I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I really miss the bar culture of Europe here in China. Over here, people eat, drink and go home; the idea of going to an establishment just to sit around and enjoy few drinks and chat over a table is just alien here. But for my day off, I decided I want two things: I want to have the original Qingdao seafood, and get hammered at a rock bar.
First one is easy, but the second… That’s more tricky. But I googled and found out that there actually is a rock bar in Qingdao, one small joint called DMC, which promised live music and decent-priced drinks.
Our Finnish actress had her Chinese leg of the production finished, so I took her and my writer/actor Dalan out to a place I call Big Tits Seafood – it’s a small hole-in-the-wall -type of a seafood restaurant with an unexplainable drawing of a German-style Biergarten waitress with huge tits dominating the back wall. Never mind the mammaries, but the food is just mindblowing.
David my assistant was too sick to join us, so we hooked him over the WeChat to order us a big bucket of seafood, and enjoyed the dish with some white wine. Mika joined us later on, after his dinner was done, and then we started to look for this fabled rock club, DMC.
It took a while to figure out where inside a mall it actually was, but when we found it we knew instantly we had come to a right place. There was a band playing loud and the place was positively shitty little joint, just like something from Kallio, Helsinki.
After sitting around for a while, I started to realize there was something wrong with the music. It wasn’t really… well played. And they were not really playing songs as such. They kinda started something, played few riffs then changed to something else or just let the instruments freestyle something. And it’s wasn’t like Jazz type of freestyling, but actually closer to a band practice. And the people in the band kept on changing. Someone grabbed a guitar, another sang a bit, someone took the drums…
Well, we were a bit drunk and thought with the actress we want in. We rushed on stage and stole some instruments – I took the mic, she went to the drums – and started blast-beating some crazy freestyle crap, me screaming some weird metal stuff and her kicking the hell out of the drumset. Slowly, the locals started to join onboard, and soon we were Saturday night jammin’ right there in the heart of Qingdao, true China-Finland cultural exchange going on right there.
The trip home was fun, we listened to some Finnish music and arrived at the hotel around 5 am…
…which was exactly one hour after the actress’ pickup would have been. It’s just that nobody told her anything about it. So no surprises there, there was a bunch of people waiting for her (this I learned later on, though) and she had to just run in and out of her room to make it to her flight!
In the end, she did. But it was a close call. And a fun day off!
Vuorensola.com 