Where is Nathan??

Thanks to an earthquake it’s taken me a week to post this…I could lose the connection…any minute.

Earthquake ……… Taiwan ……… getting better ……… still not that good. happy new year.

-n4than

There has been a lot going on this month. So much, in fact that I haven’t had time to write about any of it. A trip to Nanjing, a trip to Changsha, working out jobs, going to a wedding, planning for Christmas parties, and finishing up all the junk I have left in the semester. With four weeks left of class there are a lot of review sheets and finals to write, finals to grade, and extra work to wrap up.

If you go to the pics section you will find more excellent work by Elizabeth concerning the marriage of one of our best friends Mary. Mary is practically a sister the way her family treats Elizabeth and I. And so I’m glad my first Chinese wedding was someone so close to us. We got to witness the whole shebang from the groom busting into her house to the bowing to the countless toasts to everyone’s health and happiness.

Now I had heard about Chinese weddings before and they can be pretty diverse depending on the part of the country you are in, but some things seem to be pretty standard. Where western weddings focus mostly on the ceremony, Chinese weddings are much more interactive and focus on the meeting of two families.

The day starts out at the bride’s house, where the bride’s family will gather first thing in the morning (this included me and Elizabeth). We arrived at 9:30 to find all sorts of uncles and aunts,cousins, nephews and nieces crowding as comfortably as they could into Mary’s parents’ house. The men gathered in the front room sipping tea and exchanging cigarettes while the women crowded around the room where Mary was getting ready, going in and out occasionally to check on the bride and offer advice. The strategy here is to form two blockades. When the groom arrives he will be forced to pay a hefty toll to the family in order to get to his bride.

So as the groom arrived around 10:30 to the sound of hundreds of fireworks going off outside the building, all the men in the front room discussed how we were going to keep the door closed as tight as possible and yet still have the groom pass as many Hóng Bāo (红包, red envelopes filled with money) as possible through the door. As Li Zhong Di (Mary’s groom) arrived at the door, the men went on the attack blocking the door and demanding money. As the Hóng Bāo started to flow, children were passed through the crowd to the door to receive their share. After a few minutes, the crowd was appeased and Li Zhong Di was allowed to pass. On to round two.

The second blockade is formed by the women and children who haven’t had their fill of money packets. And again the cry from the crowd was, “Hóng Bāo ! Hóng Bāo!” And Li Zhong Di in a tactic of distraction scattered some to the floor. After finally making it to the door, the last line of defense was mounted by relatives inside the dressing room barring the door forcing the tenacious groom to bust his way in. It was a pretty good show to watch. I wonder if this tradition was started as a show of love from the family that they wouldn’t give her up without a fight, or at least by being paid off.

After the groom had acquired his blushing bride and made (what looked like through the crowd) a romantic plea to come with him, we were taken by wedding motorcade to the groom’s house where traditionally the happy couple would live. The family exits first to meet the bride and groom with clouds of confetti and, obviously, more fireworks. Now this long line of cars is the site most often seen around China with the lead being for the camera crew (who film the whole affair) followed by the most decorated car with the bride and groom, followed closely by the car containing the bride’s parents.

As the horde of Mary’s family entered the gates to the complex where Li Zhong Di’s parents live, we were announced by, yet another, deafening round of fireworks in which we were forced to take cover from shrapnel. After it was clear, pretending as if nothing had happened we happily made our way up five flights of stairs to the house of Li.

Tradition states that we are to be greeted by the groom’s parents and family, and we are to view the place in which they will be staying (or the honeymoon suite) which was the reddest room I’ve ever seen. The bride and groom stood proudly in the room next to their way-too-red bed and took as many pictures of themselves as possible while the family walked by in a museum tour group fashion and gave hardy approval of the accommodation.

I suppose this is also the official picture time because the bride and groom where brought out to stand in as many configurations of friends and family as could be tolerated. It’s also possible that just one person wanted a picture, which started an avalanche of photography. But whatever the reason I got swept up and stood next to mothers and brothers and cousins just like everybody else.

After twenty minutes or so of this, a shabbily dressed man with a fanny pack (who I could only assume was some kind of wedding coordinator) started to bellow and wave everyone to the door. He didn’t look like any kind of wedding coordinator we had ever seen, and so Elizabeth and I named him “The Bookie.”

The wedding party again lumbered down the stairs and out to the fleet Audi and Volkswagens and we played a sort of musical vehicles as we were randomly piled into cars with family members and taken to the hotel for the main event.

We pulled up to the Gold Source Hotel ahead of the other cars (thanks to Mary’s brother-in-law and his get-away style driving) and in time to see the last smoke stack salute of fireworks to welcome the new couple. This must have been a popular day (read: lucky on the Chinese calendar) to get married because as we were coming in another wedding party was leaving. And as we passed through the lobby we saw another wedding in progress on the first floor banquet hall. So it was up a few floors to our reserved banquet hall were I saw a room more red than the honeymoon suite. The bride and groom had sprinted ahead of the crowd and were statuesquely greeting all of their guests.

In the hotel, the Chinese equivalent of the wedding ceremony takes place after every possible member of the family and several hundred friends have gathered at the feast to wish the couple happiness. Mary and Li Zhong Di (currently living and studying in Canada) decided to have a mixture of ceremonies with pieces taken from a western style ceremony (an exchange of vows, Mary’s white gown and an exchange of rings) and a Chinese one (bowing to heaven, their parents and each other, toasting BáiJǐu with every table, and Mary changing out of her wedding dress halfway through the dinner). I liked the mix, which seems to be more common in China anyway, with parts being in English, French, and Chinese. Of course, most of it was in Chinese since Elizabeth and I were the only foreigners.

After an hour or so of toasting and stuffing ourselves with expensive Chinese food we wound the party down and left the hotel. It was a really great time and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I don’t get to go to Changsha very often, but this brought back a lot of good memories and, again, secured Changsha as one of my favorite (if not THE favorite) cities on earth. 长沙永远!!

So we took another trip to Nanjing this weekend to visit a friend of ours who is on her way back to Canada in the next few weeks and to clear up some more job questions. Well I heard from a friend of a friend that there was a place to get Nintendo DS games, and so on Saturday night with some time to kill we set out to find it. We walked into this large cave-like shop with no doors that was filled with glass cases and shelves containing disorganized piles of GBA games, Game Cubes, PS2s, with the occasional Xbox 360. I tried one of the counters and they told me they didn’t have any DS games, only GBA games (which I could clearly see from the mountains of them all around the store). But then I tried another counter who happened to have a young man who spoke English. It turns out this young man was the proprietor of the whole store and he was more than happy to give me DS games, although not in the way that I expected.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been exposed to game system hacking in China. In Changsha I saw some magnificent wizardry done on my Xbox that allowed me to play games that cost 7 元 (about a US dollar) . But with gameboys it was a little different. With Xbox games and PS2 games you are copying a DVD and this can be done with a standard DVD burner. But with a Gameboy game you are copying a chip. This had been accomplished several years ago with GBA games (hence their ubiquity in China), but I have yet to see copied DS games. So I went to buy DS games expecting to pay the full price of 150 元 or more, but what I got was much much cooler.

I came back the next day and brought my DS with me. By flashing the internal memory of the DS, they could place a tiny piece of software on top of the standard software. Now, again, with my experience in the past I was concerned I would lose some functionality, but they assured me that it wouldn’t and if there were any problems they showed me a key combination on the DS to boot back into the original configuration.

They told me that real DS games are difficult to copy due to either the format or getting the physical cartridges made. So instead we were going to use a specially made chip for the GBA card slot on the bottom. Since the DS and DS lite are backward compatible all the way back to the original Gameboy cartridges, they were able to use the old standards instead of cracking the new ones. So I bought what looked like a cartridge slot cover except for a tiny slot in the top for a mini-SD card. This was “the magic” that was going to turn my DS lite into a more computer-like device. This little white cartridge is really just a glorified card reader. It does have a little file browser on it that allows you a little flexibility with what goes on the card but more on that later.

So I didn’t own a miniSD card and so they happily provided one and proceeded to show me how all this was going to work. We put the card in a card reader on (I’m going to make up a name here, let’s call game guy Ping) Ping’s laptop and he copied the software I was going to use to extract ROMs from my computer onto the card. After a quick tutorial he showed me the library of DS games he had and let me browse through them. I had no idea there were so many DS titles – he had well over 600. After extracting a few and copying them onto the miniSD card we popped the card into my DS and TA DA! DS games! And the best part is I can put as many games as will fit on the card and switch games without having to change cartridges! I bought a one gig card and each game is anywhere from 10 Meg to 60 meg. So…

EWin2 lite (card reader thingy) = 210 元 [$26.25]
1 gig miniSD card and SD card adapter = 380 元 [$47.50]
USB SD card reader = free [$0]

and … drum roll please …

186 Gameboy DS titles = FREE [ still $0 ]!!

That’s right. This shop charges for the hardware, but the games are free. And even better, using this EWin system I can put other stuff on the card besides just games. Now I’ve got a program that runs on the Ewin so I can turn my DS into and mp3 player and another one to make it a book reader! I haven’t searched extensively, but who knows what else could be out there.

Anyway, the point is here I was worrying about having a hard time finding DS games here and hit pay dirt. If there is one thing the Chinese are good at it is cracking.

Here are some pictures of the stuff I just mentioned.

DS game

DS Lite – Cartridge Slot Cover

EWin 2 – Cartridge cover comparison

The normal DS screen

The Ewin2 in action