Beijing Hangover - the randomness continues
Yesterday was Saturday the 26th. I decided to check out Tian'an Men Square and the Forbidden City since they are right next to eachother, which was good fun. They never show you on TV just how MASSIVE the two are. I took the audiotour of the Forbidden City, which was actually not bad, then ended up to the north of it and walked to the two parks nearby, then I proceeded up to the area north of Beihai Park, where my surreal tourist experiences continued.
Surreal? OK, first of all the Forbidden City is like a national treasure, and yet it is FILLED with little shops selling crap. Crap? OK fine, everywhere there are vendors at tourist attractions, but instant noodles?? So after getting over seeing people eating instant noodles while walking through what is effectively a museum, I next got to see the hundreds of tiny bars in the area north of beihai park plus the hundres of rickshaw drivers. I guess the area is a "working hutong", which means alley, so I have no idea what a "working hutong" is supposed to be. Either way, it gets passed off as a tourist attraction in its own right, although I couldn't figure out what the attraction really was. Either way I stopped for lunch, so all was good! I had stinky bean curd for lunch, which was good although a bit "pungent"
OK, I hate reading when people just recount their day (I get a lot of those emails and think to myself "why are u emailing me this?") so I'll get to the decent stuff. So I ended up meeting up with my schoolmates for dinner at this "brazillian bbq", which was basically like a sizzler but with grilled meat. They had the most random salad bar ever! It was like chinese food (tripe, jellyfish, greasy stir fried veggies, etc.) plus pizza, french fries, potato salad, fruit, and an open tap of beer. The pizza is what threw me off, especially since it had things like corn in it!
Anyway, after fun at the bbq wherein I realized the diversity in ages at the table (33 on the high side, 15 on the low side. That’s right, 15. Some parents let their 15 year old son go by himself to china. I find that impressive, but that’s just me with my fear-driven American upbringing). So I think I was the 2nd or 3rd oldest person, which in my book isn't bad. So we ended up wandering the bar district until we ended up at a night club! So I'm in this night club with 12 other students randing in age from 15 to 33 in CHINA! I just couldn't get over it. And all the music was like hip hop R&B and bad dance music. So bizarre. The club itself wasn't too bad, and we saw these two HOT girls dancing with eachother near their group of friends. One of the friends kept trying to get us to dance with them, a little too aggressively I might add, which leads me to the conclusion that they were whores. Ah well…
Then I ended up arguing with my cab driver on the way home because he couldn't find the intersection that I wanted. Thinking that I might be pronouncing it all wrong I busted out my MAP of Beijing and showed him, ON THE MAP, where I needed to go. He STILL couldn't get me there. Finally I recognized some things I knew and we were able to get my ass home. 2:30am I crashed, a long day.
So I woke up this morning and FREAKED OUT because I couldn't find me phone. While taking my hangover shit and hangover shower, I kept putting together scenarios of buying a new tri-band phone, how to ask for it in Chinese, calling my old phone number and trying to explain to the cab driver (the last place I saw it) that I had lost is, etc. Actually last night at 2am the guy kept trying to get me to call my host family to give him directions and I was like "I can't call them now, its 2am!". Sucked.
So after going through my insane scenario analysis in the shower I realized that my phone was under my laptop. I'm so dumb sometimes. I'm sure I will lose it soon though…
