An Opera with Chinese Characteristics (Sept 27, 03)

We often hear the word “customization” from working in a foreign-owned company in China. But what customization exactly means? Here is a vivid real case in daily life. Enjoy!

After all these long waiting weeks, we finally went to watch the opera “Aida” tonight. Without knowing what the story about and being late for 30 minutes to the show, we end up bargaining with the “yellow cow” gangs in front of the venue. When we got off the taxi, a group of “yellow cow” gangs surrounded us immediately with a bunch of oversold tickets on their hands. We looked at the tickets and tried to find a more expensive ones (better seat) to start our bargaining. Then we were approached by this guy who has 3 tickets of RMB 580 which are middle- ranged tickets, so we thought that would be nice to start with. Before we offered a price, this guy said to us RMB 100, without giving a second thought and being late for the show already, we thought this is quite an acceptable price, so we said yes to this guy. So the deal was that we will pay only if we can get in the gate with these tickets. And guess what? The tickets are real, so we entered the gate with no problem, but that the guy was blocked by the security because his ticket is not valid. We waited for a while but the guy still cannot get in and the security is urging us to move up. Without a second thought, we decided to take the tickets and move up! So we were saying to ourselves, “wow! We got in for free!!! That’s amazing!” The Workers Stadium was huge. Imagine the kind of Olympic stadium. So we finally found our seats and sat down to watch this opera. Just when we thought we can escape… someone is calling us from behide, ooops, that was the ticket guy. Haha, he is coming after us for the money! Alas, big brother is definitely watching over us. So we pulled out RMB 300 for the tickets and he left happily.
The opera indeed was an amazing carnival featuring over 1,500 performers with live tigers, lions, elephants and camels! Why would I call it a carnival? Because you can see audience at the ground running around taking pictures with these animals, props and actors while the main characters are still singing and acting on the stage! And if you move your sight slightly over, you will see a stage of Hyundai (the sponsor) cars lying in the edge of the stage to remind the audience for the newest car models! The opera was in Italian with Chinese subtitle, but the subtitles seldom follow what they are singing… Even though we enjoy it a lot with all the terrific performance, singing, music and props, we have no clue what’s going on with the story. This has taught us a lesson that we need to prepare next time before going to an opera. Then in the intermission, we heard the announcement that “ Now we will have a ten minutes break. In order to give you more pleasure, we have prepared a Xiaolin Kungfu show, please stay for this break.” Wow, a kungfu show in between of an opera?! What a new experience! While I turned around leaving my sights off the stage, I just noticed audience around me were drinking coke, eating chips, pop corns, etc, for a minute, I thought, wait, am I watching a football match? But who cares? Sometimes you just need to think out of the box. *blink* :)