When Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, as it turned out, they were indirectly executing a labyrinthine master plan by the Old Testament God to propel him to greatness. I am hard pressed to yet find parallels with our similar arrangement since our official agents "handed us over" to another agent.

Perhaps its just the Lord's ways are too mysterious for me to yet make sense of, but I'm yet to see the disguised blessing in working for a company which insists its my unsigned-yet contractual obligation to share performance tips in half with them.

Or in for instance experiencing a 4-hour train ride-while standing all the way, followed by a 16-hour bus ride to Qingdao. I learnt the fun fact we actually came early since the 830km ride from Beijing is supposed to take 18.3 hours under safe driving conditions.

But this is only from Beijing where we don't live anymore. From Zhangjiakou in Hubei where we are now to Weihai where I wrote this from is let's see; 113km (from there to Beijing),830km (Beijing to Qingdao).

The grand total is the distance from Kampala to somewhere before Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania if one used the Namanga border.

On the journey here we learned we were not alone in complaining. Our honorable slave-master told the Russian performers they would be traveling for 6 hours only,so imagine how amused they were!

But being in the business of making people happy, it was not long before we found things to amuse ourselves with and distract from the misery of it that is making especially the girls on our team to say they won't sign the upcoming contract so they can return home a.s.a.p.

We remembered how on the train I almost fell in the lap of a busybody attendant who had kept the door of her cabinet loose. And how we were riled the one time in the club when a patron joined us onstage and began mock-fighting with me before forcing one of our girls between himself and the wall of the DJ's booth, with security standing on alert.

Tomorrow 17th May we leave Weihai to return to our apartment in Zhangjiakou with its plywood beds that you think would not hold the weight of a baby, to the club with its increasingly-challenging list of needs/demands/requests/orders, to playing pool at a place we discovered close by.

We also return to the situation that is making some regret why they ever chose to stay. Freezing our legs off in the Weihai section of the Yellow Sea has been a welcome change of pace-as has been performing for its super-sober,non-smoking,non-groping, participative audience, but as all good things must, even this is ending.

Hopefully, we have more relaxing, artistically-fulfilling existences like Weihai ahead of us, of magical experiences like when Ruth asked for a fish twice her body weight (story for another day).

And hopefully next time I write will be off in-house Internet. Again, hope the Lord's infamously mysterious modus operandi will have become clear. Till then, zaijian. blog comments powered by Disqus

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