Episode 3: Night(s) on the Town

This one's going to be a long one, and I apologize in advance. It does however get better as it goes along, so it's definitely worth reading it through to the end!

To celebrate getting through our first week of work, we decided to head out to Xintiandi, a tourist area in Shanghai that is filled with various shops, restaurants, and bars on Thursday night. It caters to foreigners, thus everything was pricy by Shanghai standards,though anything above $6 for a meal can be considered pricy in Shanghai. We started off with dinner at a very nice little restaurant situated at the far end of the walking area. The food was good, if pricy, and it turned out that it was happy hour, and the beer was buy one get one free. I decided to go with the steak and mashed potatoes, which was an extremely welcome bit of familiar cuisine. After dinner, we meandered over to a small bar which had live music. The drinks were pricy in here as well, but we all had fun, and even met an awesome couple who were from Madagascar. Overall it was quite a fun night, and it was interesting to see so many non-Chinese faces at one time.

On Friday night, we decided to head over to Stampede, a bar that also happens to have an underground go kart track in it for entertainment purposes. Yes, a bar, with its own go kart track. Awesome. Since everyone in China had to work on Saturday due to the Dragon Boat Festival, the place was not nearly as busy as we had expected, and the four of us who went snagged a table and got down to business. Stampede is entirely underground, with the bar area raised up and overlooking the pit straight of the track below. On the central support wall in the middle of the track, there was a 20 foot projector screen that was showing the South Africa and Mexico match.

After several beers, we decided it was time to hit the track. It was a ton of fun, with the track being very slippery and thus perfect for drifting. It was a short track and the karts went pretty fast (around 30mph), so the lap times were in the mid-40 second range. An 8 minute run cost 85 RMB ($12.5 USD), so it was a good value for the money. After our first go, we went back to the bar and had several more beers, along with shots of tequila. It was at this point that I got to talking to the owner of the bar, and he challenged me to a race. We raced, but due to moving roadblocks (the other drivers were terrible) he managed to pull out a win on a technicality, thus we lost out on a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and I had to buy everyone a beer.

We drank some more and then raced again, with my lap times getting faster each time, interestingly enough. At this point it was fairly late and two of us had to work the next morning, so we called it a night and headed back to the hotel, with Kelly yelling about Mexicans the whole way...

Saturday night was fairly tame, as we simply went out to dinner in People's Square and went to bed fairly early as we were planning on heading over to the Expo on Sunday morning (I'll talk about that in my next update).

I didn't think it was possible, but Sunday night actually turned out to be even crazier than Friday night. The four of us who had gone out to Stampede again headed out, this time to the French Concession. We went into a sake bar, but the establishment was far too expensive for our budget, so we headed back out and found another bar. We had a few beers there, then headed to the bar next door so that Kelly could get a girly drink.Everywhere we went was pretty dead, so we were fairly disappointed. However, one of Justin's friends from work called him and told him to come over to a nightclub called JJ's that he was at.

We hopped in a taxi and headed over. Inside of the club, they had a couple of DJs and were absolutely blasting the music. There were lights all over the place, and a fog machine mixing in with the cigarette smoke (no laws against that in China). There were people dancing all over the place, and it had a great vibe about it. We met up with Justin's friend and ordered ourselves a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, which was served to us by one of the club employees. He mixed it with Coke and was constantly refilling our glasses. We danced and drank, and went through the bottle fairly quickly. Kelly and I managed to get invited over to drink at another table, which we happily did. Here they were mixing the Johnny with green tea, which was very refreshing. We stayed until 2:30, dancing on the stage and listening to a girl singing American music such as "I will Survive". It was a great night, but waking up was harder than usual the next morning...

So all in all, my first weekend in Shanghai was far better than anything I could have expected. I just hope the rest of my weekends here can live up to this one.