Our Concert Experience

Well, Sunday was the long-awaited "Jay Chou" concert experience....as it turned out...it was not a Jay Chou concert (aka not one of his official tour stops)...the concert organizers just hired him to appear with some other performers. As our city is pretty ghetto compared to bigger cities (or Taipei), it was not really that fabulous of a concert...he was great, but only performed 3 songs at the end and was only there for like 30 minutes total...thus we did not get to meet him.



While you may think we would be SO disappointed, I am determined not to lose face on my goal...thus myself and another friend are considering trying to go to one of his real concerts.

Aside from the bummer of not meeting him, it actually was a fun experience....here is the story of the weekend....

The night before the concert, I bicycled out to the venue, and found what looked like the door that would most likely be used by crew/v.i.p.s.....then snuck inside to view the progress. At this point, I got a clue that perhaps the concert wouldn't be like his other tour stops, because they hadn't even finished assembling the stage:

The next day, the day of the concert, after lunch Leslie and I bicycled out to check again to see if sound check was happening yet...nope. All the workers were asleep on the sidewalk outside. Hm. 6 hours to go and still not all the way set up. We headed home to take a nap and prepare ourselves to look like this:

So, at 4:15 we showed up. (Rookie mistake: in China you should show up late to see the good stuff, not early). We hung around, watched the student volunteers get ready, got hit on by a man with a V.I.P. necktag (who I briefly considered humoring, then decided against it...yay good judgement), and were mistaken for Russians. We also attracted attention of our own as people used their concert binoculars to stare at us from afar.

Eventually we decided to lurk outside the V.I.P. entrance like creepers...we did in fact see a famous singer, but at the time we didn't know who she was....we also watched the backup dancers go in. Finally, a security guy who had been laughing at us asked what we were doing, and when we asked him about Jay Chou, he said he was still at the hotel, but that he would come in this entrance. We determined to wait.

Finally, another volunteer came up and told us we should go inside, that Jay wouldn't perform until past 10 and wouldn't come until right before. He also told us we weren't allowed to lurk, and that we could take pictures after the concert....

The concert was good...we figured out it was organized by the local province, because with each performer they would come onstage and give them a gift/performance of something distinctive to our province. FINALLY, Jay came out and performed 3 songs. He was great, and even used numbchucks in one performance, haha. Alas, it was short and as soon as he got off stage they drove him off....

We went to the stage area to explore though...this was when the same student volunteer (we later nicknamed him our nemesis) told us Jay was in a car right near us...we hurriedly unfurled the giant sign we had made, complete with musical notes and hearts, and the words "周杰伦， 我们爱你！美国也爱你” (Jay Chou, we love you! America also loves you!). We then discovered that Jay was NOT here, but at that point countless cell phone pictures were being snapped of us and our sign, so we posed compliantly before exporing the stage (and there encountering more students who wanted to take photos with us). And so it was that we took more photos for fans that night than any of the other performers. Score.

If you are interested, Jay will be coming to the U.S. (Las Vegas and San Francisco) in December.

Jay, you will not escape us...next stop, official concert!