Monday, November 24, 2008

A Pair of Teeth

So I had a particularly bad day at work today, and my fucked-up Scots Irish DNA compelled me to get my drink on.  There’s a FANTASTIC Italian restaurant in my complex, so I went down and had a steak, plus a glass of white wine as an aperitif, an entire bottle of red wine with my steak, and a glass of lemon liqueur as a desert.  All in all an spectacular evening of food and booze.

Friday, November 21, 2008

You’re A Ladybar!

You can tell this city is slowly returning back to its pre-Olympic state of social depravity by the number of people there are in the street asking you if you want to go to a ladybar.  “Hello, hello, sir, you want ladybar? Massa-jee massa-jee best price.” We usually return this with “fuck off” in English.

One of my friends, however, has come up with a novel solution.  He says, Bu, Ni shi ladybar! This means “No, YOU’RE a ladybar!” The guys look us in bewilderment because what we said really doesn’t make any sense, so they ask again, and we give them the same reply.  Eventually they just give up out of boredom.

Something else just dawned on me.  Before I leave this country I’m going to get video tape of me playing catch, either football or baseball, in Tnananmen Square.  We’ll probably get about 30 seconds in before we’re told to stop, but that’s all I need to prove I did it.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

About Last Night

I had an interesting experience last night.  I went out with one of my friends and, as you might guess, we got pretty shitfaced.  It was about four in the morning and the place we were at was pretty much dead, so we decided to go another bar, a place called Cheers, to have a couple more drinks before slinking home in a stupor.

It’s been really cold lately, so everyone here is of course wearing winter coats.  In Cheers there isn’t a cloakroom so we just tossed our coats onto whatever pile of clothing happened to be nearest to us.  My friend started a conversation with an Irish girl who was sitting next to us.  After half an hour or so she left, then half an hour after that we decided to split.  He grabbed his coat and I went to get mine.  No dice, it was gone.  At first I thought someone had stolen it, but then I saw under a chair a dark woolen coat similar to mine, though clearly for a small female.  It seems that the girl had grabbed my coat by mistake.  I waited around for 15 minutes or so to see if she’d come back but she didn’t.  I looked in the pockets of her coat and saw her phone was in there, so I took her coat home with me, figuring she’d call.

I was in the taxi and had just gotten off the freeway when she called.  She asked me to meet her at a restaurant called The Den, which is open 24 hours and serves a lot of western breakfast-type stuff, so it’s always full of drunks at this time of the morning.  I told the cabbie to more or less turn around and take me back to where he had picked me up.  I went into The Den, ordered a drink, and waited.  Five minutes later she came in.  Since I’d ordered a drink she said she’d have one too, so we sat there and had a quick chat.

Now, here’s the weird thing.  Prior to the Olympics the government shut down all the hooker bars, and almost none of them have as yet reopened.  Consequently the hookers are starting to crop up in other establishments.  You can imagine that in a bar known to be packed full of drunken lao wei there would be a market for prostitutes, and sure enough there were maybe 20 of them in there, trying to score from one of the drunks.  As I sat there talking to the Irish girl there were hookers coming up behind her and waving at me.  Now, this girl could have been my girlfriend or wife or something, but the hookers were trying to peddle their wares to me right behind her back.  I mean, what did they think I was going to do?  “Honey, why don’t you go back to the house and climb into bed.  I’m going to go fuck this skanky Mongolian hooker for an hour or so.  Tomorrow I’ll make pancakes.”

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Last Saturday

Nothing much new to report here.  I’ve been pretty broke the last few weeks (don’t ask), so I haven’t been doing much.  Last weekend, when I went out with the two guys I usually go out with, only one of us had any cash, so he financed the evening for the other two. 

The evening did have a few surprised in store for us, though.  At one club a guy walked in with his pants down around his thighs, underwear, too.  He saw some friends in there and he went over to say hi.  The girls in their group freaked out, took him over against a wall, and pulled his pants up.  I, of course, was laughing my ass off.

At another bar I saw a girl dancing who looked exactly like Ugly Betty, without the braces.

Later in the night we saw a black girl in a bar with a Chinese friend.  Black women are not really common in China.  (Black men, in general, are either Marines from the US Embassy or drug dealers from Africa.) At any rate she was from Eritrea, a tiny little country near Sudan.  One of my friends spent a lot of time talking to her and her friend, while I sat against the wall sucking down Jack & Coke, generally getting my drink on.

We ended up, as we so often do, at a Russian nightclub sometime around four in the morning, sitting and watching Russians dance.  I swear to God, Russian men have no shame whatsoever.  The culture that gave us ballet masters and the Bolshoi and classical Russian dancing, with the leg kicks and hands raised high, has degenerated to a bunch of drunks stumbling about on the dance floor, looking more like they are convulsing than dancing.  Nobody gives a shit, though, they all encourage each other to do this.  The women all urge them out, then join them on the dance floor.  Russian women are all great dancers, and there’s something oddly appealing about Russian pop music.

There was one girl out dancing with her friends.  She was a super-hot blonde, mid 20s, looked like a fashion model.  Unless you happen to look like Brad Pitt she would be out of your league.  Some drunk Russian guy kept trying to pick her up on the dance floor.  For three consecutive songs he tried to get her to dance with him.  She kept politely dismissing him, but he wasn’t taking no for an answer.  He’d grab her hands to dance, twirl her around once or twice, then she’d walk away.  He’d run after her and grab her again and the would continue.  Over and over this happened.  I thought it was hilarious.  She kept looking out off the dance floor into the dark of the club with a plaintive look on her face, as if begging someone to come and save her from this beast.  Not a chance.  One, it was too damn amusing and I didn’t want to spoil it.  Two, many of the Russians in China are maphiya (say it aloud) and the last thing you want to do is have a professional gangster pissed off at you.  You might leave the club with your entrails hanging out.

From a sociological aspect it was fascinating to watch, like a male peacock splaying out his feathers, and the female peacock telling him to go fuck himself.

All in all it was a hell of a night. 

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Chagina

Here’s a little insight into the batshit crazy mind of most Chinese girls.  Please take a moment to review this post about a Chinese girl, arguing with her boyfriend who was smashing her face into the window of a parked car.  One of my foreign friends has a Chinese girlfriend, and I told her “You Chinese girls are all feng zi (crazy) by western standards.” She replied that when she was younger (she’s in her 30s now) she might have done something similar. 

“By smashing my face into the car it would have demonstrated how upset I was, and made him feel very bad for upsetting me.”

And people wonder why the lao wei generally leave the Chinese chicks alone. 

Sunday, August 10, 2008

I’m a Headbanger

There was a little craziness last night.  (Maybe it was the night before last, the last three days have been a blur.) My friends and I were three sheets to the wind, and as we were walking down the street we heard a Chinese couple yelling at each other, obviously in an intense argument.  Suddenly they came running out of the shadows, with the girl swinging her purse at the guy.  Then—I shit you not—she ran into the street and began banging her head on the rear window of a parked car.  He ran after her and pulled her away from the car, but she kept trying to break free and smash her head into the car.

I turned to one of my friends and said, “Okay, I know I’m really fucked up, but is this actually happening or am I imagining it?” He confirmed the reality of the situation.

Chinese girls.  Batshit crazy lunatics, every one of them.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Johnny Law on the Bar Street

Someone is actively blocking my access to YouTube as I write this.  I uploaded a video from last night, showing a police car with its siren going off down in the Sanlitun bar area.  My access to YouTube works fine, then gets cut off, then works again, then stops again.  Now the video is up but it says it’s “no longer available.”

Ironically, there’s nothing bad in it, the police are acting professionally, and when they drive away you see how festive it was down there last night.  It’s not anything the Chinese government should want to block.  If anything they should want this sort of thing to get out because it makes them look like they’re capable of having a good time.

Here’s the URL to the video.  See if you can get it to play because it’s been blocked here.

Update: It appears to be live now, so check it out.

On further review the Brazilians appear to be Mexicans.  But anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish will know what they were chanting when the police left.  The weird thing was that, when we first walked out of the bar, we heard the siren, and the cop inside was switching it off and on, like he was scratching it, and there were all these people dancing right behind the car.  We were like WTF? so we went over to look, and this was the video I got.  So you can see the dancing drunks and the cops doing God knows what with their siren.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

The Dinner Conspiracy

Many years ago I worked for a small software company.  The guy who was the head of that company is now a bigshot at Microsoft and, coincidentally, moved here to Beijing shortly before I did.  He called me the other day to tell me that a third guy who worked for this small company is here in town for a visit.

We’re all going out to dinner tonight, and I was placed in charge of getting us into someplace swanky.  The restaurant I chose is this Japanese teppanyaki place, but you have to have reservations made about three days in advance.  I called another friend of mine, an American who has lived here for ten years and speaks fluent Chinese, and asked if he could call up and bullshit them into getting us a table at short notice. 

He called me back later and announced that we have reservations for 8:30. I asked him how the hell he pulled it off.  He said it was easy, he just asked the guy on the other end of the phone if he’d ever heard of the film director Oliver Stone.  “Of course,” came the reply.  “Well, Oliver Stone is in town on a film project and wants to eat at your restaurant.” So the friend of ours who is visiting from out of town has to pretend to be Oliver Stone when we go in there.

Thankfully there’s no way in hell the Chinese are going to know what Oliver Stone looks like. This is going to be awesome, especially if the wait staff wants to have their picture taken with him.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

I Like the Nightlife

I’ll tell you another thing you get used to in China.  It was 11:00 the other night and I was hungry, so I said, “Let’s go get something to eat.” In Beijing there would be about 600 restaurants open at 11:00.  That’s early. 

This being the US, everything was shut except for the drive-thru.  So I ended up getting some chicken soft tacos from Del Taco. 

I flew 7,000 miles for that?

It’s weird.  I’ve been out partying with my friends in Beijing and we’ll be contemplating going from one bar to another.  Someone will ask the time, and the other will say that it’s something like three in the morning.  “Oh, good, it’s still early.”

Friday, May 09, 2008

The VIP Himself

Following up on the VIP movie theater post from the other day, here’s a photo of yours truly relaxing in the in the moments before the film started.

Seriously, look at those seats.  Is this place fucking tits or what?

Thursday, May 08, 2008

VIP

Last night some coworkers said they were going to see Iron Man and asked if I wanted to go.  I had nothing else to do so I figured what the hell.  When we called the theater to find out the times we found that they had a VIP room.  A regular ticket is ¥70, about $10, and a VIP ticket was ¥150.  We went for the VIP.

What we got was amazing, similar to the business class lounge at an airport.  You get ushered into a waiting room.  There is a fridge full of soft drinks, juice, beer, and wine, and a table of snacks—chocolate, crackers, fruit, and so on.  So you sit there in the waiting room “gettin’ yo’ drink on and yo’ snack on” waiting for the start time.  When the movie is about to start you walk into a 20-seat screening room.  All the seats are massive leather recliners, the feet go up and the back tilts.  There is a button you can press if you need anything, a waiter comes running in silently.

It was the greatest moviegoing experience of my life.  Simply awesome, and all for $22.  I swear to God, if they offered this service in Los Angeles I’d pay $100 a ticket.

The only drag about watching a movie in China is the subtitles.  It’s not that they’re really distracting, it’s that they don’t also include English subtitles.  So, say you have a scene where there are multiple characters speaking in English.  One turns to the other and says something in a foreign language, which is subtitled in English on the bottom.  Since the film is already being subtitled in Chinese you don’t get the English subtitles as well.  Thus in Iron Man, when the terrorists are talking to each other, I had no idea what they were saying because all the translations were in Chinese characters.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I Am Iron Man

I went to see Iron Man last night.  It was my first time in a Chinese movie theater.  The facility itself was more or less as modern as any multiplex in the US.  The people, as you can imagine, spent the entire movie yapping to each other, talking on their cell phones, and generally acting like the Chinese do.

The movie itself:  awesome.  I’d go see it again.  Great stuff.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Foreign Food

There’s a whole group of us, about nine or ten people, going out to dinner tonight.  The original agenda called for dining at a new Ethiopian food restaurant which just opened up.  I’ve always wanted to try Ethiopian food.  A cup of rice from the United Nations mixed with a helping of fragrant dead beetles sounds like something which would tickle my palate.  Alas, it was not to be.  The place is so booked they couldn’t accommodate a party the size of ours, so we’re going somewhere else.  (My friend is making the arrangements so I don’t know what the new place is.)

Perhaps some enterprising soul will open a Rwandan restaurant.  You eat what they give you, and if you aren’t a Muslim they behead you after you pay the bill.

Monday, April 14, 2008

The Relaxation Zone

Last night was a great night, one of those things where you say, “Fuck, this is what China is all about.” One of my friends juts got back from the UK, so a whole group of us went out to a Thai restaurant called Purple Haze.  There I was introduced to a fabulous Spanish wine, the name of which escapes me.  We ate and drank like pigs, as usual, and the bill was negligible.  We then retired to my friend’s house where we drank 25 year old Scotch and ate “brownies.” After we were suitably relaxed the idea of getting a massage was put on the table.  After the week I just had this sounded great, so three of us walked over to a massage place just down the street.  I got an 80-minute Thai oil massage for about $30.  (Totally legit place, no happy endings, you dicks.)

I rolled in around 2:00 feeling like well-kneaded dough, and drifted into a coma-like slumber.  Fan-tastic.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Gettin’ My Relax On

What a weekend.  After working four consecutive days where I was at work until well past 11:00 (Fright night I didn’t leave until 1:30 am—it was like being back in Los Angeles) I decided that I needed to blow off some steam. 

The evening began at a semi-swanky place called Kagen.  You go down some stairs and there’s a door.  However, there’s no conceivable way to open it.  There’s these three red light things (it’s hard to describe) and eventually you figure out that you have to swipe your hand under these lights and break the beam to open the door.  The restaurant is Japanese Teppanyaki (think Benihana) but the cool thing is that everyone who goes in there has their own chef.  Can you imagine how expensive this would be in the US?  In Los Angeles this would be at least $150 a person, but it was only about $50 a head, and that included all our cocktails.  Great stuff.

There’s a new bar/restaurant open here called The Saddle, and this plans to be THE hotspot for expats this summer, so we migrated over there.  It’s TexMex cantina, and they serve everything you would expect—margaritas, guac and chips, queso, the whole nine yards.  I spent the better past of last evening getting my drink on there with friends.

Today after a late awakening I ended up going for brunch at Alfa, a semi-snotty eatery where the chef from the Canadian embassy serves a western-style breakfast on Sundays.  The food was delicious, if a little small, and reasonably priced.  After that I walked a few blocks down to the Yashow Fashion Market to buy a belt.  I have a pair of super cool camouflage shorts that I bought a couple of years ago at American Eagle in Santa Monica.  Since then I’ve lost about 20 lbs and the shorts keep falling off me.  I needed a military style olive drab belt to keep the pants up, and I found one in one of the stalls there.  I asked the salesgirl how much and she replied ¥120.  I screwed the belt up in a ball, handed it back to her, and said, “You’re out of your fucking mind.” She asked me how much and I said ¥10.  She started to play the bargaining game, but I told her to piss off, that she insulted me with her opening price, and that the most I’d pay was ¥10.  She asked for ¥15 and I told her to jam it up her ass.  I walked to the next stall, bought a similar belt but better quality, for ¥20 (about $3).  The whole time I was talking to the second sales girl I kept holding up crossed fingers to the first girl, because crossed fingers is how you say “10” in Chinese one-handed counting language. 

The small portions from Alfa didn’t get the job done, so we ended up going back to The Saddle to eat.  I had a beef burrito, which was as good as anything I ever had in Texas.  Seriously, it was fucking fantastic.  I will be spending many, many nights there.  The margaritas are superb, so I got a nice little buzz on.

Now it’s 9:30, I’m going to kick back and watch a DVD, then hit the sack.  I have a busy week ahead of me.