Shanghai Adventures

So finally I have arrived in Beijing after a tiring last month of work and business. I now have the time and will to update this regularly with all the stories/events that I have acquired through my travels. This post, I will explain exactly what my job was in Shanghai, with the following post explaining what happened while I was in Suzhou, visiting my father's friend who works at a factory near Suzhou/Wuxi.

So in Shanghai, I worked for a company called XPT Shanghai (Although their official name in Chinese is Lufeng Cultural Expansion Company Ltd. or something to that effect). The company is an entertainment group that supplies events/parties for brand promotion, clubs, holiday events, and more.

I worked a one month internship with this company, and basically had two duties.

One: I would work in the office from about 12 in the afternoon until 8 in the evening, and I would do small duties, as well as correcting their English translations (the only native English speaker there was the boss who was very strapped for time, so I would make sure that the other workers' English translations were correct).

Two: In the evenings, I would help provide entertainment at the parties. During my tenure with the company, the majority of the events were located at clubs, who would hire us out for two hour shows, differing in size and theme.

The company has about twenty different theme parties, ranging from some called Broadway, Fire & Ice, Future, to Hollywood. Each one contains different costumes and decorations that will be set up in the clubs. At the party, the company supplies a team of people to work the club that night, with different clubs wanting different amounts of people. Some nights it would be seven people, other nights three. At the parties, there are three different positions a person can fill:

DJ: They DJ. Obviously.

Dancers: These are more professional dancers, who spend the majority of the party on stage dancing, and whose costumes are more intricate than the others.

Animations: These are people who as well as dance on stage, they will also go out within the crowd, dance with the people, interact with them, drink with them, smoke with them, and generally make sure that the club's clientele all have a good time. They also dress up in costumes, but are more lightweight and smaller, allowing for easy movement around the club.

So at night, I would work as an animation. The costume getups they had for me to dress up in were pretty crazy, but the club's clientele just loved us.

This is the basis of what I did for a month in Shanghai and in cities around Shanghai that we traveled to. In my next post, I will detail many things I learned about operating a foreign business in China and between the interaction between the foreigners and Chinese, both within the company and with clients.