First off, I apologize sincerely for the silence on the blog. It's just been too darn busy. These next couple entries should be a real treat for you all though, so hang in there!
After we left Lhasa, our next stop was the Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival. There were poets there from China. There were poets there from the U.S. There were poets there from India. There were poets there from Argentina. There were poets there from Hungary. There were poets there from Spain. You name it, they had it! Everyone you met was either a famous poet or a journalist documenting the thing. I asked everyone I met if they were a famous poet. They asked me if I was a poet at all, and I said, why yes I was, would you like to hear a poem of mine? Then I read an unprintably vulgar poem I wrote. Only He Zhong thought it was funny.
They sure had some famous poets reading at the festival, too. Name your favorite international contemporary poet, and I bet she was there too! Everyone was there! They even had this guy! No need telling you who he is:
And here's a guy who needs no introduction. These are the pre-festival speeches by the way. There were nine hours of straight speeches! Everybody liked this guy's speech the best because it was only thirty seconds long.
The speeches were plumb fascinating. All nine hours of them
This was the real deal folks. The place was crawling with reporters, photographers, videographers, documentarians, cameramen -- just about everything but bona fide audience members.
Our Mississippi Bluesman Alex Wand got invited on to play a couple of his Mississippi Blues songs. Our Mississippi Bluesman rockin' out.
Everybody just loved it, not only because the music was so good, but also because he didn't give a single speech. Right here in this picture is just about half the audience. The other half had their tripods set up behind us.
After all the speeches were out of the way, it was time for the banquet! That was the real reason everybody came. Lots of good food, and free refills of Tibetan barley wine! Here we are with poets Lu Eean, and Yu Jian, some personal friends of our Famous Poet, Wang Ping.
The food was good, that Tibetan barley wine was really good, but the entertainment was lousy. The lineup for tonight? More speeches. Downing the rest of the carafe of barley wine, Mustachioed Tibetan poet He Zhong promished to take us to where the real party was at. Next thing we knew we were driving off into someone's Hummer. This guy sure knew how to drive a Hummer. Traffic jam? No problem, we'd just roll right onto the sidewalk and drive around the whole thing. I rode in the trunk.
Who owned the Hummer? (You don't see too many Hummers in Xining.) This guy! He's one of Tibet's most famous singers! He drank an entire bottle of Tibetan barley wine all by himself!
And oh boy could he sing!
Here he is rocking the fuck out with Mississippi Bluesman Alex Wand. You can't see me in these photos because I was too busy taking the pictures to be in any myself, but in between photos I was banging out some wicked rhythms on the spoons!
Wang Ping, the Poet dancing flamenco
We kept seeing her posters around town!
He Zhong just kept pouring us drinks
And more drinks
And more drinks
He Zhong, ladies and gentlemen. I just couldn't stop taking pictures of that mustache. What a guy!
Well, needless to say, the beer kept on pouring and we all got pretty shwasted. Except for Alex who got rip-roaring sober.
See that girl on the far left, almost out of the frame? (That's the best picture I've got.) As I was walking back from the bathroom, she took my hand, lead me away to a bench around back of some bushes and kissed me! Well, I was pretty thrilled, and once I got back to the table, I stopped hitting on the girl second to the left and started cozying right up to the girl who kissed me, when our Wiz Kid Videographer Alex Howard grabbed me by the arm to take me for a walk -- that girl was somebody's wife! Things were getting awkward.
Well, we decided the best thing to do would be to take a stroll around the premises and wait for things to cool off. On that stroll of ours, who should we run into but some nice Chinese guy, all smiles and high fives, drunk as a skunk. I tried teaching him a couple fancy high-fives and handshakes, and he kept on trying to get us to come with him to whatever party he was at, and I was tryna convince him to come to the party we were at, when all of a sudden, Alex Howard, the Wiz Kid Videographer, rip-roaring sober just bolted.
"I think we lost him," says the Wiz Kid Videographer when I catch up with him. That we did. And ourselves. And my spoons had fallen out of my pocket somewhere along the way. Somehow we made it back.
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