STO: A long weekend just got longer

'Twas an eventful weekend. I say this with a box of jade and my left foot up on my desk, which I'll get to later. This was a weekend of shopping, sight-seeing, energy conservation, random encounters, very good food, pain and obviously heavy drinking.

I'll start with Thursday night, when I was idling at home until the lights went out. Bam no electricity. I check the rest of the apartment building - they're fine, unfortunately. This means that for the 2nd time this summer, I've run out of electricity. I'm a little pissed this time because I had just bought 150 kuai worth of electricity 10 days ago and it didn't make sense how quickly it got used up. Nonetheless, though spending the night in the dark certainly made my life inconvenient, the long-term effects of the power outage was a packet of spoiled meat. So Friday night, after having bought more electricity, I met up with Crystal and Anastassia at (where else?) Lush for dinner and drinks. Mostly drinks. Random encounter #1: Angela, Xavier and a very exhausted Kate were also eating at Lush, so it was nice to chat with them. I implored my co-worker Brandon, an intern from MIT doing programming at the office, to come party with us that night (in addition to meeting up the following day) and I was a little surprised that he actually made it out around 9:30. We were already a few drinks in and on our way to this club D-22 for a live rock show, but Brandon was a trooper and downed his Long Island in 10 minutes and we headed out.

The rock show turned out to be a lot of fun. It had been a while since I listened to live music, and this was a nice small venue that wasn't too crowded. The bands were all local but it took me a while to even figure out which language they sang in (English). Of the three bands, the first was garbage but the next two were good. However, the night was made by the cab ride over from Lush to D-22. As Crystal, Anastassia and Brandon hopped into the back, I rolled into the cab and tried to remember how many drinks I had had. Depending on how strong a Kamikaze shot is it was either 4 or 5. There was a lot of commotion and female laughter going on behind me and finally I turned around and saw that Crystal was in handcuffs. Her hands were literally behind her back as she wiggled around in the back of the cab. I'd say "only in Beijing," but with Crystal, you really don't know. Apparently our absolutely insane mutual friend Will Clary, whom we are meeting outside the club, wanted her to wear them before meeting him, so yeah. Ok, so after the first rock band played, we went outside for a little bit, and I'm not sure how one thing led to another but I do know that Clary went into a local cigarette store and came back out with a small bottle of Bai Jiu. While I expressed my discontent with that disgusting drink, Clary made Brandon down a few shots' worth of it. Brandon insisted that he liked it and finished somewhere between a third and a half of the bottle right there. Clary immediately grabbed it, downed the rest of the bottle in a gulp and a half, and chucked the bottle sideways onto the street. I'm telling you this kid is nuts. Well we went back in for the next rock band and more Heinekens, but Clary would later come back out and throw up on the sidewalk. Crystal took him back home and apparently the cab ride was hilarious but that's not my story to tell. Oh and some point Marc Poore showed up and tagged along with us.

So the rest of us decided the night was still young and that we should explore the remnants of the once glorious Propaganda club. To our surprise, while the downstairs dance floor was closed, the adjacent bar La Bamba had become a dance floor by demand. It was a pretty tight scene. Many American college students were there as always, and as I scanned through the crowd the sight of Peter Kong surprised me (Random encounter #2). In addition, Rob Schaus, another Hoya who was in my Chinese class, was also there. Rob and I had been talking about meeting up for weeks now but this was the first time I saw him. Apparently him and Peter were in the same Columbia program and I had never made the connection. That whole encounter was pretty awesome despite the fact that I had become so drunk I actually could not speak in the club. I'd go as far as to say my voice is my Achilles' heel. Or maybe that's on my left ankle.

We called it an "early" night at 2 am because Brandon and I had made plans with our co-workers to explore Beijing the following day, meeting at the office at 9:30am. Brandon hangs out with his coworkers a lot and has gone to most of the tourist sites, including the Great Wall, with them. I had wanted to go the previous week and been unable to since I chose to go to church with Kate instead. So this Saturday, along with Kaven and Wu Bei, 2 Chinese co-workers, we went to the shopping street of Qian Men 前门 which as the name suggests, is kinda the front gate of Tiananmen square. The square wasn't actually visible from the street but it was really closeby. Incidentally, Brandon and I both carried bottles of water to nurse our minor hangovers. While I've had plenty of experience buying cheap fake Chinese commodities and practicing my bad bargaining, this was definitely my favorite place to shop. Qian Men blended Western high class with traditional Chinese better than any other place I had been too, and managed to have affordable yet legitimately nice goods, within clean but Chinese-style architecture. The trip was highlighted by a silk shop, in which I turned down many fine traditional garbs for a nice collar shirt that fused the traditional silk style with a Western fit, and a Saks-style Jade store. Ok so China is well known for its jade obviously, but when I think of fine jewelry I think of Diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds. But perhaps that's due to my experience playing Diablo 2. Anyways, I've bought jade off the street for 35 kuai and it's whatever. Well apparently real high-quality jade, infinitely better than the types one would buy at a cheap stand display, are really valuable and expensive. I had leisurely ambled into the store before coming eye-to-eye with a mind boggling price tag of 2400 Kuai. Looking around, everything was 800, 1000 or (!) 13,000 Kuai. Impressed, I ask a salesperson for the most expensive pieces in the store, who shows me two pieces. The first piece was smaller, about hand-sized, of an intricately carved old Lao-Tzu type of man and commanded a price of, get ready, 129,000 块. Gulp. The second piece was about the size of a skull and seemed to be a carving of a mountainside and tipped the register at 139,000 kuai. As far as I can recall, that is the most expensive item I have ever seen at a store. Discounting cars, I think I may have seen a diamond necklace worth $7,500 but that mountain of jade is about $19,000. It was surrounded by a glass case and salespeople. Normally pieces of jewelry worth more than that are surrounded by an armored vehicle. Since I'm such a high roller, I bought something at the store. Well, it was worth 196 kuai and it'll be a gift for a person to be determined.

Later that Saturday, after napping off the rest of my hangover, I met up with Crystal at the subway stop to head to a birthday dinner for the aforementioned Peter Kong who is somehow now 21, and thus can now get trashed in bars. Oh wait, that excitement's gone. Well random encounter #3, I run into Angela again at the Wudaokou stop, and we ride together through XiZhimen as she was going to a place only 1 stop away from ours. At the XiZhiMen stop, random encounter #4 materialized in Peter Kong, and you already know where he was going. In a summer where meeting up has always been a logistical nightmare, this chance encounter made life so much simpler, because none of us actually knew where the restaurant we were going to was. Dinner had been arranged by Jimalyn, the Georgetown girl who lives in China and is well-connected in Beijing. Jimalyn was unable to join us because uh, she had tickets to the Opening Ceremonies rehearsal, a fireworks show at the Bird's Nest. If you're not jealous at reading that, you should be, cause we all were. Anyways, our dinner party was small, consisting of us 3 Hoyas and a Chinese girl named Vickie, whom Peter met on an airplane (not sketchy at all...) and attending grad school at Clark. Our dinner centered around Kao Ya, the legendary Peking Duck, which automatically got all of us excited, but this restaurant exceeded our expectations, and after the meal, I was surprised to hear myself saying how this was the best restaurant I had been to in Beijing. Jimalyn really knows her shit in this town. We didn't just have a private room, we had a private kitchen. All we had to do was say FUYUAN and a door would open and a server would materialize. The menu was probably published by the Chinese Random House - it was more tome than menu. Peter spent a good 15 minutes peering through it. In addition to the delicious kaoya, there were a ton of really "exotic" or unusual dishes ranging from plants I've never heard of, flowers I've never heard of, and dark eel fried rice. If I had looked through the menu I would have more examples, but I bet that if you can kill it in China, you can eat it in style there. But no dogs allowed. We got some pretty cool stuff, if anyone knows what that yellow shredded fruit was called, please let me know. It was just great dinner, both food and conversation-wise, and it only set our party of 4 back 700 kuai, 100 of which was for the private room. That was a lot of money, and I spent more later, so I might need to indenture myself when I'm in Ireland.

Partying that night was fun but low-key. Crystal and I were both exhausted from the previous night, and we met up with a ton, like 30, of Peter's classmates in Hou Hai. Meeting that many new people is both very exciting and very strenuous, although one was from Newton! It was too tiring though and the two of us took a half hour to go to some quiet bar, where I listened solemnly as Crystal admonished Chinese culture and we discussed the transformations of our identities. Coming back out from the bar, I did my imitation of the Soulja boy in a supercrowded bar before calling it quits around 1 or so. I'm not sure whether it was my quickly depleting wallet or the overexposure of new people but I had little inclination to get trashed that night.

Sunday was packed day beginning with a 10am breakfast with Nicole at (where else?) Lush, where I relayed the events of the weekend and further discussed Chinese culture and what that means growing up in Irvine California. If I'm up for it, I'll post my views on that sometime down the line. I then headed to Jianguomen for lunch with a very overworked Kate Egan. Interning at CBS, Kate has the unique opportunity of being enslaved in China by an American corporation who is forcing her to work every day, including that Sunday, until she leaves on the 11th. While there's certainly a lot of work to do before the Olympics, that's a pretty shitty move on her company and puts her in a very different position than just about everyone else I know here in China. So I went out to meet her for lunch and amidst discussions of RL, Winsor and living permanently in China, we got Baskin' Robbins and walked by the Iraqi embassy, which is in the same complex as CBS (as well as ABC and the BBC). I then set out for an Apple Store on SanLiTunr to repair my broken iPod.

My iPod, which is basically an electronic extension of my soul, has been out of commission for 2 grueling weeks after some sort of hardware malfunction. As luck would have it, the first ever Apple Store in greater China had opened in late July near the great bar district of San Li Tun and so I cabbed it to the "苹果电脑店" (apple computer store) with success only after I told my driver to find the Adidas store and pointed to the logo on my iPod. This shop area was stunningly nice, full of clean upscale steel-framed architecture, pristinely cut street tiles, and the biggest name stores like Nike, Adidas, some clothing stores I didn't pay attention to, and now Apple. I had only passed by this place en route to a night of debauchery, although I had been nearby on July 4th when this complex was under construction. The Apple Store as always was top class and could have been anywhere in the world. Upon entering, I was helped by a nice salesperson and I stuttered trying to explain that my iPod had a hardware problem and would not turn on. I couldn't my point through, so I asked, "你会说英文吗？” (can you speak English) to which he replied, "Absolutely." Feeling slightly embarrassed, I followed him upstairs and learned that he was from nearby Tianjen, but spoke English nearly fluently. When I questioned him on how he got his great speaking skills, he just said, "I like American movies." If only it was that easy for me, but alas Chinese films suck. Anyways a hardware problem could not be solved by Apple store attendants (a problem I've encountered in the US as well) and I was given the option of trading mine in along with 1700 kuai for a new one. As much as I love my iPod, I couldn't do that and endeavor to survive these last 3 weeks and trans-Pacific plane ride without those earbuds isolating me from the world.

I had a lot of time left before I had to meet up to play Frisbee, so I mulled around that nice shopping area. I found a Nike store and decided to get some Olympic gear. Here I bumped into Jimalyn, aka Random encounter #5, aka Beijing socialite, and her dad. I thanked her so much for arranging dinner at that restaurant and made tentative group plans to have an absolute riot this Friday for the opening ceremonies. I then bought an Olympic basketball shirt for 300 kuai and proceeded to go meet up with the Ultimate players.

Ultimate Frisbee takes place in the far southeast of the city and whereas we used to meet at 2:30 for vans, we now meet at 4:15 for taxis, because the Olympic license plate restrictions, coupled with July having 31 days, have rendered our vans out of commission for consecutive Sundays, and because field space is now more limited and we have to wait for a soccer game to finish before tossing the disc. This week my red team was matched up with the star-studded blue team, but we got off to a 3-2 lead thanks to good zone play. That point, I was on defense and the last man back. I made the poor choice of fronting my man, a good player named Reid, and when he cut deep break side I was a good 10 meters away. The disc was put but very floaty, and I covered the ground quickly. Running side by side with Reid, my right foot just grazed his just before I was planning on jumping with my left. The slight contact put me off balance and when I planted my foot and exploded, the foot went every which way. I heard a pop, felt intense pain and fell to the ground screaming. I've been blessed with good health, besides the fluke shoulder injury, the broken collarbone and minor nagging injuries, and had never experienced something like this. It was clear that I hadn't just twisted my ankle, and after I had finished pounding on the ground in pain, the huge swelling already apparent indicated that I had badly sprained my ankle. I had to be helped to the sideline and had my foot propped up on a chair. Getting home was a nightmare. Like I said, the fields were in the deep southeast of the city, and I live in the northwest...furthermore cabs don't even come by those remote fields. Luckily I was surrounded by ultra friendly frisbee players, and they sent a cab for me, and 3 people got in with me and helped me back to my place. It literally took me 10 minutes to walk from the road to my apartment, and times like these really make me appreciate my feet.

So yeah, this weekend got longer cause I couldn't get to work today. Instead my bosses visited me, not even joking, and bought me crutches (what!) and lunch. They hinted that I'll pay for it tomorrow (oh no). Anyways I'm feeling better, even starting to walk (haven't said that since I was, like 2) and I think I can work tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be ready by Friday for Opening Ceremonies bonanza, but for now I've enjoyed the day of rest. Hope you enjoyed this gigantic tale of a weekend.