Stephanie in Shanghai: Soggy Shanghai Jazz

Yesterday I went to a jazz festival with Lucy and a bunch of her friends. Some of them I met two weeks ago, some I was meeting for the first time, including a girl named Azure that seemed to take a liking to me rather quickly and spent part of the concert lying down with her head in my lap asking me questions.

I met up with them at the subway station for the Jing'An temple. We went to the park there, and it almost immediately started raining. We sat in the rain for a bit, then went to wait in line only to discover that we couldn't get in until later. Lucy and I went back to the subway station and had a quick late lunch at a Thai restaurant (I had seafood curry that was quite good). On the way back, Lucy went to talk to some scalpers about getting extra tickets for some friends of her's. We pretended not to know each other since, as a foreigner, I've got "RICH AND GULLIBLE" written in neon letters across my forehead and I didn't want her to get overcharged. Lucy also told me that the Chinese word for scalper is "黄牛” or "yellow cow", and it understandably isn't very polite.

It had stopped raining at that point so we went inside, met up with our friends and had a seat pretty close to the stage (it was a big field and we were sitting on a mixture of a blanket one person had brought, magazines, and free cheapy plastic ponchos that they were handing out). Here is the stage.

While we sat and waited for the music to come, we all eyed the sky warily. Eventually it started to pour again. I took my cheapy plastic poncho and wrapped my purse up in it. I was more worried about my books and camera than me getting wet. The crowd turned into a sea of umbrellas. A white guy came on the microphone and announced in both English and in fabulous Chinese (which made me insanely jealous of course) that he was sorry for the delay and things would start soon. Here is a few members of the first band that played, rocking out in sexy plastic ponchos.

I stayed until around 830pm. I watched 4 out of the 6 bands scheduled to play. My favorite was probably the second band, from Belgium. I've included a video clip I took of them playing. It's not the best quality.

Here is me and Lucy enjoying the festival during one of the breaks in the rain.

With the rain and all the people, the field got churned into a massive lake of mud. I don't know if my sneakers will ever recover. I also discovered at a rather inopportune time that my umbrella leaks (meh, I bought cheap one. I suppose I should spring for a better one.) The concert was delayed and the rain was on and off for the whole concert. All in all, I had a great time. :-)

Side note:
In my post from a week ago, I posted a picture of the tallest building in China being blocked out completely by smog or clouds or fog. While I was waiting at the exact same spot for the bus again, I figured I would take another picture, this time where you can see the building I am talking about.