The weekend finally came and my Saturday night was spent searching for a Chinese rock concert. With vague directions provided by That’s Beijing, the expat magazine, myself and a buddy went looking for Star Time, which is part of a four story entertainment megaplex. The top floor is a concert hall, the third floor is a huge, extremely ritzy lounge bar, the second and first floors are a disco called Tango, and the basement is all KTV, which is what the Chinese call Karaoke. Next to this huge and bustling building is an equally huge and bustling 24-hour, four-story dim sum restaurant. It was a strange mix of people, as the attendants of the rock show were entirely different than the well-dressed lounge patrons or the very drunk KTVers. Surprisingly, there were few other westerners at the show, so we got stared at. However, after only two weeks, I’ve grown used to getting gawked at. The first band finished tuning up and they started playing hard rock that sounded too much like Korn. The next band came out and each of the band members wore the same thing – brown collared button-up shirts with matching pants and a red arm band. The arm band read AK-47, the band’s name. However, their uniform was a clear message – they were dressed like the Red Guard, Mao’s youth corps during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard terrorized the Chinese people by accusing people of capitalist sentiments. Regardless of how unsubstantiated these claims were, they justified taunts, property seizure, and occasionally beatings. The politics of the band's lyrics were lost on me, but I liked their music. It borrowed elements from New Wave and Hardcore, but mostly sounded like Rage Against the Machine in Chinese.

That was probably the most notable event. I have some more things to talk about, including making jiaozi at my host family, why Chinese people wear “SARS” masks, why Chinese people like wearing red, and the underclass of servants known as “FuWuYuan”, but I’ll talk about them later, as I have 70 characters to memorize for tomorrow.

I somehow managed to survive the arduous and frustrating first week of classes. I’ve apparently lost my once uncanny memory – short-term, working, and long. I spend hours trying to store a few characters to no avail, a brain gimmick that would have been no problem for my high-school self. I suppose it reflects a real education rather than the collection of memory tests that was my high school education. While the weekend was fun, the next week has already begun and it is already shaping up to be both painful and psychologically damaging.