Lately

The Suzhou Hello Kitty Bra Shop, for all your Hello Kitty Bra needs.

The city of Suzhou is known throughout China (and the Chinese say, throughout the world) for its Chinese Gardens. We did visit 2 of the gardens, the two that were hailed as the best in the city in our guidebook (the Humble Administrators Garden and the Master of Many Nets garden. They were okay. They are hailed as the best gardens in the best city for Chinese gardens. To tell you all the truth, I enjoyed the Chinese garden in Sydney better. These gardens were both quite unkempt, and while I did get some understanding of the Aesthetic by trying to imagine the gardens in their historical context, this imagery was consistently ruined by the megaphone touting efforts of the ubiquitous Chinese tour group. Anyway, the photos I took have the advantage of being silent.

A bit problem with the entirety of Suzhou was its audio component. They say that Suzhou is a city renown for its "beautiful stone bridges, pagodas, and meticulously designed gardens."

For Kelly and I Suzhou will be forever known as the 'city of squeaky breaks'. Every vehicle with wheels, when stopping, emitted a sound ten times louder and ten times worse than the most awful nails-on-a-chalk-board sound you can imagine. It was crazy, the traffic was stop and go everywhere and hence I walked around with my fingers in my ears a large amount of the time. I think gunshots would have been a more comforting sound, and the locals didn't even seem to notice. I am convinced that there is wide scale deafness in China (it would explain why Chinese people scream into their mobile phones on public transport.)

Anyway. Enough ranting. I went to an amazing underground electronic night last week, where the highlight (for me) was the Beijing based 8-bit/IDM artist known as Sulumi.

He served up an amazing live performance using 3 gameboys, two effects pads, an iPod nano, and a vocoder ran through a synthesizer. He played an 8-bit set, and it was probably one of the most amazing of any live sets I have ever seen. He made some hardcore inspired 8-bit sounds that had everyone in the place jumping. The man himself often was jumping about with a gameboy in one hand, a vocoder in the other and a torch in his mouth to see the LCD screens.
Nice work I must say.