what's on the tube tonight?

I have occasionally mentioned uneventful, at times hungover, days when I am a blob in front of the tv. Now you may all be wondering (although it's unlikely) what on earth I'm watching here in China. Back home in Canada, I was spoiled for choices. Over 50 channels! Still a lot of crap, just more of it! But I could pretty much always watch A&E or the Discovery channel for something. When I moved to Scotland, I had to adjust to the fact that there were only 4 channels.

But that's nothing compared to China. There are about 15-20 channels, but only one in English. Unfortunately, this one English channel is also excruciatingly boring. It's all about China! BizChina, TravelChina, NewsChina, EntertainmentChina....you get the idea. It's like there is no world outside of this country. Honestly, I think there could be major stuff going on and all we'd get is a little blurb "and in other news, America has declared war on all of Europe. Now back to our feature story: new buses in Beijing!...."

Sometimes I watch a bit of the travel China portion, but that's about it. So I'll flip through the Chinese channels. There are lots of Chinese soaps, even one that takes place in this city, so that's kind of cool to see places I recognize. There's at least one soap that is a period soap, so everyone is in neat old costumes. Of course I don't understand what's going on, but it's still nice to look at. There are loads of game shows too, trivia type things, and I really wish I could understand them. Oh well. Sometimes I put on the Chinese Opera channel. Again, I don't know what's happening, but they have elaborate costumes and they do impressive acrobatics and stuff. It's okay to have on in the background.

That's about it. Oh yeah, sometimes there are English movies playing too, although they're almost always dubbed over in Chinese. So I'll just watch something in Chinese and catch words here and there, but otherwise just make up my own story.

Mostly I watch DVDs that I bought here. They are soooooo cheap (less than a buck each) and the quality is perfectly good. We have hundreds of DVDs - both movies and tv series. Last night we watched Million Dollar Baby. It was very good, but I didn't know it was going to be so sad! I thought it was a rah-rah-rah she's the champ, feel good movie.

It's funny though, not all of out DVD purchases are perfect. Our copy of The Grudge is a very badly pirated copy, complete with someone walking in front of the screen. The best part though is the guy filming it tried to hide it by covering the lens as the guy walks by! We recently bought the Interpreter only to discover that not only is it a Spanish copy, it also doesn't start at the beginning, but about 20 minutes into the movie.

This has become a very long entry so I'll wrap up now. However, I will be back with more on the subject - the write-ups on the back of the DVDs. Sometimes they are hilarious!