Life in China 2016: A Picture A Day, November 5 – China has become a bit stricter with pirated DVD’s and movies in areas where there are more foreigners, but for the most part, I think the practice is still everywhere. We have a small local movie/CD store where we buy our movies for 5 or 10 rmb each, that’s 75 cents to $1.50 USD. At first I struggled with doing this, but, although we have Netflix and Amazon Prime, the internet is usually too slow to watch movies. So, while in China, we do as the Chinese do, and watch pirated movies! Actually, the majority of Chinese just download their movies and music (for free). Where we used to live, there were movie carts, and they would set up in the evenings. Every so often you wouldn’t see them for a while and then you’d know that the police were cracking down. The picture is the back of a music CD that was translated to English; enjoy reading the song titles :-) Out of curiosity, I typed the ISBN number into Google search, a bunch of Chinese results came up, so I clicked the first one and the music instantly started playing, it was Chinese songs though, not English, but this was a set of multiple CD’s, supposedly for listening to in the car, so maybe it was mixed. If you go to the large chain bookstores and department stores, you can find DVD’s and CD’s that are supposedly official, but the English selection is very limited. www.myownchinesebrocade.com
Filipino Music
Life in China 2016: A Picture A Day, September 25 – Jim returned to China today after a week in the USA, and as usual, wanted to sleep all day from jetlag! In order to keep him awake, I suggested we have dinner out and listen to some live music. In Songshan Lake, we only have the Hyatt with live music, so we drove about 25 minutes to a place Jim enjoys called Gecko Pizza. On Sunday nights, they have live Filipino music, which we really enjoy. Filipino bands are popular in expat areas of China. We like that they play a lot of old American music :-) Tonight they included Santana and Fleetwood Mac, as well as many more. It did the trick and Jim was wide awake :-)