90 kuai water

Yesterday I spent basically the whole day in bed and even after I got up I stayed in the hostel until evening, had dinner time breakfast here and a small dinner later. During dinner I started talking to and drinking with an American girl and a bit later we joined another group of people just drinking and talking. One of them is actually the owner of this hostel and with some help of one of the guys to translate (boss didn't speak any English at all) he managed to get us to complain about as much as possible, which wasn't easy because the hostel is actually really good, especially to this price.

We stayed in the Hostel Cafe drinking beer and shots until around 1.30am and then we were beyond the point of no return and just had to go out, so Zack, our American translator guy (who is also an IELTS examinator actually), who has been around here for some time took us to a small bar or bar area that should have been bustling with party people, in summer, where we got ourselves some more drinks. They did try to cheat us there, first we all got a rum and coke made of crap rum, for only 10 kuai though, so I ordered another one made with Bacardi black that cost 20 kuai, after that they tried to convince us that I only paid for the first one and they actually managed to confuse Zack so entirely that he believed them and apologized for us, it turned out that they had been trying to cheat us though.

That place was pretty boring so we walked over to one of the bigger clubs nearby and that was pretty fun, a lost more action like some guy being thrown out when we came and other stuff just going on all the time. People are not as friendly and open here as in Chengdu though, but it works out anyway because the clubs are set up more like western clubs so there is not the same kind of isolation. I lost both Mimi and Zack several times and just went around having fun, at the end of the night I was dancing with a girl that could speak a little (or probably a lot, she claimed to be fluent or at least very high level) Japanese, it was around 6am already and both of us were really thirsty so I went to the bar and said 水 and the bartender brought us three tiny bottles of water. I finished mine in about two seconds and as I was opening my second one the bartender squeezed out: "That will be 120 kuai", to which I exclaimed loudly "You gotta be kidding me!!!". Apparently he was and he probably got a bit scared of me, I wasn't really sure though so I stuck around and the girl I was with had found her boyfriend (she said it wasn't but it was something at least), finally he gathered his courage though and gave me a note saying 90 instead of 120. I guess I could actually have left before then but I didn't want to be an asshole so I paid up. That is really the most expensive water I've ever had, it was three bottles of Evian though, even though they were really tiny (20-25cl).

I finally had totally lost Zack and Mimi so I took taxi back to the hostel, to which Zack had luckily convinced me to take a calling card that I could show to the driver to get home safely.