Fall Break Part 3: Whore of the Orient

So, I feel I need to get all this stuff written down before it fades from my memory. It's only been a week or two, and events are already blurring. Curses upon imperfect human abilities of recollection! Arg!

Two things in specific. I remember how Eric told me the stories about his travels and adventures, and what he talked about a good deal that I found especially interesting was his time in New York. His stories seemed to open up a lot of possibilities in my mind. He told me about how he had worked as a bike messenger, which sounded like a really fun job to me, a person that is so physically active and thrives on adventure. Dangerous too, though. He also told me about how New Yorkers kind of hate the bike messengers since they break the laws, take risks to deliver their packages faster, and cut off pedestrians and cars, all in the name of speed. The other interesting job he had in New York that struck my interest was a ninja. And I am only kind of joking about that. There is a resturant in NY called Ninja New York. Funnily enough, the first time I heard about it was from my first CouchSurfing hosts, Mike and Becky, when they showed me a YouTube video about it. (by the way, I really like linking to other pages. It makes me feel to wiki-tastic) He told me about how he worked there, how the tips were GREAT money, how the job was physically demanding with jumping about and such, and how it was so fun to scare people. I am thinking that I might have to live in NY for a while and check out these jobs. Also, he said it is a great place to get going on things, but also a place where it is easy to lose yourself and stagnate. Perhaps after France, Nepal, and possibly New Guinea I'll have to hit up New York for a while.

There is one more event that occurred in Shanghai which is particularly humorous. It involves my friend David, a woman's bathroom, and a flock of very friendly Shanghai girls. We strolled down East Nanjing Road, a major shopping area of Shanghai, very modernized, like New York or Tokyo or something. I hopped a little tram car part of the way (quite literally. I hopped on the outside by grabbing a window. Some Chinese lady inside was a bit shocked), and somewhere along the way we found another hotel. We went inside to see if they had a good map, and to ask about a Salsa club in Shanghai. Although the guy at the counter spoke some English, there was still some trouble communicating, and Dave eventually ended up acting out and displaying physically that we didn't want a bump-and-grind kind of dance club, but wanted a Latin dance club. I laughed at this for a while, and eventually told the guy that we were looking for shā shā wǔ (莎莎舞， Salsa Dance). Dave had to use the bathroom, so we wandered around the hotel lobby waiting for him. Jamie saw a girl playing the piano, and went to talk to her. I was just exploring the (surprisingly large) lobby, looking at some sculpture they had. A pair of Chinese girls came in the door at one end of the lobby. One of them was pretty cute, and I smiled... and then they came over to 'question' me. Why did I smile at them? How come I can speak Chinese? (Shanghai has a lot of foreigners, most of whom I assume cannot speak much Chinese) One of them left to go to the bathroom (free, clean, public bathrooms are a bit of a rarity in China, so places like fast food restaurants and hotels are prime locations for... well, for 上厕所。 I chatted with her for a little while, and when we ran out of things to say (since neither of us was amazingly energetic about the conversation, the cute one had left, and I figured that Dave was done in the bathroom by now). I went back to Eric, Eric, and Jamie, expecting David to be there, but he still wasn't done. We spent a few minutes chatting, and soon David came walking up to us... with about half a dozen young Chinese ladies following him (including the cute one that I had briefly met earlier)! So, apparently the line in the men's bathroom was too long, and Dave really had to go, so he went into the woman's bathroom. When he was there however, he discovered that the stall had just run out of toilet paper (you usually have to bring your own where ever you go in China, but this was a pretty ritzy hotel in one of the most Westernized cities of the continent). He has called out from his stall (in Chinese) "This toilet doesn't have..." but he didn't know the word for toilet paper in Chinese, so he ended the phrase with an emphatic groan. Someone eventually pushed some toilet paper under the door to his stall, and when he finished his business and came out he was discovered to be a man by all the girls in the bathroom (as though his deep voice and hairy arms when grabbing the toilet paper weren't enough). Dave's desperation, combined with his limited ability in Chinese (this is just his second year) was apparently enough to make him seem pitifully cute, because they all followed him back to us, chatting merrily. They were infinitely pleased to find that Dave had friends, and they we talking, laughing at the ludicrousness (可笑, ke xiao） of the situation. They eventually asked us where we were going next, and if we could all go out for coffee together (so Westernized!). Jamie and I were a little suspicious of a tea scam, althogh in retrospect I wish we had gone with them. When I replied that I didn't drink coffe, they tried other options. "Tea? Juice? We'll qing you!" (Culture note: In Chinese culture, it is common to qing, or treat, (请) one's friends and acquaintances, to pay for their meal or drinks. This carries the unspoken expectation that the "qinger" will be qinged in the future.) The fact that they were willing to pay for our drinks was what should have been the sure-fire sign that it was not a scam, but I still had a bad feeling about it. It seemed too unlikely. We eventually turned down their offer and said goodbye (much to their, Dave's, and later my, disappointment).

As we walked outside, we were crossing the street and Dave was telling us how this happened, as we still weren't clear on how David left us to take a shit, and came back 15 minutes later with 5 Chinese girls! He said that he went into the ladies bathroom... and at that point some very flamboyantly accented Chinese guy turned to us and said something along the lines of "You want ladies? I can take you to ladies." We cracked up. We kept asking, and I eventually to get him to go away I told him that we didn't like ladies, we liked boys.

In the lonely planet guide book, which our program sent us in our pre-departure packet before we went to China, and which is also a fantastically useful resource, the first words of the chapter about Shanghai reads as follows: "Whore of the Orient..." Not only did we find it funny, but out experiences (in only a few days, at that) caused that became our nickname for Shanghai too.

On Wednesday morning, Jamie headed over to a special appointment at the Chinese Pod office, while myself and the other guys hit up the Sex Museum. We met up later, cleaned, packed, got our passports stamped, and hopped into our sleeper to go to Hong Kong.