Sometimes you just Choose the Wrong Song

So... Let's talk about Chengdu.

Friday night I arrived in Chengdu, having left Guilin with promises of one day returning, into the unknown of the Panda's Paradise. After a quick flight, I soon had a bag and was greeted with the barrage of Taxi drivers explaining to me that I couldn't possibly reach the city without their special services, something I was already quite experienced with turning down. A moment later I was rushing along an unknown bus route, bound for the inner ring road of downtown Chengdu.

After approximating my location to be somewhere near the city center, I hopped off the bus and grabbed a cab over to the hostel, a street the taxi driver had never heard of. Sooner or later he dropped me off with vague instructions and a quick point somewhere off the main set of roads into some all walking areas, accompanied with a barrage of Mandarin probably telling something along the lines of "it's somewhere over there... good luck, you'll need it". 60 pound pack and guitar in tow, I managed to walk just about everywhere but in the right direction. Just as it began to get really dark out, I stumbled onto the dragon town youth hostel, and Harrison managed to find me wondering why I didn't just crash at his place.

Confusion aside, I dumped the luggage and we went over to his pad to collect his roommate and get some drinks. Harrison I had met over in Shenzhen during the warm up trip, and I had some idea that the DC based English teacher knew exactly what he was doing when it came to grabbing a drink and talking to a girl. One of his best friends from home, Phil, had decided to leave DC as well and come over to Chengdu to also give English teaching a go, and it took no more than 5 minutes before I was re-immersed in thick American slang, soaking up the sarcasm as the first drop of water after walking across a wide desert.

We hit a couple of places around town, Phil, Harrison and I all of completely like mind in not wasting a Friday night without extracting every bit of adventure and intrigue we could find before the massive intake of alcohol served to knock us out wherever we may have sat down for just a minute too long. Phone numbers, photos, and a terrific hangover the next day served as silent testament to the success of the prior semi-recalled events, Saturday morning.

Deciding not to take it too hard, we took an easy day with the local food and wandering around the general area, Harrison and Phil quietly adjourning to their respective beds, leaving me to my own devices for a while. I wasn't particularly bent on a hard day of exploring the unknown, so I headed back to the hostel to pick up my stuff to move over to Harrison's. I didn't move too fast when I got there, choosing to blame my inaction on the slight rain outside, and plopped down in the hostel common room to watch a movie or two. With a British couple named Ollie and Lucy.

It was their first time in China, having spent the last 2 years or so traveling around the Asian rim. Most recently they had come from India, so we swapped tales and killed time for a couple of hours until I finally gathered enough steam to pick up my pack and head back over to Harrison's, where he had kindly offered me a couch to crash on for the duration of my Chengdu stay. We all decided to call it an early evening, grabbing some local spicy Sichuan street food (they cook everything on a stick right in front of you on portable grills they drag around usually on bikes - the food was incredibly fresh and tasty, and often an entire dinner ran to only 5 - 10 yuan, depending on how much you wanted).

The next day Harrison and Phil set off with my cell to take some pictures for some articles that they were writing for a new Chengdu magazine hitting press for the first issue soon. I opted for another slow day, where I explored some of the nearby Tianfu Square (the central square of the city) with the massive statue of Mao waving to the people, and some of the surrounding area. I soon found the sister hostel to Dragon Town called the Loft, looking to see if they happened to have any bikes available for rent. At the time, I didn't think it particularly odd that I was carrying my guitar around, as it normally doubled as my day bag while I was in strange cities.

The people waiting in the hostel common room had an entirely different notion of that matter, however.

I began with an awkward sweep around the room, taking in all of the facilities and the rough layout, trying to move slow enough not to be noticed by fast enough that everyone who was staring at me would just piss off for a moment, forget I was there, and go back to whatever the hell it was that they had been doing. A group of 7 or 8 Chinese people, mostly women, were gathered around the bar, a long bench set just in front of it filled to capacity, with an unnatural silence and hushed voices suddenly speaking in low tones with at least one or two of them looking off in my direction to wonder at the aberration that had just entered the room. A tall white guy was playing some kind of game vaguely resembling a chess board at a table with a few girls, all puzzling over the incomprehensible movements that seemed to be the norm in the game. A couple of guys were huddled around one end of the pool table talking in newly whispered tones, one or two of which also perfectly tracked my movement as I traversed the length of the room. I was glad to have a moment to pause significantly at the other end, taking in a glassed off smaller room where everyone was entranced in a television thankfully pointing their vision away from my unknown presence not far behind them.

I swept back around, alternately wondering if I should take off or not. Nearly all the seats were occupied, leaving me with the option of either awkwardly introducing myself to one group or the other, or just giving up and leaving the awkward moment to disappear from everyone's collective memories with a shake, returning my presence to the realm of earlier invisibility.

I wasn't going to give up that easily.

I made my way back across the room, and decided to grab a beer from the fridge. Suddenly having a purpose to being in the room, most of the people went back to whatever it had been that they were doing before I entered, the busy keystrokes of people tapping away emails on the two free-to-use computers on the wall providing the only sound above the slightly raised conversational hum that began to return.

"How much," I inquired.

"6 Yuan."

"Thanks," I replied, dropping a 10-note on the end of the bar. I took the new authority of having entered the realm of paying-customers for a spin, and tapped the guy with about 2 inches of free space at the end of the long bench on the shoulder.

"Mind if I sit here?"

"Go right ahead," he replied in slightly accented English, adding perhaps another 6 inches of behind-space for my pleasure, compressing god knows what against the other mass of people somehow occupying just one bench.

"Thanks."

I went on in the time honored tradition of trying to balance the guitar in some fashion against the glass front of the refrigerator door, desperately trying to avoid the guitar's keen desire to slide one way or the other and happily clang itself loudly and noisily on the floor. The guy offering me the bench gladly offered occasional support in the balancing act, pointing when it began to slide one way or the other, before I just resolved myself to holding it with one arm and slugging the beer with the other.

It didn't take very long for the curiosity to overwhelm one pretty Chinese girl sitting nearby.

"Is that your guitar?"

"Occasionally.."

"Huh?"

"Sorry, I meant yes. Do you want to see it?"

"Sure."

You can guess roughly how it went after that. At some point, the tall white guy came over when I happened to hit just the right song, and introduced himself as a Canadian named Dave. Helen and a girl in Electrical Engineering both humored me by acting interested through the set. The Chinese people at the bar loved it. The people on the Internet managed to keep from acting too annoyed from the quiet solitude of Internetting being completely destroyed. And one or two of the people from the pool table starting throwing out requests.

"Mind if I take a few pictures," one guy asked, camera in tow.

"Sure," I called out between songs just as I began starting to play an old favorite, Denis Leary's "Asshole" song, "go right ahead."

"I'm Bill by the way."

"I'm Guy, nice to meet you," I managed before the intro ended and I launched full force into the song.

It didn't quite come off the way that I had expected it to. It damn well didn't come off the way that I had pretty much ever played it. Here I was, winding up to one of my favorites, that usually had the audience in tears or at least good cheer, and when I finished the damn thing, everyone failed to make eye contact and a hushed silence came.

Dave bailed me out. "Love that one, man."

"Thanks, I was wondering if anyone heard it," I managed before the hush resumed in force.

Bill put his camera away and shook my hand again. "I guess I'm going to have to get a guitar for the hostel. You're pretty good, you should have a lot of fun doing this in this city."

"Thanks a lot, really appreciate it."

"I'll put the photos on the hostel website if you don't mind. Still trying to get this room just right."

"Ahh, cool," I muttered, starting to pick up on the hidden mention of authority in his last statement, and choosing not to draw it out. "That's cool. Do you work here?"

"Yeah, I run the place."

"Ah, of course. Thanks for letting me play here."

"Anytime Guy. Gotta run, have fun in Chengdu."

"Thanks Bill. Talk to you later."

And he took off. The silence turned into scandalized smiles as the other people all decided to make eye contact with me once more.

"We all work here," one of them spoke up as the self-nominated spokesperson, "and he's the boss."

"Yeah, maybe that wouldn't be the best song to play," another quietly added.

"Ah well," I replied, something of a pro in the art of whiffing and generally screwing up, "sometimes you just pick the wrong song to play."

They all laughed, and we got back to the business of playing some slightly more general audience kinds of music. The beers started to fly by again, and Dave learned a move or two of Kung Fu from the spokesperson in the empty space behind. The pretty Chinese girl requested a few more songs to perk me back up, while letting me know that she worked at the desk downstairs during most of the morning. She managed to stuff a few pringles in my mouth in between versus as well, since I let her know that I was somewhat starving at the time.

A short while later, the electrical engineering girl retired, and I had broken enough strings on the guitar to make me want to put it down. Someone threw on some hip hop music, and Dave, Helen, and another tall guy had adjourned to a side table to talk about the day and map out some ideas for where to adventure tomorrow.

I joined them a little later, finding out that the tall guy was a Brit named Chris, and had been traveling with Helen since somewhere around Beijing. Helen had studied Mandarin in college for a few years, and was able to translate a few of us out of some corners we'd painted ourselves into during some of the discussion with the Chinese. All and all a good start to things, and it wasn't long before I headed back to Harrison's to rediscover that the guy near the gate that closes off the 3 or 4 apartment buildings where he lived locked the gates every night at about 10, and you needed to tip him a couple of yuan for the trouble of waking him up. Him, Phil and I did a quick recap of the day before I lay down on my new domicile, the couch in the living room, and passed out, knowing that I was in Chengdu now, for real.