Shanghai Nights - not like the movie

So I'm sitting in my hotel room, trying to access my blog and lo and behold no success. There's a few possibilities... China might have blocked blogger, they've done it before. The hotel's Internet might suck or be blocking blogger. Blogger might be down (unlikely but whatever). In any case, I can't really blog. Last time I connected was on Friday when I wrote my last blog. So as I type this in an e-mail to myself it's Sunday here, around 10:30am.

On Friday I chatted with my new Chinese friends and Lin Ying invited me to spend the day with her on Saturday. Now this conversation was a little complicated because her English is not really good. Verb tenses tend to confuse her. So answering questions I asked to try and figure out if she was spending the whole day with me or just a portion of the day were kinda frustrating. Anyways, we made plans to meet up around 10am.

After work Jorge and I set off for Xin Tian Di, the french quarters. A short ride on the subway, even though we had to change trains in people's square. We got to our destination without too much trouble. Xin Tian Di is a touristy spot now, it used to be where the nightlife was at, but now it's all tourists wanting to see what the Shanghai night life is like. Which means that's it's entirely different than what Shanghai night life is like, since the Shanghainese don't come here anymore because it's overrun by tourists. So in reality it's tourists going to scope out the tourist night life.

In any case, Jorge told me that the dumpling shop there served the best dumplings in the world, so we had to go. We got a seat in the dumpling shop, there was about 10 guys in the back making dumplings. They worked in a fish bowl type place, big glass so people could see them work, hahaha. Anyways, we order just about every dumpling on the menu. Jorge said that anything else was just fluff, and after tasting the dumplings I had to agree. Unfortunately for some people, they didn't know this. The big table of 10 next to us didn't order any dumplings at all. They were a loud German group. I mean if you go into a restaurant and there's 10 guys making dumplings in a fish tank, and everyone seems to be eating dumplings, you order the BBQ chicken right? Morons. Oh and if you're reading this going I'm a drunken German, and I didn't eat a single dumpling while I was spilling beer all over myself in a fancy Chinese restaurant in Xin Tian Di on last Friday, then you're an idiot. On more levels than one.

So the loud German group didn't detract too much from our dumpling eating. You think you've had dumplings before, but really you haven't. You see in China they have a way of putting soup inside the dumpling. So you use a spoon, and you bite a little piece of dumpling off, then you can suck a bit of the soup out and then eat the dumpling. If the dumplings aren't super hot, you can just eat them whole and the soup will explode in your mouth, but that's a burning hazard, so you better know what you're doing. I'm told there's a couple of ways to get soup in a dumpling, but that the tastiest is to turn the soup into a jelly and then mix it in with the meat. These days they refrigerate the soup to turn it into jelly, who knows what they did back then. In any case, once you cook the dumpling the soup liquefies.

After the dumplings we roamed around looking at all the bars. During our travel this couple comes up to us and speaking in Chinese they tell Jorge a sob story about how they lost their wallet or something and they need a cab to get back to wherever they were going. Anyways, they were asking him for 20 rmb, that's the only part I understood, Jorge gave em like 4 coins and I made fun of him. I mean if you lose your wallet, is your first destination the touristy bar area? No. So after that we finally found a bar that didn't look half bad.

Apparently it's assigned seating in bars in China... odd. We're going to a table and the lady finds that nothing is really free, so she leaves us there and tells us she'll find us another table (I think, everything was so loud). So when she comes back and tells us she has a new table for us, she squeezes past this bar bench and a stool. Jorge also fits in this gap (I don't know how). But apparently my leg is bigger than the both of them put together. So I climb up on the bench (nobody was sitting there). Some people freak out, and I climb down on the other side. Anyways, we're plowing through the dance floor and because of my delay with the bench I get stuck behind this clearly touristy white woman. She's trying to tap on some guy's shoulder to say excuse me while he's dancing on the dance floor. She wants him to get out of her way so that she can pass. She must be new to China. After she finally squeezes through a little gap, I plow in right behind her. I probably moved the guy at least a foot, and he kept on dancing as my shoulder pushed him clear into three other people. Once I had passed he just backed up again, never missing a beat.

So we get to our assigned seating, two chairs at a table of 8. There's already a couple sitting on one side of the table, they seat us on another, and shortly after that they seat another couple at the table. We order a 500ml beer each, 75 rmb for em... ouch. We start listening to the music, there's a live band, kinda. The band is playing along to some recorded music, we're not even sure if they ever really played the instruments or just pretended. I'm pretty sure they were singing, Jorge thought they might be lip syncing. I say they were singing because the words they were saying didn't make sense. "Everybody dance now" sounded more like "Evydy dane no". And they sang a spanish song with no Rs in it... sounds unlikely to me.

So as we listened to the terrible covers we watched people walk by. So I have this running theory that Asian girls that white people find attractive are not the same as Asian girls that Asian people find attractive. Jorge is Asian, from Macao, so he's the perfect test for this plan. So every time a girl walked by we would say if we found her attractive or not. If there was a pair of girls we would say which one we would pick if they were the only choices available. Either Jorge and I have radically different taste in women or my experiment proved true. We would have been awesome college roommates, because we would never have fought over girls.

A bit later a hot girl (at least I thought she was hot, Jorge thought she was so-so). Anyways, a hot girl walked by wearing pleather. We both found her outfit odd looking... as it turns out she was a Jagermeister chick. Her job was to sell Jagermeister shots. Mike's dream girl, hahaha. Dunno if Mike reads this blog, but his favorite drink is Jagermeister. This girl finally came to our table and she asked me if I would like some, I told her no, she asked if I had heard of the drink. Maybe in China nobody's heard of Jagermeister but in Canada and the US just about everyone my age has heard of this disgusting drink. So no Jagermeister chick, I do not want your drink, and yes I've heard of it. But feel free to tell me more about this disgusting liquid because hey, I can look at you while you're talking to me and it doesn't count as staring! Anyways, when she realized that I was not gonna buy her swill she left.

When the music stopped in the bar, it just stopped. The band left and nobody turned on a CD or anything. It was kinda odd being in a bar without music. We finished our drink and left. We roamed around some more but it was getting late. We hopped on a taxi and headed home.

Saturday was a long day so it deserves its own blog posting. Speaking of blogs, Trish suggested that I try VPN in to work and it worked. If I VPN in I can access blogger. Odd. Anyways, stayed tuned for the weekend blogs.