Ni hao ma, ladies and gents? Friendly neighborhood Senor Weaselo here, back from a whirlwind holiday adventure throughout China. Whirlwind in that I might still be slightly jet lagged (13 hour time difference) and whirlwind because I had to keep a log to make sure I knew what city I was in that day from all the travel. You know, like a real tour! Except without the sex, drugs and rock and roll; we were exhausted from travel, drugs are very illegal in China (have you seen Locked Up Abroad?), and I’m still me (and my instructions were don’t die, don’t get engaged, and take pictures).

As I’ve mentioned one or twice, I play violin. Normally for fun, slowly and steadily more for profit. And enough people say I don’t suck that every once in a while they ask me to play cool things for fun and/or profit! That’s how this happened. I won’t go further into the tour, like a full itinerary and program, because there is the illusion of a thin veneer of mystery on who I am (he said, posting performances) where nobody needs to know who this wiseass weasel is! I like doing all this cool shit, and I want to keep doing this cool shit. Because between playing with an orchestra with a conductor you trusted with every fiber of your being, getting a chance to see what an opera’s like from the stage instead of the pit, that gig at a certain famous hall a few months ago, this China adventure, and premiering a piece in the city this week, I’ve done a lot of cool shit the past few months, but it’s hopefully just the start of many decades of cool shit.

Anyway, onto the fun stuff. Here are the important things I learned in China!

1. In China, there is no such thing as right-of-way or waiting in line.

Yeah, so that was the first thing we learned when we got to China and started walking around. Yes, there are lights in terms of when you can and can’t turn, but even if you have the walk signal, it means jack shit because they’re going to make that turn and maybe they’ll hit you and maybe they won’t but you don’t want to find that out for yourself, now do you? Especially because in China there’s apparently rules on restitution for hitting pedestrians and it’s cheaper to hit them again and kill them. And I like being alive. So there was more than a few times that even my NYC jaywalking instincts went “Oh fuck no”and booked it. They call Queens Boulevard the Boulevard of Death, but it’s got nothing on a Shanghai intersection. Or sidewalk for that matter. Scooters drive on the sidewalk sometimes, so you could just be walking down the street with your friends trying to figure out what to do and hear incessant honking behind you, and you look back, and there’s a scooter trying to pass you and they won’t stop honking until they do. Repeat for as many scooters as there are on the sidewalk, and it can be a madhouse out there.

Merging cars can best be described as a game of chicken, which is scary enough when you’re in a large bus. It’s terrifying when you’re in a cab trying to merge with things like an aforementioned large bus. There were some U-turns that made me think “Are we going to make it in one turn?” and then “Holy shit we’re gonna get hit” and then lastly “How the fuck are we and everyone in our radius not dead?” There’s no good explanation for how this works because I didn’t see a single car accident in my whole two-plus weeks and that doesn’t make any sense because I’d expect about 30 of them per hour. There is again a whole lot of honking, even though there are signs that say no honking (or no trumpets, we weren’t totally sure). Just total chaos.

Without cars, it’s not much better. You’d think there’d be nice single-file lines to get into train turnstiles, right? Ha, no. It’s just barreling into the line, outta my way. Baggage claim is also like that, but more in the “I got my bag and will now run over whoever’s feet to get out of here.” Thank goodness I wore my boots during travel, because that shit happened by my count four times. Or about three too many. Hell, as much shit as you’ll give us for being pushy, people say excuse me and try not to run people’s feet over at JFK. It’s only after you do that you get cursed out six ways to Sunday.

2. Yes, the air sucks.

You’ve heard about the pollution in China, have you? Well that’s pretty true. There are a lot of ways that I can describe the shittiness of the smog, like pictures of all of us in the masks (I was one of the last holdouts but after a very dusty concert hall one night I finally decided I needed to break them out), but there’s easier ways that don’t involve pictures of people in the group. I have standards and principles, after all.

Here’s a picture of the weather in the city we were in for New Year’s. Please note what the text says instead of sunny or cloudy or rainy.

But wait, it gets worse! Check this out from another city we were in.

So yes, at some point we all needed the mask. You know, the masks that were all the rage during the SARS epidemic? Those masks.

Also, every once in a while you get a whiff of something in the air. How do I describe it… ass. It smells like ass. Not quite shit, but ass. You know the difference, because even if you’ve never smelled ass, you know what ass smells like.

3. But they keep those streets clean!

Everywhere you go there’s what seems like a broom brigade to clean the streets. And that’s pretty remarkable because it’s not like they litter much in China either. They’ll hock all the loogies, but littering they did pretty okay.

Less so about keeping the public bathrooms clean, from what I heard. (I only went to the ones inside transportation hubs, but there are buildings marked public toilet.) I’m not gonna go into what the non-Western toilets look like, you can ask around, and I was smart and my intestines held until I got to the hotel, so I never had to bite the bullet.

4. China’s a big country with different regions, you know, like any other big country. Or any country at all that’s larger than, say, Monaco. (Wait, you mean it’s not all casinos and gorgeous people in Monaco?)

Right, it’s not all rice paddies and the ghost of Chairman Mao. Yes, I made a couple “ghost of Chairman Mao” jokes, including when my friend didn’t have a pocket so she put her money down her shirt so I said that she was giving Mao a show. (She didn’t murder me). Oh yeah, all the bills have him on them. They’re different sizes and colors so hopefully it’s a little less confusing, but it’s all Mao all the time, and he might have spied on me in the shower but more on that later. Anyway…

According to the world, China is the second-largest country in landmass (wait, I thought second was Canada… they’re fourth? Behind the U.S.? Did I learn this wrong?) in the world. So it goes without saying that it’s a big fucking country, and we travelled about as far north as you can go and about as far south as you can go. We didn’t go quite all the way west by the Himalayas or all the countries that end in -stan, but we put some miles on the odometer. I can honestly say, after trying it, that I understand the drain on athletes. But at least they get first-class seats, we were coach all the way.

So obviously there are big regional differences and there’s definitely an urban/rural split. And a southern/northern split. Shanghai, for instance, in addition to other more southern cities, is very modern and in some ways is like home sweet home, but then they decided to turn it up to eleven.

Then there’s the cities in the north which look a little, what are the words I’m looking for again, more communisty? That’s a word now. There’s still modern amenities in the nicer spots of town (which we were usually in) but every once in a while there’s a snap back to “Oh yeah, we’re in a communist country.” A couple of halls we played in were places they have Party meetings and you can tell this because there’s a solid wood railing in between every row and at first you think it’s for legroom and then you realize “Wait, there are levers and shit, they vote on Party stuff here, holy fuck.” Or the room we thought was our green room which was really nice and I took a picture of me in my tux, a gigantic painting of what I believe is the city we were in that night behind me, and the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party flag next to it, which has become my profile picture, making sure I get stopped and checked by every government agency. (It was not our green room but a VIP room and they then notified us and asked us to get out of it). Or this one at the place we played New Year’s Eve. This was backstage.

Meanwhile the south is like a southeastern Asian country, according to the people who had been to southeastern Asia before this. We were a hundred miles or so from the Vietnam border and we had gone from subzero temps to 70s in about 48 hours. Those nights were much more comfortable.

5. Other things that make you go “Oh right, that whole ‘personal freedoms’ thing” and other “oh shit” moments

Yeah, the outpost of four guys with machine guns at the airport was one of them. Or the, well, I’m not sure what they were bringing into the hotel, but it required a fully armed guard, helmet, machine gun, the works. Or the time I almost got my chin rest tightener (it’s a small metal object with what kind of looks like the short part of a very thin allen key which you use to tighten your chin rest on the violin) confiscated and they went through everything in my case and I was worried since they took it off the x-ray machine that they were going to take my violin and the pecking order for things I care about goes family 1, my violin 2, inner circle of people I genuinely care about 3, me 4 if not lower. So that was the scariest part of the trip. Security on the move did range from the “explosives check” guy who basically took a sheet of paper to luggage which I guess was checking for gunpowder residue to a security guard at the airport who was quite thorough and I might have gotten to second base with her as a result of that, so go me, I think.

6. “Well, we’re big in China…”

In the big touristy cities they get foreigners so they’re more used to it, but in places like the north, where they don’t, they went wild over us. The halls were packed for almost every show (we think part of it was because our name was similar to a major American orchestra and there’s a chance we might have been mistaken for them… but that’s not our problem), one of the concerts I signed some autographs after, and, yeah, just an absolute zoo. But I’m a little bit darker complexion, dark hair, so it’s not like I was getting mobbed in the streets or anything.

My best friend on the tour, on the other hand, we had to be a mini security detail around her because she was after concerts and at the airport. See, she is absolutely gorgeous if I say so myself, with copper-red hair. (Before you ask.) So obviously everyone wants to take a picture with the cute American redhead—guys, girls, doesn’t matter. But it wasn’t even all the time like “Hi, can I take a picture with you?” (except in more broken English), sometimes it was just coming up to her, sometimes it was people at the airport as we were traveling… so we had to scare a bunch of people off via various methods because she’s just minding her own business, so why don’t you?

7. “… but not KFC big.”

I was surprised by how many KFCs I saw around, and it was the most popular Western fast food chain we saw (McDonald’s was a close second, Pizza Hut third). One of the hotels had a KFC next door so one of the guys was happy, and there’s something surreal and oddly satisfying about eating KFC and drinking champagne in a tux in a five-star hotel in China. This actually happened in my life.

And even if the selection might be different and smaller in China than it is here (regular fries instead of wedges threw me, and no boneless tenders kinda sucked), it doesn’t matter, because (STRONG TAEK ALERT) it tastes better there. The breading seems crispier and it feels less greasy. And the less greasy was good for us at the hotel because I only brought the one tux and this was still pretty early on the tour, like concert 3 or 4. You don’t need seven concerts of playing with a greasy tux on.

The one bad thing from KFC? This picture I saw when my friend and I went wandering one day for lunch and unsuccessful trinket shopping.

Yeah, that’s Asian Androgynous Lady (we think?) Colonel Sanders. Although in hindsight, still less off-putting than George Hamilton as the Extra Crispy Colonel. BRING BACK CARTOON COLONEL!

8. Prostitute windows

No, it’s not me trying to cut into the phenomenon that is ass herpes… I said,

That’s better (sorry Dok). Anyway, you’ve heard of many a hotel that charges hourly rates, correct? And since we’re all adults here, we all know why they would have the option of an hourly rate, right? Good.

So in these hotel rooms, there’s a window in between the walls. That window is between the bathroom and living/bed/whatever you call the rest of the hotel room. There is either a blind or a frosting on the glass that operates via switch. The switch and the blind are opened from the bedroom side, not the bathroom side. So if you wanted, you could undo the frosting or the blinds and see what’s going on in there… taking a shower, I see?

No, my roommate and I did not use this feature of our hotel rooms.

9. Definitely not Mr. Starwood yadda-yadda-yadda

The trains in the U.S. suck, I don’t need to spend x words about how because we know that. The trains in other countries don’t suck. So the high-speed trains in China are the not-sucking version. They’re faster, they’re clean, they have weird cartoons advertising taking the train you’re already on (there was one involving Santa’s reindeer going on vacation, so he took the train to deliver presents and the train did so well that he told them he didn’t need them), they have almost no clicking so you can fall asleep when you didn’t fall asleep on the night train like we did.

Oh yeah, the night train. Now that was an experience. Although there was fortunately no livestock on our train. Just some character at the train station who asked how much for one of our bags who we cursed out. After that it went pretty smoothly because many of us said “Nope” and hung out. Some people actually did try to sleep and proved that somehow you don’t have to be on the Olympic gymnastic team to get to the top bunk. You have to climb over the bottom AND the middle. There’s three to a bunk, six beds to a section. They’re definitely not as new or as fast as the high-speed rail. That was a rough night.

As for the Shanghai Metro, it reminded me more of the London Underground than the New York subway system. It’s clean, it’s actually one long car as opposed to separate coupled cars, it’s not sheet-metal gray, some of the stops sound funny… (hehe, Cockfosters, hehe, Pudong)

10. The Senor in China playlist

You can’t go on the road without a bomb-ass, dope-ass, super hot fire playlist. Here are the tunes that went on through my head.

Well, that’s my full report. Would I do it again? Hell yes, though I’d probably put a couple more days off in the middle. Shower laundry’s harder to get right than laundry laundry—it works in a pinch but I don’t recommend it; your shirts never dry nice. If you’re on the move and doing that get a Ziploc bag. Tune in next time when I’ll probably intake enough capsaicin to grievously wound me but survive anyway. Until then, sayonara. (That’s Japan.–watch until 1:31)

Senor Weaselo ordered and ate the pepperoni half of a half-pepperoni pie when he got home. It was delicious. Oh, and he took all the pictures.