8. Hospital 2

8. Hospital 2

I was lucky enough to get ill enough to go to hospital, again!  This time with some funny disease with a funny name I can’t remember.  It started just as a cold and then turned in to a fever, and when I went to hospital they decided to give me days and days of IV, oh joy of joys.

I mentioned the IV room before but I think I can elaborate on it somewhat, as it is quite an experience visiting one.  They partially resemble an airport waiting lounge, with uncomfortable blue chairs and lots of rubbish scattered across the floor.  There can quite often be a bad smell, more on that later, and a funny mix of people. 

With quite a lot of the IV rooms the first thing you notice when you walk in is the screaming, funnily enough, small kids and babies take a rather strong disliking to being held now and having needles inserted in to their hands, feet and the top of their heads.  And this creates a really rather uneasy atmosphere, not only have you got your own illness to worry about but the naturally distress inducing ululations of a small child.  Then you have to go and find your seat and tell whoever is sat there to move to another seat, this is sometimes a person on IV and sometimes just someone who is accompanying their unfortunate friend.  Or you can just find an empty seat and sit there and wait for someone to tell you to move, and perpetuate the IV room flux.  But luckily being a laowai, and not wanting to move, it’s possible to pull the ‘I don’t understand’ ‘ting bu dong’ card, anyone who comes waving a small piece of paper at me saying something in Chinese and looking faintly annoyed but mostly curious will get a swift ting bu donging!  And I will be left to sit back and enjoy a couple of hours of mediciney antibioticicy in the veins hydration. 

So with a couple of hours you tend to glance around a few times, and it’s quite funny what you see.  There is a really eclectic mix of people, from young babies to old biddies and people who look like they’re about to die to people who look like they are just stopping off here on the way to work, like they are just sat on the underground reading their newspaper the way they do every other day.  It’s not uncommon to see two people waiting for IV, one looking terrible and the other obviously accompanying them, and then the nurse come along and hook up the healthy looking one!  And of course anyone whether ill looking or not is likely to cough up a big ball of phlegm and spit it on the floor.  Parents too lazy to walk their children to the toilet will just pull over a bin, whip down the kids trousers and let it rip, whether it goes in the bin or not does not matter, neither does it matter if the bin doesn’t have a bag in.  And as you can imagine, if people are willing to litter the floors of a hospital they are not going to hold back anywhere else.  There are always kids going in the street, children’s clothes here even have a little slit running along the bottom for easy access.  But it’s not just the kids, everyone seems to be in on it, just about every urinal I have used here has a sign above it that reads.

向前一小步，文明一大步

Literally, ‘forwards a small step, civilized a big step’, but maybe I have the translation wrong here, as it seems that most Chinese blokes go ‘backwards a big step’.  I don’t know if this is because they just can’t be bothered to take an extra step forwards, or they don’t want to stand so close to a dirty urinal, but they just don’t seem to care either way.  They will happily stand a good foot or two back and just watch as it goes everywhere without thinking to step forwards and actually get it in the drain rather than on the floor.  This even happened in school, when both urinals broke, cardboard signs were placed inside saying ‘do not use’, but this did not stop them.  The signs got pissed all over and were soon soggy jokes left standing in a flooded urinal.  And when these became too malodorous or ugly to urinate on people just came in and pissed on the floor.  The worse thing about this was that the toilet still worked absolutely fine, it was just the urinals that were broken.  But this did not matter, urinating here is just something that happens, and it doesn’t matter where.  When I was walking out of the terracotta warrior museum I saw a mum walk up to her young boy, standing in front of the main entrance, lift his t-shirt up, pull his trousers and pants down, point at him and tell him something seriously.  Then he started peeing and she ran back and got a nice photo of her boy at the museum.

To get back to my hospital visits, I had all this to enjoy whilst feeling so ill I actually thought I was dying at one point.  But this is all over now, no more illness, I am back to good health and making sure I stay that way.

A Chinese Massage. No skin off my back!

 Not your normal massage, I think I was lucky to come out of this one alive, this was five weeks ago and you can still see the marks on my back.  I asked a friend to take me to a massage place and she said her family uses a really good one, which she took me to.  I was laid down and given a ferocious back rub and then told to take my t-shirt off, I remember thinking at this point ‘that was very painful, maybe I should just say I don’t want any more, pay up and scarper’, but for some strange reason I ignored this intuitive impulse, which I guess it was my survival instinct, and decided to continue.  I put my head back down in the little hole and got ready for the second wave.  I couldn’t see what he was using but it was sharp, and he pressed it against the back of my neck and scraped all the way down to my lower back, and kept doing this until it was red raw and felt like I’d been lashed.  After this I could hear him preparing some other form of torture and it took all my courage to stop myself from jumping up and running off half naked with no shoes on.  I heard what sounded like glass clinking, some kind of liquid and a lighter, followed by a little popping noise as he applied something to my back and then the kind of suction that Dyson could only dream of.  I was just happy that he didn’t chuck a Molotov cocktail at me as that would not have been surprising.  What he was actually doing was pouring ethanol in to jars, lighting it and sticking them on to my poor back as the ethanol burned and created a flash of heat, then an incredible suction followed by a cold pain.  He did this with twelve jars then left the room, the agony was intense and movement created more pain so I just had to lay there and wish I could have gone to Guantanemo bay instead of China for about fifteen minutes.  When he came back he ripped off the jars and turned on some insanely bright heat lamp which he used to warm up my back, which had got pretty close to absolute zero.  Then he removed the lamp and told me to put on my t-shirt as it was over.  I felt relief like nothing I have ever felt before and then got a shock as I sat up and looked over my shoulder to see one of twelve perfect circles of pure black skin.  These remained very dark for about two weeks then gradually began to fade.

hospital

Being in china has really hit my health, I am nearly three months in now and I am on my fourth cold, I only got food poisoning once which was not too bad, an ear infection, lots of sore throats and coughs and have lost six kilograms.  The worst thing has been the ear infection, I woke up one morning early to cover a friends class and took some cocodamol as my ear was a bit sore, by the end of the two hour class my ear was so painful I was a shivery nervous wreck, I had to cancel the classes for the rest of the day and go to hospital.  The doctor stuck a few things in my ear and sent me to the pharmacy to get some medicine, which did not help, I got some weak antibiotics and a paracetamol based painkiller that was pretty much just homeopathy.  I was very grateful mum had given me a ten pack of cocodamol which I hoped would last me til the antibiotics kicked in the next day.  I don’t know what was happening inside my ear but it felt like the pressure was building up and up and the pain was tremendous, sleeping was pretty much impossible, the cocodamol would give me about twenty or thirty minutes every four hours.  After the morning and the painkillers had run out I was escorted back to the hospital to try and get it sorted out, this seemed to involve never ending waiting, followed by walking from room to room and waiting some more.  This was made all the more worse by all the stares that being western attracts, and the weird way that Chinese hospitals operate, when waiting to see a doctor, you don’t wait outside the room, you walk straight in and put your form on the doctor’s table, while he is seeing a patient, and so do about 6 other people.  Really annoying when you want to see a doctor and when you are being seen by one.  After all this waiting around and getting inspected by doctors and fellow patients nothing was helped, I went home with some more useless medicine and spent the whole night up in agony.  I remember at some point getting up and going to the toilet, half way through I started to black out though and the next thing I remember I just made it back to my bed and lay down, as I got my vision back I started to hear a funny noise in my ear that didn’t go away, after about fifteen minutes I realized that it wasn’t in my ear, I cautiously got up and walked back to the bathroom to investigate.  For some reason, when I blacked out half way though peeing I decided to take the shower hose out of it’s holding, put it in the sink and turn the tap on, before making it to my bed to crash out.  Funny what two days without sleep can do to you.  In the morning I started laying my head on my pillow bad ear down, after a while there was a funny noise and a bit of movement and then blood started coming out of my ear.  Back to hospital, and after 4 hours of walking from room to room getting blood tests, seeing doctors and sitting down waiting with my head in my hands I was told I needed an IV drip, I didn’t really want this but eventually agreed because nothing could really be worse than the pain I was already in.  I was then told I couldn’t have it until it had been okayed with the school, so I had to go back home and wait.  When this was done we made our way back to the hospital for IV, when we got there they told us the IV had just finished for the day, so we went to the emergency room, where we could sort out IV, this however, involved more walking around the hospital, waiting in hallways and random rooms and seeing funny doctors.  We did finally, however, make it to the IV room.  A great big open space with over a hundred chairs and all kinds of different people, some looked close to death and others looked perfectly healthy, IV in China is perfectly normal treatment for a cold. 

After the IV I got home and fell straight asleep for the whole night, my ear continued to bleed for a few days and I felt pretty weak for quite a while.  I kept having IV everyday for a few days and eventually the pain went away.  My hearing however, did not come back, and after 5 weeks I went to see a doctor friend of a friend to try and see if it was recovering properly and if my ear would ever get better.  Being a friend of a friend there wasn’t any of the joy of endless waiting around busying from room to room to wait more, and it was only after a fifteen minute wait that Doctor Hu let us in to his tardis, I mean room, and after an inspection prescribed me some more medicine.  Some of the worst tasting drinks I have ever had and nose drops, funny stuff but they did the job, after about a week or so my hearing got better and I started to feel and interact normally.  Amazing what difference having one ear out of action does to you,   I was constantly mistaking what people were saying, not following conversations properly and whenever walking with someone having to jump around them to make sure they were on my right hand side, which everyone found very funny.

food

I have been here for nearly 3 months now and have cooked twice, and this cooking only involved pasta and bottled sauce.  Luckily restaurants here are so cheap that eating out twice a day is no problem, apart from being a bit bad for you.  The food here is good, there is a wide range of food to try, some of it is great and some of it is terrible.  Xuzhou’s central location in China gives rise to its nickname ‘the gateway to the four provinces’, with the four provinces meaning the four main parts of China, and these also represent the four styles of Chinese cooking.  With Xuzhou’s location it gets a lot of influence from all four provinces, but it also has its own local styles.  If you look up Xuzhou on wikitravel, the first thing it says to do is get a dog meat taco, I haven’t seen or tried these yet.  Luckily dog meat is fairly expensive and a bit fancy so you won’t usually get it by accident.  You will however get some things by accident, there are these great street barbeques you get around town called shao kao, where they cook meat and bread and fish on skewers on these long thin coal barbeques and then bring them over to your table to finish off on another barbeque before you eat.  I visited one a few weeks ago with some other teachers for a meal, and we ordered a selection of skewered meats and some bread and vegetables, we started eating and got to the chicken skewers which we wrapped up in tortillas, Charlie and I eat ours down and Dan took one bite and said ‘that’s not chicken’, he was right, it was testicles.  Charlie had very sneakily realised that that was no chicken but continued to eat just so that he could see the look on our faces when we realized what we were eating.  Luckily I eat mine obliviously just thinking it was very soft and spongy chicken, and had finished before Dan bit in to his and saw Charlie’s smile and put two and two together.  Apart from that the meal was really good.

There are basic restaurants where meals start at 40p, and places where you can order a steak for £20, and similar to Thailand I find there is a general rule that the less money you pay, the better the food, the expensive western style restaurants give terrible quality western dishes at pretty much the same prices as western countries, or you can buy some dumplings on the side of the road that will cost next to nothing and taste great.  There is also a big divide in portions, Chinese restaurants give massive portions, so it’s always best if you go with several people, being so cheap you can quite happily order four or five different dishes between two people and get a shock when a truck load of food arrives.  The western restaurants on the other hand cost a truck load, and the portions are not so much smaller.  However I’ve just been to a fancy European restaurant tonight and got goulash soup, garlic bread, Caesar salad, a pizza, piece of cake and a coke for £10, which isn’t really much to complain about, but for the same price I could buy 40 of my favourite eggy bread sandwiches, which is over a month of lunches,

I went to a fish restaurant with a Chinese friend, we ordered some fish soup, some Xuzhou sushi style fresh fish and a turtle.  The soup came and it was nice, a bit boney but that’s alright because in China every meat is boney, you just spit the bones out on the table and enjoy your meal.  Then the sushi style raw fish came, it looked like they had just put a fish on a plate, especially as when she put it down on the table it started flopping around, its fins were still contracting and you could see its mouth and gills moving.  I’m pretty sure it was dead, because its head had been cut off and when the waiter opened the fish up, it had been gutted and prepared so that the flesh was lying there inside.  Disgusting.  I was very happy when my Chinese friend seemed to be as shocked as I was and told them to take it away and bring back just the flesh, we had it with a wasabi type sauce and it was delicious.  Shocking to think though that the idea of the dish is to eat it out of something still moving

settling in

Settling in

Getting settled in to this place has been quite difficult for me, or a lot more difficult than I imagined. And I think this is due to a combination of everything that it so alien about Xuzhou, or maybe I should say so alien about me being here. People stare a lot, walking down the street most people will look at you for a few seconds, some will stare at you continuously as they walk past, some will stop walking, stand still and watch as you walk past them and off in to the distance. A lot of young guys especially have a tendency to shout out ‘hello’, as this is the only words they know in English. They find it hilarious, and it is usually hilarious to us too. This curiosity that the locals here have for the foreigners can lead to some very funny encounters, the other day when we were sat in the town square enjoying some ice cream in the sun we started to hear some music in the distance, it gradually got louder and louder and we struggled to find out where is was coming from as we couldn’t see any large speakers around. After a while we realized that there was an old guy walking through the square directly towards us, with something hanging around his neck. This turned out to be a speaker, and it was blaring out traditional Chinese music at a very high volume. He walked right up to us and stood there for about a minute deafening us with his high pitch music and just had a good look, then he gave us a little nod and turned away, started walking, and turned off his music. We had a good laugh. A few days later we were in a bar having some drinks, curiosity got the better of a drunk Chinese guy and he came over to investigate, we had already noted him earlier on from doing a particularly cool dance involving 2 thumbs up , closed eyes and a lot of nodding. He wanted to tell one of us that he had seen them do karaoke and it was ‘wery gooda’, and that we were all his very good friends, luckily one of the guys spoke Chinese and was able to translate what he was saying. A few of us lit up cigarettes and without having 2 puffs he had pinched them out of our lips and thrown them on the floor, presently he pulled out his own very expensive cigarettes and stuck them in our lips and lit them up, then a round of beers arrived and he went on stage to sing us a song. This turned out to be one of the most energetic performances I have ever seen, he sang a song in Chinese screaming as loud as a banshee, at one point he was on his knees, belting out some Chinese love song going red in the face through exertion. He then blew us some kisses and left the stage, we were laughing so hard we were almost falling off our chairs, my stomach muscles were in pain but it was just so hilarious I couldn’t stop laughing. Luckily he was a bit too drunk to realize our state, or he may have been offended that we were laughing at his singing, but it was just the whole situation, and this has happened a few times now, it’s like being caught up in a real life sketch show, where things start off rather strange, and get stranger and stranger, and you just can’t help but laugh. And what makes it all the more funny is the looks it draws from the locals, they have a slight look of amusement on their face and you can see them curiously wondering ‘what the hell is that weird laowai laughing at’.

The other thing that hits you about Xuzhou is the noise, there is a real hustle and bustle to this place and everyone seems to have developed desensitization to the noise. From my apartment the first thing I get in the morning is surprisingly birdsong, which is nice, but it doesn’t last, it is followed shortly by the army barracks that lies behind my block. This involves lots of screaming and marching at 6am. As the day begins people start driving, and driving means lots of beeping. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Asian driving styles what they have done is replace looking in your mirrors with beeping your horn, and this results in a lot of beeping. They also have a system that means when you are in front of someone, it’s your right of way. So if you are driving along a typical 5 lane street through town and want to move in to the lane on your left you just have to take a look, if there is no-one there you beep your horn and move across, if there is someone there and their car is a meter from the front of yours you beep your horn and move across, and visa versa. Also if you overtake, you beep your horn, if you undertake you beep your horn, or if anyone overtakes or undertakes you, you beep your horn, if people cross the road you beep your horn, and if anyone takes more than 0.1 of a second to start moving after a red light you beep your horn and don’t let go until at least a few seconds after they’ve moved away. As the roads are always busy here, beeping is a non stop all day background noise. At least Xuzhou’s airport is far away enough so that we don’t have planes flying over the city, this is very fortunate. Unfortunately one of China’s largest military bases is located nearby and on most days they fly their jets right over the city, these can be really loud, and even supersonic sometimes apparently.
To help combat the pollution problem facing so many Chinese cities these little electric bikes, or e bikes were dreamed up, these can be basic bicycles with electric motors all the way up to fancy looking mopeds that nip silently along running of a battery similar to that of a car’s. These batteries are the cause of the trouble though, as they are the most desirable part of the bike in a thief’s eyes, so as well as being locked up to the bike, the bikes are also rigged with super sensitive alarms. These go off all the time, and are always going off everywhere, because the e bikes are always parked everywhere. Sometimes just walking past one sets the alarm off, and a car driving past, or a gust of wind, even a loud noise will also get alarms going. The military jets I mentioned earlier, they will set off a whole wave of alarms. It’s just lucky that e bike alarms don’t set e bike alarms off, but even if they did, I’m sure it wouldn’t affect anyone. No-one takes any notice of alarms, people will walk up to their bike and load all their shopping in to the baskets and storage areas oblivious that the alarm has been ringing the whole time, or they will go and sit on their bike and chat with friends before departing, talking over the alarm that has been ringing since the second they approached the bike.
One of the most distinctive noises about Xuzhou, and China in general is also the most unpleasant, and this is the noise of someone charging up a nice phlegmy spit ball to discharge wherever they happened to be standing, and this will be wherever they are standing. The airport, shopping centre, street, park, restaurant and even the hospital, I don’t think that it’s allowed in the school though luckily.
Construction is also a constant source of noise, on the large and small scale. Near the centre of town there is a new development area where they are probably going to build a new gigantic shopping centre, anyhoo they must be doing the foundations because it’s just a big yard at the moment and every now and then a terrific boom goes off that makes the whole city shake. I’m guessing this is them clearing for foundations. All around town there are big building going up, lots of shopping centre style buildings, blocks of flats and then lots of destruction of the old buildings. And on the small scale there are always pavements being turned upside down, shops being gutted out and rebuilt and small building getting radical construction changes in minimal time. I can walk past somewhere in the morning and there will be one old workman squatting down with a small drill with the hammer mode set on working at 10 meters of solid concrete steps, the type of thing that would normally require a giant stand up breaker in England. But at the end of the day when I walk past it’ll all be broken and taken away. And these drills set on hammer mode can be heard from all directions, as can angle grinders, hammers and just about any other building based noise.

But like the locals, you learn to ignore all these noises and they just fade in to the background. But you are still aware of all the noise of everything in the back of your mind, it’s one of the things in China that ensures you are constantly switched on, you can never be sure what’s going to happen. Whether it’s crossing the road and having to watch out for people running red lights, or going when the green man is lit up and having to dodge the silent e bikes that come from all directions, or ordering something from a restaurant and never being entirely sure you’ll get what you order, or who’s going to stare and who’s going to scream hello in your face as you as you walk along the street trying to drift away in what is slowly becoming everyday life. Something will always hit you smack in the face and stop you from assimilating in to the everyday anonymous existence of city life. This is good.

teaching

teaching

I was very nervous about starting my classes, but luckily I was broken in to it well with lots of co-teaching, Sharing the lessons with an experienced teacher so they could jump in and save me if it all stated going terribly wrong, thankfully this has not happened, and I won’t say yet because I’m on my own now and if it goes wrong there’s no-one there to save me. But all the classes have been going well, some not so well, but generally pretty good. It can be a great feeling when you finish a class and feel that you’ve done a good job. After about three weeks of me being in the class observing, co-teaching and teaching the three year olds have started to warm to me, with only one girl bursting in to tears in today’s class, a massive improvement on last week!

I also had the joy of teaching a new class of 4 and 5 year olds in the classroom with glass walls, which all the parents took no hesitation in surrounding. Nerve racking for me but luckily the class went very well and it was a joy to teach. The only problem was the room was particularly warm, the school is moving to a new location soon so they decided to move the air conditioners first, which unfortunately coincided with the weather getting hot, and this was made even worse by being in what is basically a green house with no windows running and jumping around with a load of kids. I came out quite wet, and shaking, but it was still the best class I’ve had.

There is a massive variation in the classrooms, we teach kids up to about fifteen and then there are one on one classes with adults too. Some of the classes are small, and some are large, some noisy, some quiet, and despite what people seem to think about well disciplined obedient Chinese kids some of them are little shits. But there is a consolation, in China there is no problem with touching kids in class so picking up their book and whacking them one over the head doesn’t result in loss of career or addition to a certain register. But mostly the kids are great, very well behaved and hard working, especially considering that this is a private school and when they attend they have already spent a whole day in school or are on their weekend.

first week

To Xuzhou

Things are going very well so far, my flight was very good, a nice Chinese style dinner and full English breakfast. Finding the train station was not so easy, it turns out that there are 4 train stations in Beijing, and I didn’t know which had the train that goes to Xuzhou. After a few phone calls my taxi driver assured me that Beijing south train station was the one I need, and that there was a fast train that would take an hour and a half. Much better than the seven hours I was expecting. Xuzhou conveniently lies in the middle of China’s ultra modern high speed rail network, with the fastest trains in the world stopping here between Beijing and Shanghai. This sounded great. I arrived at the train station that could have been mistaken for a major airport, and went to the counter and asked for a train to Xuzhou. I was told ‘sleeper’ and shown the times, thirteen hours overnight. When I asked for a fast train she shook her head and told me ‘subway’, so not only had I missed the fast train, I was in the wrong train station. So I got back in a taxi and after getting stuck in traffic left the car on the side of the road and got taken on the subway with the taxi driver. When I finally arrived at the train station I had a couple of hours to wait until my train departed so I sat down against a wall and had a rest. Until a curious old Chinese man in about six jackets decided to have a chat, which was very one sided because I could not understand a single word the guy was saying, and responded to everything he said with ‘ting bu dong’, I don’t understand. But he didn’t give up and spent a good half an hour talking to me about I don’t know what. I though that with Beijing being a big international city it would have a lot of westerners and people who can speak/understand a bit of English. But from the moment I left the airport I didn’t see a single non Chinese person or anyone who could speak English.
When the gates opened there was a mad dash to the train that involved lots of pushing, squeezing and haste as if if you weren’t quick enough you’d end up on the floor sitting on your luggage for thirteen hours. However, when I reached the train I realised I had a bed booked, and so did everybody else. I then slept straight through for pretty much thirteen hours. I was only awoken by a group of old Chinese boys who were having some beers and though I might like to be woken up and included in the party.

Xuzhou

I arrived at Xuzhou at 6 am and was met by a few people from the school and taken to my apartment, I was bought a fried egg sandwich thing for breakfast that was delicious, and has since become my most favourite thing in the world. The food sellers are right outside my house every day from morning until evening and I barely walk past without buying one, and with them only costing 25p I can afford to.
My apartment was a lot bigger than I expected, being told is was small I did not expect a big bedroom, double bed, living room, corner group sofa, kitchen and dining area. But the best thing is that it’s right in the centre of town and about 5 minutes from school. I then had a seven hour nap and got up to go to dinner and meet a couple of the other teachers. Two other English guys the same age as me, funnily enough one of them had just studied at Winchester uni, so we had a good chat about Winchester. This was quite surprising for both of us, to be in the middle of China and having a chat about the bars and nightlife back in Winchester.

After dinner we stayed to have a few beers and watch the band perform in the bar area, I was given lots of advice and warnings about living in Xuzhou, Dan was half way through telling me how everyday brings something funny and unexpected when Jane butted in saying ‘Hey, monkey guy’s got two new monkeys’. I am still yet to meet monkey guy.

The next day I was taken in to school and introduced to everyone, showed around, given some training and a desk. We went out for Japanese food for lunch, one of the places where they cook the food in front of you and put it straight on your plate, which was very tasty. And then for dinner we went to a little Chinese restaurant next to the school for some more good food. That night I got sick, but was alright to go back in to school for training the next day. After a couple more days training I started to observe classes, from three year olds up to fifteen year olds, and did this for the rest of the week.

On my first day off the other English guys and I had a walk around the city, to the lake, and up the mountain. Which was more like a big hill but everyone calls it a mountain. The weather was glorious and Xuzhou looked beautiful from the top, with a 2 mile wide man made lake glistening in the sun. The city itself stretches out as far as you can see and looks giant, lots of tall buildings and development. Amazing considering this huge city is the only the 37th largest in china, and about one ninth the size of Shanghai. So after gazing over Xuzhou for a while we decided to get back down the mountain, which turned out to be a lot easier than the hour walk up. A metal slide has been built that resembles a bob sleigh track, but rather than a bob sleigh you get a tray with what looked like shopping trolley wheels and a lever to slow yourself down. Hurtling down was hilarious, the little tray could pick up quite a lot of speed and would raise up the sides on corners, a shame that it was over in about a minute. We then went on to happy hour at a lake side bar, had some drinks and played lots of pool with Chinese people. After this we decided to hit a nightclub for some more drinks, I was taken to bar 99, a pretty swanky looking place with chandeliers and security guards in SWAT uniforms. It had an atmosphere similar to that of a wedding, everyone was drunk and dancing their hearts out. The dance floor is scattered with standing tables that you can put your very expensive drinks on and pick at a fruit selection. And there is a little stage that you occasionally get dragged up on to by a random Chinese person for a dance in front of the whole crowd. Everything calms down at 2am and you go and get some food, MacDonald’s or dumplings, as these are the only 24hour places. Everything else is closed, and everyone seems to be asleep, after about midnight all 2 million people apparently go indoors and call it a night. There are barely any cars on the road apart from the big trucks that wash the roads so that they can get nice and dirty again the next day.