Monday night, aka clubbing and hanging out in the chi-chi shopping district.

to the left is a restaurant that was in the nice shopping district. Uncle sam's restaurant. Made me laugh, i wanted to see what was on the menu but we were in a hurry to get moving so i did not get to see.

hua and i met up with William and Helen at a nice place in the shopping district. You paid 36 quai and you could stay at this place as long as you wanted. They had free food and drinks as well as more substantial food and alcohol that you could purchase. It was popular with the younger crowd. There were a lot of kids playing cards and just hanging out. One interesting group of people were a bunch of skinheads, full braces and boots with white shoe laces. It made me wonder if they knew what they were representing. i would assume not because racist skinheads don't really accept Chinese any more than any other non-white race but these guys had it down to the smallest detail so they had to be somewhat aware of what they were emulating.

this was the exit sign for the hang out place. i liked that it was export instead of exit. The image of exporting yourself is really funny to me for some reason. i wonder if you would have to pay tax to the place that imported you?







this is the club we ended up hanging out at. It was almost exclusively Chinese, i only saw one other white person. Being able to compare this to the expat bar i had gone to on Friday was cool. For those of you that recognize the name the poster of the guy in the picture is Paul van dyk so it is a pretty big club. One of the interesting cultural differences is that bartenders are not there to serve you unless you have purchased a bottle which gives you a place at the bar. Instead you stand at a table and get service from a waiter. i learned this after standing at the bar for ten minutes and trying to flag down a bartender who kept ignoring me. It is interesting that a bottle gets you a place at the bar instead of a table, although there are tables where you have to get a bottle as well.

The music was alright, pretty much what i would expect at a club of that size anywhere. Mostly just shitty euro-nrg. The dance floor was built to sway so you did not even really have to make an effort to dance because the floor bounced you up and down no matter what. i could stand that for about half a song and then i just ended up hanging out near the bar talking to hua. at one point though i wandered into this foyer type room at the entrance to the club that was more quiet and stood there people watching for a while. This girl leaned over and said "disco". i made the smart reply that "yes this is a disco" and she said no disco and started making a dancing motion. i tried to explain that i was too lazy to dance and not really interested. i was having a hard time explaining lazy though so switched to sleepy and made the universal "i want to go to sleep" motion. She responded with disco then i sleep with you. To which i responded, umm i need to go grab another drink, talk to you later. It was funny because for some reason i thought there were less working girls at this club than the expat bar but after talking to hua and some people at work i guess a large percentage of the girls there had been hired to be there. They were not necessarily paid to go home with the guys but at least to hang out with them and dance around. We went home pretty soon after this.

here is the beer i drank at the place in the shopping district. pbr is cheap everywhere. It was funny to me though that even in china it is the new hip younger beer. What a renaissance it has experienced since blue velvet.


music recommendation today is beans - shock city maverick - warp. i thought he had reached his peak with antipop consortium but his solo work might be even more advanced. He has that early kool Keith gift where he can rhyme about almost complete nonsense and it still sounds great.