China just finished a week of celebrating its liberation by Mao. The first three days of the last full week in September are holidays. The universities take the entire week off, students who live far away have time to go home. This includes my student helper, Oscar. Soon I will write about him, he is an interesting sort. My first impression was that he was not very “quick”. I was wrong. Some students must ride a train 20+ hours to get home. To take the entire week off, classes are held on the preceding Saturday and Sunday.
In anticipation of the week off, we made arrangements to meet other westerners for dinner and a trip to a bar frequented by our types. The establishments are called Detox and Escape Club, respectively. We took a taxi into the city. It was the first time we traveled to the city at night.
Nan Chang is a large city and, at night it has the vibrancy of a large city at night. Many cars and a lot of neon lights. We drove past Bayi Square, the light standards are beautiful. Each standard is about 20 feet high and are adorned with, maybe, 30 individual lights fixtures The lights are pyramid shaped and give off a soft white light. I will get a picture of the lights and post it.
As this was the beginning of a holiday weekend, the square was PACKED and remained so until 2 in the morning. Kites. People were flying really cool kites. Some may ask how I know they looked cool because it was nighttime, some kites had lights, some of which were iridescent, and others reflected the lights from the city below. Again, pictures to come.
Back to the trip to the restaurant and bar.
The cab dropped us off about 3 blocks from where we were supposed to meet the rest of our group. Of course we had no idea where to go, so I called Andy. Our description of our location was no use to him: he asked if there was someone I could trust with my phone? Being the trusting soul I am, I gave my phone to the first man I saw. He spoke with Andy and then walked us to our meeting point. He refused the money we offered. This reaffirmed my faith in my fellow man.
Detox had been open 2 days. The food cannot be called American but, it has a definite American style about it. The owner, head chef and chief bottle washer is Kyle, another Brit. The food was not spectacular, just damn good. Why did it take coming to China for me to have rice pudding. It reminds me of risotto, but very sweet. Budweiser and Heineken are the same price, don’t try to figure it out. Our dinner party consisted of 8 people, three Americans, one Japanese and the rest were British.
After dinner we went to Escape Club. There our group expanded to about 15 people, including several locals. One is a pilot for China Eastern Airlines. One-hundred Juan buys 8 bottles of local beer. After several hundred Juan were spent we began a drinking game, the pilot lost. The owner knows the foreigners and spoke with us for quite awhile. I learned that there is graft in the police, building and fire departments. I also learned that there is a lot of drug usage at the night clubs in Nan Chang. I knew drugs and graft existed here, however, it seems that it is more pervasive than I thought. Unsafe clubs stay open and the younger crowd goes to the club and get wasted on cocaine, sound familiar? People are the same everywhere.
After Escape went to a dinner companions bar. The pilot had beer muscles and wanted to arm wrestle me. He is about 5’8” 175 pounds and sort of muscular. He lost, repeatedly. He even lost left-handed. He also suffered because we bet shots of Jack Daniels. My head hurt the next morning, he later told me he was in serious pain the next day. He did not have to fly Monday, they have the same rules about that as do we.
The Japanese guy was so wasted he passed out at the bar. The entire night he may have had four beers. We finally wandered home at about 3:00 in the morning. I had to practically carry the Japanese guy to his apartment.
Later in the week we had lunch in the city at a pretty good Chinese restaurant, afterward Rodney and I went to Metro. Metro is a store that has a large foreign food section. It is nothing remarkable however, 69 Juan for 6 ounces of maple syrup reflects the cost of bringing foreign food into this country. The purpose of the trip was to get the makings for spaghetti, I had a birthday party for Christol today (10/6). The clerk was rather rude. This is an example of Chinese customer service: The package of pasta would not scan and the clerk looked at me as she said something I did not understand then she tossed the pasta in the bin to be returned to the shelf. This happened to be the last pasta on the shelf, I needed it. I took it out of the bin and told her to pickup the phone and get the price. Five minutes later, no price had been provided. I took all of the things for the pasta and told her to take it off the bill. She was VERY put out but, I did not need them if I was not going to make spaghetti. I wound up making chili. The point is that customer service in China is poor. Chinese people are used to being told what to do, what they can’t do or have and accept it.
The next day we went to a village called Anyu (Iee). Anyu is the portal to three ancient Chinese villages. They are 1000 to 1400 years old. They manage to stay in existence by being a tourist attraction. I have posted some pictures of the villages. The villages have restaurants. These places serve everything from eel to dog. We did not eat there.
This is getting long and by the time I post the pics it will be very long so I am stopping now and will rethink this posting to see if I can elaborate on last week with interesting information. Two of the subjects will be Oscar and Elic (Elic is a religious organization.)
