My Blog

Happy 2007 everyone. I hope it’s the best year for you yet.

I found a lot of happiness in 2007 - met a wonderful girl, worked a lot. Lost triathlon along the way, still looking for a way to get it back.

I also went to Beijing and Hong Kong for work. The cities were definitely night and day from each other. Beijing was a concrete jungle with thousands of years of history. Hong Kong looks like "Blade Runner" And beginning with lost luggage, the craziness kept continuing.

Here are some notes I took while in Asia…

Chinese is a difficult language for Westerners to learn - complicated to pronounce the specific ethnic varieties of the language. This is apparently the same for the Chinese, who have remarkable trouble communicating with each other. After waiting through several discussions only to be met with a confused shoulder shrug - I am convinced the language was made up yesterday.

The crew was one of - if not the absolute - worst that any of us have ever dealt with. Mitch was our production coordinator and interpreter, he apparently had mastered enough of the language to get everyone in the same room. The gaffer and grips were essentially window dressing, as asking them to raise or lower a light became a group experience. At one point they put a hanging silk in front of the camera. Gary commented that it was almost as if they were "appointed" jobs by some authority. And on the day jobs were handed out, the official said - okay, "you’re a gaffer" and you, yeah you, you are an HD camera assistant."

The China of bicycle-riding has diminished since Nixon’s trip. There are still bike lanes and morning commuters, but cars rule the road. Similar to Atlanta in the early 1990s, freeways are being built as infrastructure for the Olympics. Our driver, Henry, said there are 1/4 of the amount of cars in China as in the US. Strangely enough, there are over 100,000 car-related deaths a year. Seriously. The cars drive like they are in a game to see who can kill more people. And losing the game means you will have to be hit by a car.

The taxi drivers also don’t know the city very well. The distance between the Ritz Carlton Beijing and the office we were shooting at is about 10 blocks. And we had a map. In Chinese. With pictures. Leaving the office at the end of the day, the doorman called us over a cab. We got in and said Ritz Carlton. Nothing. We showed him the map. Nothing. We asked the doorman back over. He invited two of his friends. 3 minutes went by as they discussed internally. Again, the language was made-up yesterday. Finally, our audio man, directed the cab to the hotel. He had already done this five other times on our trip. Most recently, from Tianamen Square, which has a Starbucks.

–end–