Hi,

This is my first attempt at Blogging. When I thought about what to use as a theme, my idea was to blog some of the time as Brian George and other times as Byron George his Alter Ego but maybe I’ll save that to another time. As real life happenings inspire my writing I just thought that I’d put up part diary and part observations in my daily life  and put them on here as notes that I may use later. That way my readers can guess where they will appear or have something to refer to later or even make suggestions to me.

So to start I’ll write up some things that happened in 2015 up to December.

I am working in China since about May 2015. I couldn’t get a visa at first but that didn’t stop me as I used my 2 passports to get in and out on business visas giving me 28 days at a time, so that I could exit to Hong Kong for a few days at a time and then return. In the meantime I used the company visa agent to get through the bureaucracy until we had enough of their requirements to succeeed in getting my residency sorted. I was just waiting for some documents to arrive at my rented apartment and had left Tianjin for a couple of days to visit another job down in Qingdao, where the beer is brewed! The night that I left on the bullet train for Qingdao, the big chemical warehouse explosion happened in Tianjin killing about 170 people and blowing up the nearby apartment blocks so much as to make about 7000 people homeless! Unfortunately one of the apartments was mine, but I was lucky enough not to be there. Some pictures on here show some before & after the explosion on my apartment.

The explosion also blew away my documents and that meant a return to the UK to re-submit for my work visa and residency which I eventually got in mid October. After that I worked on running the 2 projects and travelling back & forth between Tianjin and Qingdao.

In Tianjin my drinking partners at my regular bar haunt in Teda, the Guitar Cabin had been running out of passing musicians, so the owner Pipz, a talented Filippino guitaristand his lovely Chinese wife Scarlett started encouraging a few of us customers to step into the breach! I happened to mention that I had sung as a kid and also had a blues harp at home which I practised on regularly, so needless to say I ended up jamming with the guys on a Friday and Saturday night, usually when we were drunk enough to have the courage to get up and get on down! This has now become a regular weekend thing and the other singer Stefan and I often end up wasted and after playing on stage in the Cabin at around 3am, are often seen partying on nearer home in all sorts of strange bars/clubs in Teda. I have also put a video on here taken when I jammed with the house band at The Blue Marlin in Shanghai, on Rock night.

I also got invited to a Chinese Wedding Party of a business colleague and once they knew I had begun to play the harmonica made me perform a song at the party/reception. Could have done without that but the party moved into Qingdao later and we ended up at a bar called “Knuckles” and I got dragged out by a Filippina girl singer to duet the end of “Titanic”, I must have “bad singer” tattoooed on my forehead, or do musicians automatically sniff us out to make them look better! ha ha.

To bring us up to date I got out of Tianjin at end of December, went drinking in Manila and ended up in a front ender car crash, where a drunk motorcyclist lost control of his bike and fell off, but the bike continued to leap in the air where Evel Knievel style it landed on the bonnet of the car I was travelling in, that woke me up! When I got out to investigate what had happened all I could find was the bike in the road and no rider, I even looked under the car but couldn’t see the rider until some street boys carried him out of the nearby garage forecourt. Upshot was I spent Xmas morning at the traffic police car pound from 3am until 6am. My Manager and Driver Midgey was ok but shaken up, so I had to calm her down until her family arrived to assist with handling the cops and tow trucks.

We hadn’t even got to New Years Eve and already I was getting phone calls about things going wrong at work in China, so spent the end of the holiday by the pool and half of that on email and phones to sort out problems there.

Pics and vids attached