Rock! for Roots n Shoots

 "Planting trees on Earth Day seem like an appropriate thing to do,

 but raising a forest by attending a rock concert puts a new spin on

 helping the environment. Rock! Roots & Shoots fundraising concert

 will feature local Western bands The Horde, Boys Climbing Ropes,

 Moon Tyrant as well as Chinese bands, Gone Before Now, Da Bei, and

 Banana Monkey bring an eclectic mix of bilingual beats ranging from

 Shanghai-style American folk to Chinese punk."

 One of our friends works for Roots and Shoots, A Jane Goodall program, here in Shanghai. She helps do programs in

 the local migrant schools and is featured as the face of roots n

 shoots on a commercial running in taxi cabs here! We went to support

 her and a few international schools, and our comedian friend, Drew

 Saturday night.

 There was a really talented high school student playing guitar. He

 had shoulder length fluffy hair and bangs that kept getting in his

 face. The event began at 6pm with a bunch of pint sized people in

 "buy a tree" shirts running around convincing us to buy Shirts they

 painted. For 50 rmb you planted a tree in inner mongolia and got a

 cool decathlon Tee painted by grade school kids- each one unique!

 How could I say "no"? Laurie and I went through about all the shirts

 looking for the coolest ones. You can sponsor a tree planting on Taobao!

 They also gave away free pizza, and had a nice lounge area away from

 the concert hall (Mao livehouse) to sit and chat. It was a cool

 variety of music- from acoustic guitar, punk rock, and U2 sounding

 stuff and the last band brought all the foreigners in - Boys

 climbing ropes: a tall bearded Canadian, and a very petite asian

 singer. Not my type of music- I could barely hear her over the rest

 of the band and wondered what it sounded like when they practice? I

 really liked the Banana Monkey band. It was a group of asians- and

 the guitarist was all decked out in geek gear. They had some U2 -

 like songs, and very catchy upbeat songs that got the crowd on their

 feet. (The front row was sitting) Drew did 15 minutes of comedy,

 awesome as usual, with his "Pointy menu" joke and the phone call

 joke- which I won't give away here!

 Since we got free tix (for my birthday!) we bought a load of raffle

 tickets and anxiously hoped for our numbers to be called. 1st round

 nothing- they gave away 800 rmb of chocolate, a whole case of wine,

 dinners at element fresh. 2nd round came around 11pm and I was

 really tired and ready to head home. They called the numbers and we

 got the last two prizes! A hang out with the cricket club, and a

 weekend stay at the marriot! woo hoo!