I love my cat, I love mycat, I lovemycatIlovemycat. Seriously, I do. I love him to bits even though I had conveniently enough forgotten about how annoying he is when he at 2:42 am wakes me up by nibbling my arm, eating my hair and sweeping everything on the bedside table down on the floor to get my attention. For what? I don’t know. I’m thinking he’s just making sure I’m aware that he’s the boss and that he can get my full attention at all times.
On Friday night I went out with the girls. Or let me rephrase; a group of middle aged women of various nationalities went out on the town to celebrate a birthday together. I had met the birthday girl only once before so it was nice to be invited. Simply going into town is an adventure.
It turns out that Mr. Li, our driver, loves Lady Gaga. He loves her so much that he is playing one song over and over again in different remixes (“There’s nothing else I can say, he-ey, he-ey…… over and over and over again…) all the while maneuvering the car in Beijing’s crazy traffic. I don’t go into town much so just looking out the car window is mind-blowing. It has changed so much and at the same time, between the high rises, in the alleys and parks; people are still dancing for exercise or walking backwards, playing ping pong or chess and the children still don’t wear diapers and do their business on the streets. We tried our best to communicate, Mr. Li and myself, and I think I spoke more Chinese on that one hour ride into town than I’ve done altogether these weeks I’ve spent in China so far. And it’s coming back to me, slowly.
The plan was to meet up at The Fairmont for a cocktail class; have a Japanese dinner at Hatsune and end the night dancing at Suzie Wong’s; the pick-up place in Beijing – according to my husband. I told him not to worry too much; eight gigantic (by Asian standards) middle aged western women would hardly be the belles of this ball. So we arrive around 11 pm and the place is of course very quiet; I mean who goes to a club before midnight (unless they have kids of course, like all of us)? It’s a two or three story house, different bars with different music and yay! It’s PINK night! We get to wear flashing pink mouse ears or devils’ horns if we want or why not a pink boa for the birthday girl? We find a bar with a table to sit down at (we are old!) and proceed to order drinks only to learn that tonight, the special PINK night, there is a minimum of 800RMB per table….in a half empty bar. I managed to negotiate that we would leave the table if another party wanted it and the waiter was happy with that.
As we are waiting for our drinks and look around the place it hits me; things have changed in the club world. Where we used to dress up to look nice for ourselves and our friends, the girls now dress up for show, to be seen, to get their picture taken perhaps and end up on someone’s’ blog or website. And where we would drink and laugh and have fun together with each other, now half the group is busy texting or browsing the web on their phones or looking bored as if they have something more important to do. And they all drank whole bottles of alcohol. I’m guessing to 1. Meet the 800RMB per table rule and 2. It looks cool (?). But hello, we see two young local men get a table and proceed to order one (1) whole bottle of Jack Daniels and eight (8) bottles of ice tea. I’m glad we stay to see how that turned out later in the evening and I wonder if they will ever be able to drink JD again.
We finally worked up the courage to hit the dance floor; I mean – who cares? Who cares that we felt awkward, underdressed (compared to the local beauties; come on! They came in full gear; false lashes and all!), old, tired and very, very tall. BUT! Miracles do happen and I believe we’ve still got it, at least some of us. Local Chinese guy encouraged by drink perhaps but also the fact that he is out to entertain the boss begins to dance wildly with us, clearly having a great time. A little while later he gets his boss out on the dance floor and I believe for him its mission accomplice, his job is done. Boss is happy, he is happy.
Very soon after we were happily on our way home; I was in bed by 1pm and was of course promptly woken up at 6.30 the next morning. Thank God we didn’t have to order a whole bottle of alcohol.
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