Its been a while since I posted, so I hope this makes up for the drought.
Linda and I have been collectively sick and tired of hooking up our computers to our apartment's TV so we can watch DVDs. For the uninitiated to Shanghai's Expat culture, DVDs are the Number 1 escape mechanism from CCTV9 - unless you're hooked on dodgy satellite TV beamed in from overhead.
It was getting tedious. At the moment, Lin and I are hooked on Lost. We've powered through the series in the last 2 weeks, and now there's only a few episodes to go. We also wanted a remote for f#ck sakes!
So, on our usual weekly/fortnightly/we have no food trip to the Wuning Lu Carrefour, we purchased a new DVD player. All RMB400 worth (about AUD$60). We bought an Oritron-branded DVD player, it looked sweet. It was a lemon. We took it home, hooked it up, and our problems started.
Firstly, our apartment's TV rear input plugs don't work. We found this out the hard way before. Luckily there's side AV input ports that work a treat. Secondly, we should have checked out the player in the store - as countless people have told me since. My smallest gripe was that the remote was entirely in Chinese, there were no English menu controls on the DVD menu. I could live with that. It might give me the opportunity to absorb more Hanzi (YESSSS! I can now recognise the Chinese characters for 'Frame Advance'! Now that's handy!).
My major gripes were as follows. It wouldn't turn on. Well, you would plug it in, and the player power button wouldn't work - most of the time. Unplug, wait for 5-10 minutes, and then it would work. Strange. The converse was also true, you couldn't turn the thing off. Unplugging it was the main way we got around this. No worries right? Nah. The discs we put into the machine would stall, cause the player to crash, and other such petulant behaviour. Annoying.
But the crux of our decision was the fact that a lovely surprise was included inside the player. To our delight, we were given the added bonus of the 'Adult Tempt' DVD. Lovely. It had several, suspicious, greasy fingerprints on the bottom side of the disc. I think 'the playa', as it will now be known, had seen some action. Startled at this, we had a good laugh. Lin later put the DVD on for some comical Asian porn plots. It was pretty cheesy - that lasted all of about 1 minute before we tried episodes of Lost. The Playa apparently only liked the porn disc, but what would you expect from a machine that has been around the block several times.
The sum of all parts meant that I wanted to take it back. And I did this last night. Carrefour happily took back the player, despite the fact I forgot to bring the remote with me. The truthfulness in me blurted out 'I forgot to bring it!' when the shop assistant asked 'It didn't have a remote inside?'. (And no, my Chinese comprehension isn't that good, he spoke English quite well). Despite this, they accepted the refund, we got our cash, and then a one-on-one personal service to ensure we got a good DVD player at the store. We picked up a Desay player, checked it out in the store. We were happy - now we are capable of DVD watching with a remote! Yeah!
We picked up a few things, waited in the checkout line for ages (mental note - no Carrefour trips after 8pm at night EVER again). We got home just before 10pm. Hooked up the DVD player, got our Lost fix, and dreamt of sweet DVD watching experiences.
No, I didn't dream about the watching the porn DVD thankyou very much.
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