Yang’s Date with the Eagles

Back around valentine's day I saw an advertisement for the Eagles concert in Beijing and decided it would be a great valentines present for Yang. I thought it was a great idea because after all these years of valentines days with Yang I’ve flat run out of ideas and truth be told I never had a ton to begin with. Then I noticed the ticket prices – 2580 RMB ($400 USD) for floor seats and 2080 ($320) for the other decent seats. I figured for those prices Yang should get to have sex with one of the Eagles, the only question being which one. So I talked with Yang a bit and ended up getting her some face supplies at Sophia instead.

Then a week before the concert one of Yang’s friends and her got to talking. The friend was going so Yang decided we’d could go just for the atmosphere and get one of the cheaper seats. We bought two tickets for 580 RMB ($90) each which got us half way up the upper deck of the basketball area (it was the same basketball arena that I took Aidan to watch basketball during the Olympics). Her friend ended up with seats in the lower bowl for about double the price.

So we went to the concert, settled in our seats and snacked on the horrible arena popcorn. A woman sitting to my right asked we are so and so friends and the so and so was one of Yang’s good friends. The same good friend which inspired Yang to go. And it turned out we had actually had dinner with the couple sitting next to us about six weeks before. Having booked our tickets independently and in an arena of 10,000 this was quite a coincidence.

The Eagles came on only 15 minutes later than the official start time and played a good couple of hours. They ran through their hits, made fun of their age, and tried to interact with the audience a bit. They were in decent if not great voice. Their most popular song here, by far, is Hotel California which is played ad nauseam at karaoke clubs and bars in general. Don Henly’s voice cracked a bit during the later parts of the song did not dampen the audience’s enjoyment. They could have probably played Hotel California every third song and the audience would still want to hear it again.

After the concert we had a bit of a walk back to the subway. The bit of a walk was in large part due to my superb navigation skills. Or as Yang noted, we went the exact opposite direction we should have gone. The walk though was pleasant, the night was relatively warm and people in a good mood. We noticed that while 95% of the audience was Chinese, it seems every 40-60 year old foreigner in Northern China had turned out for the concert.