Goodbye China

So it has been a long time coming but it needed to be done. I am finally finishing up my China trip on the blog. In the month hiatus I am sure my loyal readership of two has dropped to zero but I need to finish this anyways.

The last day in China was pretty fun. The day itself was relatively pedestrian (packing , work and another torn down restaurant)


The team took me out for a farewell dinner at AFunTi. This is a place where they serve Western Chinese food and have lots of dancing. The food is mostly Middle Eastern and was pretty good. The dancing was pretty crazy though. Basically the whole night was watching various dances and performances.




It started with dancing from the staff of the restaurant and quickly progressed to lots of audience participation. I even got dragged on stage with my co-worker LuLu (of the awesome glasses, check them out). We had to try to spell out letters between the two of us (A-F-U-N-T-I, surprisingly enough). We did not do as well as some of the other groups but gave it a valiant effort.


There was more dancing and a skit involving a snake being draped on an unsuspecting guy. I was happy I managed to sit that one out or I would have embarrassed all Americans by screaming like a girl and running like hell if they had dropped a snake on me. After the snake they switched it up to belly dancing which was interesting enough. After the female belly dancing came the male belly dancing. I had never witnessed this but apparently they man dancing was the premier male belly dancer in China (and judging from the crowd’s reaction, one of the few).




They switched to hip hop kung-fu after the belly dancing which was a bizarre mix of 50 Cent and wushu (AKA cool looking martial arts like you see in movies). They threw in a lot of dancing as well which was pretty entertaining but not the most authentic display of kung-fu I suppose.




After this it was back to the crowd participation. I managed to sit this one out but LuLu was not so lucky. The participants had to do a medley of all the routines from the night and one involved spinning a girl around in your arms for a while. She got a little dizzy from the whole thing and needed to be helped to the side of the stage.


After the medley everyone pretty much jumped on the tables and started dancing. I was kind of flabbergasted, sure people had been telling me for a week that this was a place where people danced on the tables but I had kept assuming they meant it was wild. I found out otherwise and joined in for a little bit.

I left dinner with a cool watch (going away gift) and a neat hat form the restaurant. The watch can play Mp3s which would be great right now as my iPod is dead. We took the subway home and it was a much more subdued affair than the trip out.


One cool thing about the train though was their posters warning against bears. You can see the bear here:


And what to do here:


Well that is the China blog. I feel somewhat anti-climactic after having written the last post. I think I will probably keep posting things and hopefully on a more regular basis than once a month. We will have to feel it out.