Gig frustration; gig compensation

A very vexing time I had earlier this evening.

I received an e-mail this afternoon advertising the visit this month of an Indian woman musician called Shubha Sankaran who plays a rare kind of über-sitar called a surbahar (which has allegedly never been heard in China before). She's here for a few weeks, playing a series of gigs around town, with an American guy accompanying her on a regular sitar.

As luck would have it, I'm not free for any of their other dates. Their opening gig - TONIGHT - was going to be my only chance to hear them.

On the plus side, it was quite near my office.

On the minus side, I didn't know the venue, and had only the vaguest of directions to it - no map, no name/address in Chinese.

Finding anywhere in this city is generally a pretty huge ordeal (I could go into this unfortunate phenomenon at great length - perhaps in another post at another time, maybe over on Froogville - but, in a nutshell: everything looks the same; the system of ascribing addresses is wildly confused; names of streets and buildings are rarely displayed; and everybody - the Chinese especially, but foreigners too - gives appalling directions). At night, in the middle of a park, I had no chance at all. After I'd made several vain attempts to contact the event organiser, she did eventually send me a series of text messages - which appeared to be claiming that the teahouse hosting the performance was..... well, somewhere it plainly wasn't, a spot that I had actually stood on while hopelessly scanning 360°around me! Grrrrrrr.

Anyway, I managed to be fairly philosophical about it. I had known it was a pretty hopeless cause before I even set off, so was thoroughly mentally prepared for the frustration and disappointment when it indeed materialised.

And at least it was a nice evening for a walk home.

And, if I hadn't decided to walk home, I probably wouldn't have gone out at all tonight. But since I was passing by my local Nanluoguxiang bar street on the way back (well, a small detour), I thought I'd drop in somewhere for 'just the one'. I happened upon Salud (site of last year's infamous Christmas party where I was inveigled into playing Santa, and also of the French-babe-overload The Choirboy and I suffered some months later), which is now doing live music every Wednesday. And tonight it was really rather a decent little laowai blues trio I hadn't heard before - which was probably much more what I was in the mood for. (And they probably wouldn't have had any beer in that mysterious, invisible Zhongshan Park teahouse!)

Things have a way of working out for the best sometimes.