Sunday, July 3, 2011
We leave the hotel in Suzhou super early and are dressed to be television stars. Well, ok, maybe just to be featured audience members. I had to say goodbye to the six star room and service. Breakfast was delicious but hurried. As we hit the road to Nanjing, the tour guide asks if we want to sing or rest for the next 3.5 hours. With a bus filled with talented beauties, singing was the top pick. It was a mini talent hour where those who didn’t want to sing told jokes, recited a poem, or posed brain teasers to the audience. We had a mix of golden oldies and current pop in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and Spanish. Once the fun was over, everyone more or less passed out until we reached the lunch spot.
We met our local Nanjing tour guide at the lunch spot where service was lightning fast. The local tour guide has lived all of his life in Nanjing except for a brief stint in Beijing for college. Nanjing will always have a place in history because of the horrors incurred by its people, but the city has been making a place for itself in the world despite its sordid past. There are still sentiments of resentment towards the Japanese, and as the local tour guide warned us, we should shy away from speaking any Japanese with the city limits. What Nanjing is most known for now is their plum blossoms. Every spring, there is a massive pilgrimage to Plum Blossom Mountain to view the most picturesque landscape in all of the world this one time of the year. As the local tour guide and the Chamber of Commerce like to say, once you have a taste of Nanjing and all of its beauty, you will want to return again and again.
Off to the JSBC studios for the girls big break on the internationally popular blind date show “Fei Cheng Wu Rao” hosted by Meng Fei. All of the contestants at today’s taping were Chinese currently living in Australia. If you want to know more about the show, you can look it up online – it even has its own page. Yi Yao (Contestant #1) got the opportunity to wow the audience and the future viewers of the show with her eloquent Mandarin and sense of humor, representing her fellow contestants to the viewing audience. The chamber of commerce officials who met us at the television studio were pleasantly surprised at the language skills the contestants possessed being Chinese-Americans. The girls in the front two rows right next to the stage where the commentators were stationed. These girls were such troopers because they has to sit in the same position, legs crossed and slanted to the side with perfect posture and smiles on their faces for nearly five hours straight. There certainly were some characters on stage. The current season has a couple of cosplay enthusiasts, and everyone seems to have a distinct personality from the rest of the female contestants. How it works is that one guy comes out and the girls and the guys spend time looking each other over. The boy makes his choices of a limited number of contestants with whom he would like to go on a blind date. The girls also choose whether or not they like the boy. Everyone gets to see clips of the boy’s life and testimonials from friends. The boy then must choose two of the matches, and they get to go on a blind date. Yes, there are occasions when there are no matches and the taping is cut short.
Once the promotional photos are taken after the taping, we do run across one of the celebrity commentators, and one of the event assistants gets her wish fulfilled. She gets to be in the same picture as her favorite television celeb. She was over the moon that we relentlessly sought her out when the celeb was instantly spotted because she was in the middle of being depressed that she hadn’t caught up with him on set. She’s still over the moon with her head in the clouds because of this happy happenstance.
The officials from the chamber of commerce help us get to the restaurant where the Governor of the Jiangsu province where Nanjing is located. It is the singularly most expensive restaurant in all of Nanjing, and we all felt privileged to be invited by the Governor and dine with his representatives. Gifts and songs were exchanged to the delight of both groups. Yi Yao (Contestant #1) delighted the officials with a classic Chinese song while Danni Wang (Contestant #7) and Isabella Chen (Contestant #9) gave a shout out to American culture with a rap duet. As for the banquet itself, Nanjing is known for its tapas-style banquets where tiny individual plates bring you a large variety of traditional local dishes. You even get an individual teapot. What a way to end the evening! Tonight, we get to the hotel early, and don’t have nearly as early of a call time in the morning. Yay! A deserved bit of rest before the farewell breakfast and additional television appearance tomorrow.
Stereotype Rebel 