RATATAT!!!

RATATAT

On Thursday night I saw Ratatat here in Shanghai! They played at a place called Zhi Jiang Dream Factory, which is an old French Concession factory converted into music venue. It was completely jam packed with people (literally 200 or so over capacity) of which majority were ex-patriot's or college students. The show was incredible, and even the warm up act, a local chinese band, got the crowd going. I managed to push my way up to about the second row from the stage, and though I got drenched in sweat and abused by the mosh pit it was completely worth it. Not much else I can say to describe the concert, i'll let the pictures speak for themselves (I have great video too, but can't upload it because of the block on blogger).

After the show we went to a night club called Sky Lounge- which though trendy, was still silly and Chinese. The music was a mixture of gangster rap and bad 90's pop - I may or may not have danced on stage to the YMCA........


Today, Friday, we went on another field trip with our program director. This time on a walking tour of the French Concession, an area which I have mentioned in past posts. We explored some back alley neighborhoods, historic homes, and even an art gallery or two. To make the afternoon more interesting, our director brought along a friend, an architect/artist/photographer living in Shanghai, who gave us somewhat of a photopraphy assignment while we were out. The friend (whose name I forget), is working on a photography project of Shanghai. For this project he wanders around the city taking pictures, however before doing so places an arbitrary but strict set of guildlines on himself, for example: while out, he photographs the nearest person to every 6th red door he sees. In a nutshell, his reason/theory for doing this is that you get a more uniform and less arbitrary sense of the city through a series of photographs that all follow the same rule. Our assignment was to do just this; give ourselves an arbirtray rule for photography in the French concession and stick to it. My rule was that whenever the group stopped I would photograph the closest address number, it was kind of silly but I actually came out with some incredible pictures.