Jamey's Journeys!: Friday, February 4, 2011

oday was, in many ways, a mirror image of yesterday. I vegged out in the room until the afternoon, with the rationale that nothing was open, despite oaths that I would do otherwise. I’m sure that nothing was open, however.

Around 2 in the afternoon, Christina, Alex, Shazeda, and I left the dorm in search of food. We found a noodles restaurant, Yoshinoya, which was that same restaurant where I supped my first supper of this trip to China. Christina and Alex parted ways with us after the meal, and Shazeda and I went off in search of a mythical cigar store whose information I’d espied on the World Wide Web. The store was in a part of the city that I’d not explored very much, the Chao Yang District. This is, again, the ex-pat/foreigner hangout in Beijing.

We looked around the district for some time, and we eventually found the area where the cigar store was to be found. The cigar store, the Cigar Ambassador, was in a huge shopping center called The Place (italics my own). The Place reminds me of the Summit, but only if the summit was piled four or five stories high, and with two basement levels. The Place tailors very much to the ex-pats in the area, but also to Beijing high life, and the stores are quite pricy, to say the least. As I was with Shazeda in this shopping emporium, I had to be patient to find this cigar store, as she wanted to visit every clothing store in the facility. What can I say? Women be shopping J.

We eventually found this store, but after all of our searching, we found the place to be… Closed! Such disappointment… We vowed to return to the store again, after the end of the Spring Festival. We found an advertisement for a bookstore, and as we have both been incredibly bored over the last two days, with naught to do, we looked around for this bookstore. After about 30 minutes of searching, and several instances where Chinese people gave us wrong directions, we found the store. We found the ex-pat section of the store, and after much deliberation, I decided to get two books – Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, and Ghost Stories of Henry James. I’d read part of each of these books, but there was enough unread material to warrant their purchase, at a ridiculously low price.

Then, we wound our way back to the subway, and eventually to the dorm. There, we joined forces with Christina, Alex, and Lee to create a force capable of traveling to Wu Dao Kou (Five Points) to eat some pizza at an ex-pat restaurant! As we were a group of 5, we were unable to fit in one cab. Thus, we separated on the basis of sex. I decided to make the most of our late start from the dorm, and told the cabbie that we wanted to race against the cab in front of him. At first he declined, and I thought that he didn’t want to do it. He made no more mention of the race, but within a minute or two we were racing through the city at speeds greater than I thought possible. Be careful what you wish for…

When we got to 5 Points, the place where we wanted to eat was closed for festivities. So what did we do, you ask? We did the only thing that any rational person would do in the situation: go to the restaurant/bar next door called Old Foreigners. There are many levels to the reasoning that going to this restaurant was wrong, including our dignity, or the service, or the sketchy ex-pats at this bar, but the main reason was that it cost each of us 41 Yuan to eat dinner, which involved two measly thin-crust 10-inch pizzas (that weren’t even that good), and an order of nachos made with bad cheese and with the toppings under the chips. We were livid, and still very hungry when we left.

We were on the prowl again for a dining establishment. Keep in mind, dear reader, that it is around 10:30 at night, as this first adventure has taken about 2 hours of our time. We found a little Italian restaurant not far from The Old Foreigner. It was owned by a 20-something guy from Italy, who was extremely nice. He treated the five of us to lemoncello, which is an Italian liquor made of lemons and cellos. We ordered a cheese pizza and ravioli made with pumpkins. Let me say this: the food was not to par with that of Italy itself, but it was close. That made this restaurant a little piece of heaven for the five of us. The cheese was melted, the dough doughy, and the pumpkin ravioli was better than I expected. This place will most assuredly be visited again in my future here in China.

We ended up hanging around the establishment for a while, chatting and swapping jokes. When we finally paid the bill, which is always interesting, it was 12:30 in the morning. My fellow adventurers wanted to go to Propaganda, the hopping-est club in 5 Points. I didn’t particularly want to go, nor do I think that I will ever really want to go to many clubs in this country – or my own country for that matter. However, I consented, and we entered Propaganda. We checked in our coats and proceeded into the belly of the beast, an underground dancing floor. The bar was immaculate underneath, and the air was quite clear. The music was actually pretty good, and all of the ACC students who found their way to the club – which was a good many – were dancing in a clump near the edge of the dance floor, while the Chinese attendees gawked at our rhythmic movements and opposable thumbs. Christina maintains that I am not dancing right while I’m there, but I don’t exactly know how to dance correctly :P While I did enjoy the music and the crazy cultural clash that was occurring before my very eyes, within a short amount of time my eyes were stinging something fierce, and I had to return to the surface.

Upon emerging, I found that Lee and Shazeda had come to the top for different reasons. We all decided to catch a cab back to the dorm, and we parted ways for the evening.

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jamey