Since the Games have ended, my status here has officially changed. I have gone from a tourist/spectator to alien resident/expat. In America I’d be reviled and assumed to be an illegal immigrant, but here I feel welcome. As the Olympics drew to a close I had my first experience interacting with the expat community that I am now a part of. Elisa, one of the fine folks that I met when I went to Tianjin to see some soccer, was leaving town. She wanted to have one last night out with her friends and she was gracious enough to invite me along for the fun. (NOTE: Click on any of the images below to jump to my complete photo album from this night with lots of additional details.)

 

It’s a funny thing, this expat business. Jonas, the guy who first invited me along to that soccer game, mentioned to me that a significant portion of an expat’s social calendar is made up of going away parties. There are tens of thousands of foreigners living and working here in Beijing and there is so much turnover that every night there are groups of friends marching around the city’s bar streets bidding farewell to somebody. As excited as I was to go on this first outing, I was also certain that this would not be my last goodbye pub crawl.

 

 

 

The night began with dinner at a very good restaurant at the other side of Dongcheng district. Here I met some new people: Xiaoye, Pierre’s girlfriend Ana, Vincent and 2 other friends of Elisa’s (I am ashamed to say that I forgot their names!). I have always loved the Chinese style of eating dinner, as it makes meeting new people very easy: You sit at a large, round table with dishes that everybody takes helpings from. There is a constant interaction that Western-style dining just doesn’t foster in the same way. Having to help people spin the Lazy Susan around, pass items back and forth, and reach over people to get at what you want pretty much eliminates your ability to sit quietly. If you’re not talking to folks, you’re still bumping into them.

 

 

 

After a fun meal we all headed over to Sanlitun. This is a neighborhood right next to Dongzhimen where a large number of bars, restaurants and expat hangouts are located. There is a main drag and several side streets and alleyways where the close proximity of the buildings is very reminiscent of the French Quarter in New Orleans. In fact, given that you can drink out in the streets and walk from bar to bar with your drink in hand, it often functions the same way- though there is a glaring lack of roving camera crews and girls going wild. Much the better, IMHO.

 

 

 

We started our “crawl” in Nanjie Bar, which is famous for their cheap drinks. We were going to bounce around from place to place in the alley that we were in, but when we went outside, the crowds were all hanging out in the streets anyway, and the wait staff continued to get us drinks form the bar, so we just stayed where we were. This actually allowed even more people join our roving band of merriment and I made some more new friends: Julia and Jane both live in Beijing (Julia is an expat and Jane is a transplant from a village up north), and Amany, a CouchSurfer who was passing through town and I had hung out with earlier in the day.

 

 

 

We eventually moved off the street that we were on and across a wide boulevard to another section of Sanlitun. Once there, we hit Bar Blu, which was playing cool 70’s and 80’s dance tunes and had a packed roof deck.

 

 

 

My memory starts to get a bit fuzzy by the end of the night (and by “end of the night,” I literally mean “morning,” because I did not get home until 5:00am), but one of the last things that I remember clearly was my run-in with members of the New Zealand Women’s Indoor Volleyball team.

 

They were all out getting plastered and they had a bunch of guys hanging all over them. One of these fine ladies -I never got any of their names- decided at one point that it was time to start dancing on top of the 5-foot bar. This was a tall woman -at least 5′10”- and she towered over everybody. As I looked up, and up, and up to glimpse her completely trashed face she suddenly lost her footing (BIG surprise) and tumbled backwards right towards me.

 

My reflexes were clearly slowed by my now more-than-slight inebriation, but I somehow managed to shift my body out of the way and hook my arm under her shoulder just before she slammed onto her back and cracked her skull on the floor. Uninjured, she bounced back onto her feet, wobbled a second and then threw up her arms in triumph, screaming as if she had just nailed the Floor Exercise in Gymnastics. I put my arm back onto hers (I had helped her up and steadied her during her momentary loss of equilibrium) and asked if she was OK.

 

“Fuck you!” she shouted at me and stormed off back to her group of teammates and male hangers-on.

 

Damn Kiwis.

 

I got my revenge, though. A few minutes later I got the guy that she was slobbering over to bring her back my way to pose for a picture. Funny thing: When I told them both that I wanted a shot of a drunk, belligerent Olympian for my blog, neither of them (or any of her teammates) seemed to mind all that much. I wonder if the alcohol had anything to do with that?

 

 

 

Everything starts to blur after this, but I know that  had a great time. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Beijing, Nightlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.