I'm Kind of a Big Deal... People Kind of Know Me (In Shanghai)

Well, we made it to Shanghai just fine, and three weeks later are basically settled into our new apartment (a 13th floor 3br. 2ba. with great balcony views), and almost adjusted to our 4 hours of Mandarin class every day. As many of you know, we fled the United States to escape from the spotlight of US media coverage - like so many before us (TomKat, Brangelina, and CarrotTop ...) we were known as "Coch" (Corrie/Chris) in the tabloids. The hole we left was, of course, immediately filled by Vidaham (David and Victoria Beckham), who soon became the new victims of larger-than-life stardom. All we wanted was a calm, peaceful, and secluded life in rural Shanghai, where we could roam amidst 21 million people without being recognized. We should have known better...

Channel 'Young' (I don't actually know the Chinese name) decided to do a feature on us - sort of an official "China loves and welcomes the Van Velzers" news clip. They came to our apartment, and we decided it would be best to invite a few friends over (including Charlie "Chuck" Engelmann, who we have sort of hired as our Manny to open our front door, etc.). We should have known that fame knows no borders - that every language knows the word 'superstar' - and that being international celebrities is in our blood, not just our stylish clothes, ridiculous contribution to pop culture, and totally unfounded political opinions.

So, I decided to make this blog a first for Ruined For Life - a VanVideo Blog. You'll have to excuse the quality of the video from the program - I had to film the TV with our video camera, which causes massive problems with flickering. We've seen ourselves on TV so many times, it just wasn't worth buying a digital recorder for such a small segment.

With any luck, by the time you have finished reading this, the video below will have mostly preloaded (depending on your internet speed, although it is a beefy download). I also took the liberty of adding some subtitles, so that our Western friends could understand all of the Chinese. If you do know Chinese, you might pick up something in the program about "interviewing foreigners" and "seeing what they do for Chinese Spring Festival" - but that's just because the Chinese words for those phrases sound exactly like, "interviewing international superstars Chris and Corrie."

I'm going to go comfort Corrie now - she has been so overwhelmed by the media attention that she broke down and shaved her head yesterday, and got a tattoo of an armadillo and an eggplant on her forehead. I hope you enjoy!


(Note: the real story behind this video is that China is fascinated with foreigners in general, especially foreigners living in China. A friend of Chuck's called him to see if he and some foreigner friends could do a quick segment on what foreigners do for 'Spring Festival' - the Chinese New Year, which has been going on all week (blog to come on that later). We filmed it at our place, since we are fortunate enough to have a pretty big kitchen and apartment. I think just about every foreigner in China has to be on Chinese television at least once as the token 'wai guo ren' (lit: outside-country person, or foreigner). We just got our opportunity sooner than later!)