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.”