STO: Incurring Damages

I've decided that after my last extremely lengthy post, I'm going to restrict each post to one of three categories: an account of my personal stories and life (STO), notes on Beijing and its culture as a whole (CUL), and my take on sports (SPO). I might throw in a purely Ultimate post once in a while but those categories cover most of what I've been posting about. This should make things much more readable.

So this post is about Saturday night. After lounging around my apartment all day, being super lazy and writing that immense blog post, I dined with Lisa, Anjli and Saloni at Grandma's Kitchen, the best American restaurant around. The menu itself will make any American ex-pat missing burgers and sandwiches absolutely drool, and the food wasn't bad either. The cheese quesadilla and turkey swiss sandwich I ordered would have been better if I hadn't had to ask them to heat them. Lisa ordered a steak with eggs, and after spending 10 minutes trying to explain in Chinese how she wanted her eggs cooked,(we eventually got an English speaking waitress) she asked "How do you prepare your homefries." The three of us simultaneously groaned, "Oh my God." As we're finishing dinner, I said we should go straight to Kate's party but Anjli and Saloni couldn't make it, so I forced a reluctant Lisa to accompany me. Anyways Grandma's Kitchen is on the 4th floor of a mall, and riding the escalators down, Lisa hops down and lands on the last step. It was cute, like a bunny hop, but it managed to stop the escalator. Lisa didn't realize, because she had just walked off it, but everyone else who had so recently been leisurely leaning on the handles instantly started to glare at her when they realized they had to walk down. I don't know whether this says more about Lisa or Chinese machine manufacturing.

Kate's 2 bedroom apartment is cozy but with a nice living room. The party basically never materialized as 3 of the groups that she invited decided not to show up. When I arrived there was just Kate, Jansen (her roommate), Xavier, her Chinese-born friend Yancey and her boyfriend John who was celebrating his birthday. After taking flaming shots, I closed Kate's bedroom door so that we could play a game of beer pong before heading out to the bars. After I dominated the game :) Kate went to open the door to get her wallet, and discovered that it was locked. Apparently they had never closed the door without her inside it, and thus never realized it automatically locked. Although that's understandable, what's not understandable is a) why a door would auto lock and b) why the landlord never let them in on this pertinent information. The highlight of the "party" was when Xavier and John tried to kick down the door, only succeeding in breaking off a piece of wood paneling. They stopped when they realized that if they succeeded, they would shatter the wood around the door knob. So I'm not sure which was more poorly made: the escalator or the door.