A(nother) Night on the Town

Hey everyone - I've been reading all of your posts and I have to say this was a really great way of keeping in touch. Oh, also, before I forget - you all need to send me your mailing addresses if you want to get postcards; so far I've only got Yamanda's.

Things in Shanghai have been pretty good, but I'm glad I'm only here for a month because I'm mostly going out at night and not learning much Chinese (which was kind of the entire point of the whole China thing). Anyhoo, most of my good stories I put up already on my other blog. I'm actually posting more than I thought I would - I think I'm just kind of using it as a journal for myself and to remind myself why I took the pictures I did, because a lot of the times I just home and forget what all of them were of. Anyhoo, I figured I would write a blog entry here about one night where I got completely wasted and stayed up until 6am, because I figured that wouldn't be a very good one to put up on the blog that my grandma reads...

Anyway, so it was a Friday night, and (as usual) everyone decided that it would be another good night to go out. Not that it needs to be Friday - it's like being in a frat here or something, the partying starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. Luckily I've found a couple of people I can stand going out with (and even more luckily, one of them is my roommate - we're still getting along pretty well). So this Friday night we were all supposed to go out to this Moroccan bar called Barbarossa's. We went in two cabs, and of course the other one got lost, so the people in my cab decided we'd go to another bar while we were waiting for them to walk back to Barbarossa's. We headed over to this place called Windows, which is probably the skankiest bar in town, but has really cheap drinks. However, this was a Friday, so they had put in place a cover charge of $3 (outrageous!), so we got some pizza instead. Then we headed down to this other really sketchy bar area that seems to be a headquarters for 50 year old foreign men looking for prostitutes. Yay. We ducked into this bar called Woodstock, which was going for a sixties hippie theme but for some reason was playing dance music (dj'ed by a seventy year old man on a laptop and a projector). We grabbed a table away from the old men and the prostitutes at the pool table and had some awful cocktails from a mix.

After a bit we get the word that the other cab of people finally found their way to Barbarossa's so we head back there - it turns out to be a really cool bar shaped like a big castle (complete with a moat) with three stories and all this cool fabric draped everywhere. We get a couple of cocktails and an apple hookah and hang out on the balcony for a while, playing with this weird spotlight and shining it on people as they walk below (until the owner takes it away). Before we know it, it's 3am and they're closing. Next door is the Marriott - we'd been speculating how many floors it was, so we thought the natural thing to do was go in and check. Turns out that the estimate of 60 was spot on, but we need a key to get up there. Luckily a wasted Italian couple used their keycard to get us up there, and we get out at and wander around and have a look at the view. We go down to the lobby (on the 38th floor), but there are cleaning staff out and about so we decided to get out of there. We decide to stop off at the grand ballroom on the way down, which was a mistake, because when we get back on the elevator we realize that we can't get back down to the ground floor from there. Suddenly a voice comes out of the surveillance camera asking us what we're doing and where we want to go. Luckily Alex, a guy from London, has enough presence of mind to say "uh, out?" - they tell us we have to go back up to the lobby and take a different elevator down from there. I knick a vase of flowers on the way out (I was pretty gone at that point), and then we run past the front desk people in the lobby to get on the elevator and get out before they get seriously pissed.

A quick cab ride later, we're back at the dorm, but we decide we're hungry. We get on our bikes and ride to the pedestrian mall south of campus, only to find that the restaurants that advertise being 24 hours were lying. We bike over to the little noodle shop run by a Chinese Muslim family near our language classroom because I remembered that they were supposed to be open 24 hours, too. The two teenage boys manning the shop woke up enough to make our noodles by hand - by the time we finished it was about 5:30. The ride back to our dorm was a bit easier, considering the sun was up by then... By the time we got back to the dorm, it was 6am - we all collapsed and slept until dinnertime the next day.