“How Karaoke Destroyed the Great Wall”
Photo Credit: Paul Mantz
If you have ever been to the great city of Beijing China like I was, you most likely have visited the Forbidden City, climbed a part of the Great Wall, and sang some awful Karaoke. I was in China filming a documentary about New Brunswick entrepreneurs, politicians and educators as they travelled to the Far East to explore and encourage closer relationships with their Chinese counterparts. After filming many trade mission type events like ribbon cuttings, hand shakes, toasts and red carpet rollouts, I was very excited to finally get a chance to see a bit of the real China. The real China of course started with a very late night of Karaoke. Everyone from the trade mission who came out for the night of singing 1980’s pop classics, and one too many “I will survive’s” ended up going to bed hours later than they probably should have. The next morning we were too climb the Great Wall of China!
The next morning came far sooner than I was prepared for, and my friend Janet knocked on my hotel room door telling me that the bus was waiting for me…I had slept in. I slumped onto the bus and apologized to all for making them wait. We hit the narrow roads and made it to one of the most iconic structures of mankind’s history. I groggily whipped out my video camera to start shooting, but the batteries were dead. In my state of Karaoke bliss coming back to the room the night before, I completely forgot to charge my batteries. My climbing companion Paul was kind enough to take this picture of a defeated me. When I visited the Forbidden City later, still without a working camera, I submitted to my Eeyor-inspired self loathing and thought that no one probably would want to see my sad video anyway. To justify my embarrassing error, I decided that taking mental images of the structure would be far better in the end. Consider yourself warned, Karaoke nights in China can destroy any decent man’s ambition to film the wonders of the world! \
You can see Greg’s documentary “Chasing the Sun” at http://factualtv.com/documentary/Chasing-the-Sun
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