A Little Song and Dance in Fuzhou, China
There was a big park outside my hotel in Fuzhou earlier this week where thousands of people gathered on Monday night to sing and dance. You just had to see the size of this park with hundreds and hundreds of people packing into various sections all over the place. Some sections were too dark to take photos, but walking among hundreds of happy people in the dark on a nice warm night was calming -- especially after a long day of OpenSolaris presentations.
I was with Shaoting Duan from Sun China, and she asked around and found out that this is really quite normal for this park. We walked around for a couple of hours. I was the only foreigner in sight, and everyone noticed me, too. It all got pretty friendly at one point when a keyboard player said hello to me -- into his microphone for everyone to hear -- and asked me to play along with the band. I`m absolutely serious. What ever gave him the idea I could actually do such a thing I`ll never know, but it was a charming thought nonetheless.
You know, I often write about community building for OpenSolaris. I try to learn from those who have gone before, and I try to build on top of what`s already there. Well, to me these scenes below represent communities in their purest form -- people just coming together for their own reasons, to have fun and express themselves. And that`s a significant learning experience as well. Anyway, it was a lovely night ...
Photos being too dark - I find that this is one of the biggest downfalls of my point-and-shoot camera, a Lumix. The flash is underpowered, and available light night shots shots all come out much darker than they look like on the preview LCD. I thought it was just my camera.
I have actually seen this kind of mass celebration, dance, singing, music making, quite a lot in parks around China. Much of it seems organized at some level, much seems very organic. I think it's a holdover from Chinese villiage life that we don't experience so much in the west. Our mass gatherings are sporting events or protests.
Posted by Dave Stewart on November 20, 2008 at 03:04 AM JST #
Yah, point/shoot cameras are challenged at night if you don't have a tripod. Shooting at night requires an expensive lens. :) And I'll have to pay more attention to these community events in China. I've been many times but this is the fist event I've seen. It was so big.
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on November 23, 2008 at 08:44 PM JST #