Sasha, the center of my life

Sasha is quite a find. It's a rubbish place for meeting new people but excellent if you want to sit down with a few friends and argue about politics. Set against a beautiful mansion and serving two brands of wheat beer, it's also on the longest bar street I've ever seen. This street runs for miles and is just bar after disco after restaurant after bar. Some say this is an expat hanghout, but there's not nearly enough expats to make up even a percent of the clientelle here.



Some introductions:
Jai on the left is into lubrication. The sole in the middle is the soul of the party. And Alex on the right is very concerned about how lightly non-americans criticize his country


That's Alex korean business partner, and me grinning like madman.

Time Maas at G-Spot

It's not that I'm partying all the time, it's just that it's a long while since I was living somewhere with so many big name DJ's playing here and such a sincere party scene. I'm really excited about all this.

Last night I returned to G-Spot where I saw Diggiwee last week. This time they had no other than Timo Maas playing there, the Maas himself. Playing possibly some of the weirdest electro music I've heard in a long time in such a mainstream venue. Miles from the usual 5-year-old RnB Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong seem to prefer.

Oh, and there was a guy on the dancefloor with glowsticks. This place is starting to feel just like home.

The Maas himself:



Oh, I should probably mention that G-Spot apparantly features the best speakers in Shanghai. They are huge, they look like something out of a charicature of a nightclub, they are so massive, humongous and other big words. If go there again I'll have to take picture of them.
The sound is excellent of course, but at the Time Maas event they had the bass a little to loud. The music he was playing was pretty much all base, and I actually felt nauseous most of the time I was shaking away on the dancefloor. Too much of a good thing...

Food. Disappointing.cabarets.

I've spend the whole day working on my Chinese. I've been so busy dodging hit-men and jumping between buildings lately that despite living in Shanghai I've not made ANY progress on my speaking or listening skills. After eight hours of straight studying, I realized something really interesting and potentially life-saving: if you don't eat, you feel like shit. In fact, some Internet research suggests that lack of food might actually kill you in the long run. So I've decided I'm going to set up a regular schedule for eating. Something along the lines of three big meals per day, and one or two snacks in between.

So this Shanghai nightlife thingy is interesting, but also a bit frustrating. Now that I've seen how good it can be, I can't settle with the average glamour bar. Yesterday I decided on checking out two new places that sounded interesting. One was Glamour Bar (it's what it says on the tin) which was trying to pull in punters with a cabaret dude from New York. the other was Jade 36 (on the 36th floor of course), which had a Thai model-cum-DJ who made her name playing to 1.6 million football fans at the Germany world cup closing ceremony.
But turned out to be less than mind-blowing. Maybe i should stop relying on classifieds and try to get some cool friends "in the know" so to speak.

The problem with Jade 36 was just that there were no people. The DJ was both gorgeous and played some funky cool music. But the cabaret at the Glamour Bar was really disappointing. It essentially consisted of a hat. the rest of the show was made up of a pretty average performer singing his own takes on various famous songs. Bizzarely, the man took a song by Fisherspooner about a woman's relationship to her own colon and turned it into a love song about Hollywood. First time I've heard someone do a change-the-lyrics-cover that turns a dirty crazy song into a mild-vanilla song.
And the man was wearing a funny hat. That's what goes as a cabaret in New York apparantly.

PIC UPDATE: Li being all glamorous with her Champagne against a glamorous backdrop of glamorous Shanghai- on a balcony off Glamour Bar.



PIC UPDATE: This man believes his hat is a cabaret. Where are the drag-queens, midget acrobats and burlesque dancing?


Anyways, normally this would have been a reasonably good friday night, despite the lack of breathlessness. But I couldn't shake this feeling off that somewhere in Shanghai there were all this glam people dying to meet me, but I just didn't have their phone number.

Meeting good friends in Singapore

I only had a few hours to spare after all the stressing and all the presenting. But a few hours was all I needed to catch up with some friends in Singapore. Good members of the international conspiracy

Enrique is the very dude who coined the phrase "21st century boheme".
Sam can't sleep.



Notice the number of beers. Yes! I'm completed my run on anti-biotics. This had to be celebrated with a beer in the company of good friends.

I went to a really nice lounge this evening, which combined lovely wine with an amazing view.
I had to take a picture of it, and even though it is pretty crap, you can see 101. You can see how ridiculously tall it is.

That's the thing about most impressive buildings in the world. They often have observatoriums or really expensive restaurants or bars in them. But you dont actually want to sit inside these buildings. Thats rubbish. You want to sit in the building across it so that you can see it when your sipping your vintage Chilean wine.

The life of a spy- park adventures

The life of a spy is a dangerous one. Actually, it's not, but Taipei is definately the most dangerous place I've been to in Asia. A couple of weeks ago someone stole NT2000 from me while standing behind me in an elevator.

And tonight, an evening in the park was interrupted by a couple of thieves trying to snatch my friend's handbag. Not in a violent way, but in a creepy skulky way. It was kind of scary how neither me nor my friend noticed the creeping creep, until the very last minute.

Since I've been spoiled by the safety of other asian cities I've been to, the idea that this was a thief just didn't occur to me. I just assumed that creeping around in parks was somehow a traditional behaviour of these strange Taiwaneese people. I mean, just that night I had passed several groups of people doing Tai-chi and various kinds of dancing. Most of it looked very alien to me, why wouldn't they do a bit of creeping too?

Anyways, the man scurried off when my friend, who obviously understood his intentions, screamed after him and she even tried to chase him. Kind of a silly thing to do considering he was joined by a friend and I'm sure people who creep have no qualms about dirty violence. (i.e. I was a coward and did nothing...)



Yes, it's a rubbish pic to go with this post. Would have been cool with a pic of the thieves, wouldn't it. Instead we have some palms. Cuz the park had palms, which I think is cool. And it's the only pic I have from that evening.

Taipei nightlife

For some reason, I'm not very interested in nightlife right now, I'm too busy with work and trying to navigate yet another highly unique Chinese city. But the arrival of toby & company naturally meant it had to be done.

Nice shirt, Toby.

I'm happy to report that Taipei's clubs are quite excellent. Beautiful people, cool music and there's some dancing going on, as opposed to the shuffling that all to common in this region.

An excellent weekend of martial arts, chinese and obsessive shopping

Ouch. I'm hurting. I thought I'd try something different this weekend, so I asked a good friend to submit me to a beating. I let him have two go's at it, the second time using a stick. For good measure, he let me have a stick too, to defend myself, but it didn't make much of a difference. To be honest, it's not so much the beating I got that hurts (although my nose hurst a little from when he gave me a good punch straight in the face) but rather the times he'd let me hit him. I hurt in strange places. For some reason my legs hurt a lot, because you need to move around alot and use your legs to push your body forward when you make a punch. Or something like that.
The unarmed combat was actually under the supervision of a Wing Chun teacher. Wing Chun is that martal art style that Bruce Lee made famous. The teacher was some sort of ex-bodyguard and had adapted this style to the situations you'd find on a street. His aim, he said, was to teach you to fight wearing a suit and an overcoat, and possibly even wearing bullet proof west. Sounded pretty hardcore, but I suspect it may just have been an excuse not to teach us how to kick.
The stick fighting was really really fun, and my friend has actually worked as an instructor. Stick fighting uses less force and places more emphasis on defense. The latter makes a lot of sense. While you can take a punch or a kick, you really don't want to allow a stick to hit you. So you train a much more defensive posture.

It was a busy weekend. I didn't just attend my first fighting classes, I had my first real chinese lesson! I've enlisted a personal tutor who will visit me at the office three times a week. We agreed that I've reached an intermediate level, so we will focus our time on chatting rather than working with texts. Also, the fighting has really taken it's toll on my hands, so I can't write using a pen and paper. I'm even finding it difficult to press the space bar writing this! So for a while we'll just be practicing talking and listening skills.
It does appear that I might have the edge on this language. Chinese is actually quite easy, it's just that they've made it more difficult by using those beautiful but stupid chinese sings instead of an alphabet. However, I find it really enjoyable to learn these characters, I enjoy searching for the system behind these signs and can spend hours just exploring new characters. However, this is usually considered the worst and most boring part of the language, so many westerners skip it altogether. I'm coming to this languages enjoying it's most difficult part, so now that I'll start taking classes, hopefully I will be able to pick it up quickly. We'll see

Not only did I start my martial arts training and chinese tuition. I also explored my new shopping addiction a little further. It's mad living in Causeway bay, whenever I go out for a chicken with rice or just out for a little walk, I'm confronted with one of the more hectic shopping areas in the world. All these bargain, shiny products screaming out at me from displays under strong, attention grabbing lights.
I've realized that my approach to shopping has been completely wrong up to now. Having bought some nice jeans and a really italian-looking blue shirt, I realized that I needed white shoes+belt for this set to look it's best. As the jeans+shirt had cost a lot of money, I thought maybe now I'll head off to the bargain market over on Kowloon side. Now, Causeway Bay may be one of the busier shopping districts I know of, but Mong Kok in Kowloon is definately the busiest in the world. It's streets after streets of pulsing crowds, shops, stalls and restaurants. You think it will end at some point, but it just slowly transitions from extremely busy to very busy, and then goes on forever. After browsing the stalls for a while I understood two things:
- Escalation: once you buy an expensive piece of clothing, it requires quite a lot of will power to buy something cheaper to go with it.
- Priorities: you don't go cheap on accessories. You can save money on your clothes, but not on your bag, belt, shoes and sunglasses.

So, I quickly gave up on the busiest district in the world and headed back to the high end brand stuff and got myself a nice belt and some nice lamb skin shoes. Yes, I've overspent, but I'm writing this off as learning-related expense. Wearing an expensive shirt with cheap shoes is NOT the thing to do. While wearing the belt to end all belts with cheap old jeans and a dirty t-shirt could definately work. Now, I just bought an ordinary nice belt in the end and instead spent the money on the lamb skin shoes. I wore the shirt, jeans, white shoes+belt out on Saturday and overall I must say it was a pretty good show. It was a bit too much, but then I knew that beforehand- but sometimes you just really really want to wear all the new things you bought, right.

Speaking of going out, I headed off to Cyber in Kowloon in my new outfit. Partying in Cyber is not really the thing to do if you're a westerner, but I quite enjoy hanging out with the young cantonese hamsters. They listen to some very suspect music, but I quite enjoy it. And going against the trend (usually the cantonese come visit us in our ghetto, rather than the other way around) earns you quite a bit of attention both on the cantonese side and back in the ghetto.

All in all, wow what a busy weekend! I've broken myself financially, but I've learned many things about shopping and about the cantonese clubbing traditions. I've broken myself physically, but learned to keep my body tight and how to throw a good right hand punch. I'm still living in a rat-hole, but I'm learning Chinese. Excellent.

Quick update

Tonight we've managed to get onto the guestlist for some bar that's going to be giving out free vodka. I only have time to say one thing: I went out partying with Phil last night. Yes, that's right, Phil! We used to know each other in the first year of university, and by pure coincidence we bumped into each other in Ikea in Singapore through a mutual friend. BIZARRE.

I meant never to post party pictures on this blog, but it's very difficult to find Phil in a non-party environment. Sorry.