Clubbing

  Beijing, China
Friday, July 11, 2008

Jen and I met Kirsty and her twin sister Melissa in Sanlitun Thursday night to go clubbing.  Sanlitun is Beijing's most notorious bar district.  If you've ever heard me tell a story about being drunk in Beijing, chances are it happened there.  Like everywhere else, though, it's changed dramatically.  A whole side of the street was torn down, mostly to be taken up by a ridiculously large Adidas store. 

The four of us went to a bar called Cocomo.  We sat up on the rooftop and drank pitchers of mojitos and long island iced tea while a band from Xinjiang played latin music, mixing heavily accented Spanish with Xinjiangese.  We met up with friends of Kirsty and Melissa who I also used to party with when I studied abroad here - James, who co-owns one of the best Thai restaurants in Beijing, Cindy, one of the managers there, Freddy, who works in software development and was one of our closer local friends when I studied here, and a couple others I just met.  The place was beautiful, but as Jen said would have been amazing if only you could see buildings more than a block away through the smog and haze (insert visions of Olympic athletes passing out).  Such is modern China - at least part of it. Jen, whose previous experience with China was more or less limited to a university was I think in shock.  She kept wondering how her students from last summer in Tianjin- all working hard and studying constantly to compete against millions of other Chinese for top rankings and university admissions - would react to seeing something like this in China.  I've seen a lot of both sides, and it's one of those contradictions of China that is endlessly fascinating to me.

From left to right: Melissa, Cindy, me, Kirsty



After some time at Cocomo, we wanted to go dancing (Kirsty is a professional hip-hop dancer after all) so Jen, Kirsty, Melissa, and I took a cab to the World of Suzie Wong to go dancing.  The DJ was pretty good, spun lots of popular hip-hop from the last couple years with his own twist - usually speeding things up.  The dancing was wicked fun, and I even managed to keep pace with Kirsty.  After a while we went upstairs to the roof bar.  Kirsty and Melissa spotted this guy with an 'oh no, not him' attitude.  They explained that he was one of the more prominent DJs in Beijing, half Australian and half Chinese.  I asked whether he was good, and they said they didn't really like him.  But when he came over, they introduced him to me as, "the BEST DJ in Beijing!"  He was treating some business partners from Australia to a night on the town.  They're all working on productions and parties for the Olympics.  The Australians bought us all sorts of drinks and were really interesting to talk to.  It was the absurdness of expat life at its finest. 

I had forgotten how much I loved this giant, crazy city - which is what I kept repeating as Jen and I walked through the sleeping alleys of the hutong back to our hotel.