Dragon Quest IX on the DS. The Pudong International Airport was surprisingly empty and we made it through customs shortly. I was worried that I would be given a hard time because of the lack of resemblance of myself to my passport picture. In my passport I have my head shaved and no facial hair and now I look the complete opposite. When I flew to Shanghai in May the customs agent didn't believe my passport picture nor my driver's license looked anything like me. It is baffling to me as to how I don't look like myself. How can I not look like myself? Alright well I got a bit off track. Even though we quickly made it through customs our bags were almost the very last ones to come out. It must have had to do with our five hour layover in Detroit(Whoever is the travel agent for my parents is absolutely terrible). The school is nice enough to provide us with our own van and driver who met us at the gate and helped bring our half a ton of luggage down to the parking garage and load it into the van. Stepping outside of the airports meager air conditioning and into the humidity almost made me feel I never left Florida. About 45 minutes later we are at our apartment and throwing all of our shit in the door as fast we can. I managed to sprain my wrist playing dodge ball two days before this flight so it made hauling the luggage around all the more fun. I quickly set up sheets on my mattress and grumpily asked my parents where some shit or another was. I was in dire need of sleep and I felt crappy from my drug induced coma on the plane.

After falling asleep pretty early I then also rose way too early to help with readjusting to the timezone change. I was up at 3 AM and went back to tackling the beast of Stephen King Novel. I managed to fall asleep again around 7 AM only to be woken up by my father an hour or so later. We biked through town and checked out how the construction of the school was going. They are fixing both of the gyms on campus and it looks like they won't be finished by the time school is in session. Biking around town it really hit me that I'm really here to stay in Shanghai. I'm excited to start getting into the grind of things. Until then I need to buckle down on my Chinese studies and get into decent shape by the time school starts in August. The cicadas symphony of buzzing has yet to stop and I doubt it will until the heat dies down. It's currently a pleasant temperature of 99 Fahrenheit but with the heat index it feels like 114 degrees outside. I'm running out of time now I must be off to downtown for dinner and to most likely get my own cellphone. Hopefully most of my thoughts have been coherent as I won't be able to reread or edit anything I wrote.