Thursday/Friday 13-14/01/2011

The past two days have been like a shelf with awesome bookends and a whole bunch of 120-page angsty teen novels in between. Either way, it was awesome! I won’t delve into the shoddy collection of books; it’s not worth the time it would take to type.
Bailey took Tori and I on a long run up north, and we got to see just a few of the great shops and restaurants and sight-seeing in Shanghai. We turned around about 3 miles away from campus after we got to these incredible skyscrapers and a gigantic golden temple-looking pagoda building.

The smooth round wood and intensly artistic designs looked really out of place in the middle of an extremely busy interesection, surrounded by shopping malls and glass/steel office buildings.
A small interjection: we finally found those delicious dumplings filled with soup! Tori randomly remembered what she repeatedly heard her dad call them at Dim Sum, and from there it’s been incredibly simple to order them. (She claims they understand what she’s ordering because she so good at Chinese. I disagree, but either way we’ve agreed that she does most of the communication when there is no english involved, and I jump in if the person speaks any English. For some reason it’s nearly impossible for her to understand broken English, even if it’s reasonably well spoken.)
Friday night was the most fun I’ve had here, and quite possibly the most fun I’ve had in my life! I randomly saw an advertisement for “Boys Noize” in a bathroom stall earlier in the week and decided to take Tori, Bailey, and John Hermes. It was 150 kuai to get into this “concert.” I use the term concert very loosely as it was a line-up of six awesome international DJs playing from 10pm to 6am at Mao Live House, which is only a block or two from campus.

When we first showed up at 11:00, the place was almost empty. We nearly doubled the population despite the very loud and awesome dance beats going along with the crazy lights and huge LED screen. It seemed we had made a huge mistake in thinking they would appreciate techno/house in China. After realizing there was no chance to get our money back, we hung out for about half an hour, sipping on relatively inexpensive drinks listening to very good music. To make the most of it, Tori and bailey started dancing like crazy people in the middle of the empty dance floor with at least a 20ft radius of nothingness around them. It was hilarious!

Apparently it had an effect though, slowly over the next half hour there would be 2 or 3 people filtering in every ten minutes, and more people filtering in the door. By 1:00, the third dj was up and it became the best dance party I’ve ever seen. We checked our coats and had a blast! The best part about a dance party in China is that drugs are extremely hard to get ahold of, so you know the people around you are sober and being crazy for the fun of it.
There were a ton of Europeans, quite a few dance moves I’ve never seen before and probably never will again, and huge fuzzy panda hats with dangly fuzz balls hanging from the ears. We finally left around 2:30 as the red bull wore off, but were considering going back after a nap since the party was clearly going to continue up to or beyond its 6:00am expiration.
I’ll try to upload pictures of the dance party soon. To tide you over, here’s one of Me, Mike Lorenz, and Nick Bradford playing this awesome dice game some people here showed us!

You roll five dice each, and say how many dice of a certain number you think are out there. So, if I think there are at least 3 threes between Nick and Mike, and I have 3 myself, I’ll say “six threes!” They can call me out and we’ll have to all expose how many we have. If I’m right, he has to forfeit a dice and vice versa. You can say something to the person that’s guessing, and that may subconsciously throw off the rest of the groups mental count. Ones are wild, and there are a few more rules, but that’s the gist. Chinese people play it in clubs all the time, and it’s hilarious because the clacking sound of everyone shaking their dice cups fills up the room.