Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Well after all the rain in Suzhou and the multitudes of fairly uninteresting rained out gardens and canals, I thought better of going to Hangzhou for more of the same. I had also planned on taking a ferry down the river to Hangzhou, but the guy at the hostel told me it’s “not so good” and it takes 13 hours. I remember the last time a guy at a hostel told me “it’s not so good”, he was refering to the only “room” left at Cheap Charlies in Koh Samui and was trying to convince me not to take it, he was right, it WAS NOT SO GOOD.
The first 3 days of Shanghai would have been about the same experience as if I were in London except for a few more Chinese people. The buildings in the Bund just off the Yangtze River here look exactly like the buildings off the River Themes except the clock tower is a wee bit smaller. Wandering about town with Peter, Will and a couple of other Wankers was quite a good laugh, but just added to the feeling that I was in England. Now if I was Eating Taipei, I really should have titled this section Drinking Shanghai. We heard about a bar with cheap beer in Shanghai called Windows from a couple of German guys that had been in SH for almost 2 weeks so we were off. Having just arrived in Shanghai, I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were doing in SH for so long, but we figured they would know where to go. Shanghai wasn’t exactly the little town that I was searching for to recharge my traveling batteries, but I ended up staying for 10 days. Now Windows is a strangely alluring place since it’s not particularly near the Captian’s Hostel (25Y taxi ride) and it’s a dive, but it does have 10Y beers, whiskey… (for comparison normal prices in SH range from 40Y-80Y (Americans divide by 8 )) There is no real DJ, but there is a guy slamming records on seemingly at random points irregardless of breaks or what the dance floor is doing. One night we created a dance circle to generate some space on a crowded weekend dance floor and I swear he played some Barry White for the battle we started. Now how do you bust a move on the dance floor to Barry White? FN Retard! Either that or he was playing favorites with an up tempo song for the local whore that joined our circle and a 50 beats per minutes song for the “Gwailos”. Nonetheless, we ended up there at least 4 nights as the default place to go even when I swore I wasn’t going to go again. I always managed to instigate some kind of scheme to make the place more fun. One night, I pretended to be a local Chinese guy (u met) that spoke only broken English. I must have talked to this English girl for a couple hours with Will and Pete as my wingmen. The funniest part was that Pete was supposedly my translator with his busted Mandarin, but I was just speaking to him in English and he’d just repeat what I said to her. I guess Will must have gotten a bit bored of the game and maybe kinda felt bad for his fellow countrywoman and decided to tell her that we were just (I’m unsure of the british phraseology here that Will used, but something to the effect of…) ‘taking the piss out of her’ and asked her if she would be really upset or just think it’s really funny if he told her that I spoke perfect English. As I broke from my Chingrish into fluent Americanese, her jaw literally dropped from her face, but she managed to force out the obligitory, “Oh yes, I think it’s really funny”. I’m not quite sure what happened after that because the next thing I remember is waking up in the hostel the next morning.

Tags: Travel

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