How to celebrate a birthday in China

Of course I just had to do it at Pizza Hut again, it has more or less become a tradition to eat at Pizza Hut when I have birthday in China. So I asked some friends to Join me, first Bella that I met with for hotpot this Wednesday, and she brought her friend Luna too, then Aaron, an American guy that works in the peace corps and I have befriended, and he brought Amanda who is a quite newly arrived co-worker of his and finally Jane, another friend of Aaron, I think his Chinese teacher actually, that I was out with this Friday. They brought some gifts, or promises of gifts, which was really unnecessary but still very appreciated. Bella and I discovered that we had accidentally, maybe, got the VIP ticket instead of the normal ticket, which meant VIP area access and 150 kuai worth of drinks. Lucky Lucky! (or so we thought)

The Food was great, well great might be a strong word but when the craving for pizza is in then it is great; we had pizza of course but first a tiny pasta dish with curry sauce and garlic bread and we ended everything with two pieces of cake for birthday cake. After that I went home to leave my camera, I just didn't want to bring it to the party. I picked up a bag of bilar as well, but we totally forgot about that and I think it is still in Bella's bag. Picture from left to right: Jane, Johan, Bella, Luna, Amanda and Aaron.

We took two taxis to the Hemp House to get on the free shuttle bus that would go from there and that's when our trouble started; the free shuttle bus was more a minibus and there were too many people waiting, so we decided to go there by ourselves instead, with two guys joining we were two full taxis now, but we didn't know much more than the name of the place and the taxi drivers hardly had any idea of where that was, except perhaps the general direction. So at some point we, that is my taxi, decided that we might have better luck finding it by foot, and I guess paying a taxi driver to drive around in blind wasn't much of an attractive thought, so we started walking around, up and down a long street first and then just by chance we ran into the group from the other taxi again. With our newly gathered forces we started asking local people of where it was and after about 30-45 minutes of walking around we finally found the place.

And it was not really what I had expected, the warehouse was just a outdoor area framed by big transport containers on all sides and just a small opening. The VIP stamp caused some confusion, I think they actually didn't sell any VIP ticket so they just sold them as normal, but in the end we managed to get 5 free beers each, which got Bella quite wasted after just a short time. When we arrived the place was really crowded, and most people there where Chinese but as time passed that began to shift, more and more westerners arrived and the Chinese dropped of one by one it seemed, I guess they were just tired and needed to go home and sleep, at 11pm? We ourselves left quite early, Bella realised that she was too drunk and left around 2am and Jane was getting tired and neither Aaron or Amanda liked the music or the dancing so we decided to leave, leaving Luna alone actually but she seemed to have to much fun anyway, I think she really did, I talked to her today and she had apparently joined an after-party at one of the DJ's place.