Party in Hong Kong (part 1)

As of yet we haven't really been out partying; we had a few drinks near my home the other day and last night we drank some beer with the BBQ but otherwise we have taken it easy. On Wednesday we have plans to go out to a club with a friend and on Saturday I have arranged a big local party and BBQ to show Maja how we really party here, should be quite fun.

Playing in Hong Kong (part 1)

There is a lot to do in Hong Kong but mostly you need to have contacts for it, or at least it will be a lot easier if you do. Fortunately I have a few contacts and one of the companies I'm involved with likes to arrange things for their employees with families on holidays and last Friday (Good Friday as it was) was one of those times. For me it involved some teacher training in the morning and that Maja didn't have to join, but the buffet mentioned in Culinary Hong Kong and the team building we had after both Maja and Ariel joined. The whole day was great fun and I got to know some of the teachers a bit better. We had planned to go out and do something in the evening after but we were so tired and dehydrated from the games and eating that we just went down for a drink at the hotel bar near my home.

My main friend and contact for doing outdoor fun things in Hong Kong is my good friend and colleague from UK, Marc Rimmer, he has worked with outdoor sports in Hong Kong before and made some good friends in the field. So he arranged for us to go out wakeboarding with one of his friends and we had an awesome day playing in the water yesterday, but so exhausted now and muscle aches all over.

I think there won't be any more play like this but perhaps we will do something in the weekend and we should go to Ocean Park on Friday.

Me trying to wakeboard, I did get up on my second try
but I couldn't manage any other impressive feat.

Maja trying to wakeboard as well, and in fact she was better than me.

Marc testing out as well.

Finally Marc's friend and our instructor showing us how it is done.

New Year in Hong Kong

As this post might seem like complaining I must first announce that I have finally decided that I like Hong Kong; there are some things about the general state here that is not all great but all in all it is good. Basically I like it here and I intend to stay for a while.

The holidays however are not great, this is just my view of things and is because Christmas (especially Christmas Eve) and New Years are the most important holidays in Sweden and even though New Years Eve is always completely over-rated it still has that special charm of being so. So well I have been a bit home-sick these days. But we have to make the best out of situation and I already told about my Christmas experiences so now let's cover New Years Eve:

From the very start I decided that I did not want to end up in some extremely overcrowded area of Hong Kong where millions of people gather up to watch the fireworks over Victoria harbor. I tried to arrange some small party in my flat again but this time I hardly got any support at all, only Steve, one of my new Hong Kong friends were up for that idea. Instead Steve invited me to join the normal (normal as in same as always) group of people for a party somewhere else but since I didn't want to bother them too much, being the only gwailo (foreigner), I had my dinner alone at home and didn't head out until closer to 11pm.

This was a big mistake though because even though they were in a private flat (an office it turned out) in TST the only entrance was located just by Ferry pier which just happens to be one of the best locations to watch the fireworks, ergo the streets where massively crowded and police had set up roadblocks. I did manage to get through a few of those roadblocks, the first one by walking inside a shopping mall and the second by having Steve explain that I was heading to a private party (and delivering ice-cream), there was a third one that I never got passed though so even if I were only a few hundred meters from my friends (actually a lot less if we were to draw a straight line through space) it was impossible to reach them.

So at about 11.45pm I got stuck on street with thousands of strangers, it was also nearly impossible to get a signal but after about a hundred tries I managed to get hold of a semi-sleeping Joyce and greet her Happy New Year prematurely and then I managed to do the same with Ariel even closer to the strike of midnight. And close as I was to the harbor and the event of the night, the fireworks, I couldn't see them either because of the massive building at the end of the street. It is not as bad as it might sound though, basically I just had to wait 20 minutes to get to the party and it is just another party after all, I didn't have any expectations at all for this night anyway.

They opened the blockade at about 12.15am and less than 5 minutes later I was up at the 16th floor where my friends had a perfect view of the harbor and I'm guessing they must have enjoyed the fireworks a lot more than I did. After that it was mainly drinking and games and we kept playing until about 3am when I had had enough and went home.

HAPPY NEWYEAR EVERYBODY!!!

Ps. this year I will not get stuck on a random street on the other side of the world, I am coming home for Christmas and New Year.

Christmas in Asia

Once again I failed to come home for Christmas and it bothers me. This year was not nearly as bad as last year when I had to work all week for Christmas but even though we had a lot of fun I still feel the distance to a real Christmas. On Christmas Eve we had a party in my flat; it was Joyce's and Man's idea so of course they were there, Janice, Kate and Ariel came too and Kate brought her boyfriend Tony, Joyce also invited a mutual friend of theirs, Wilson, and Almen and Lone came too, so we were 6 girls and 4 guys, which was a lot better mix than I had ever hoped for actually.

It might seem like a small group but with an apartment this small it still got quite crowded, especially since everybody should bring their own dish but because of work no one had time to prepare anything so they all had to use my kitchen and with a tiny kitchen like mine we had to go in turns and all the cooking took several hours to finish. Almen and Lone were rather clever and ordered Pizza instead, which took two hours to deliver but still arrived at about the same time all the rest of the food was finished.

Everyone’s dishes:

• Joyce - Pasta with pasta sauce (basically "spagetti och köttfärsås")
• Man - Chicken wings
• Janice - Brought a homemade cheesecake so she never had to occupy the kitchen.
• Kate and Ariel - A vegetable/fruit salad.
• Johan - Meatballs from IKEA and chocolate cake.
• Almen and Lone - Pizza hut set with pizza, lasagna and soup.
• Then I just guess Wilson and Tony got the Sushi.
  

I had planned to make pancakes too but we were too full and everyone left before we got hungry enough again.

Tony brought his Wii too so for the first time I got to try the Wii-mote and play things like Mario-cart, boxing (which was a real exercise), bowling and tennis. We had gift exchange too; lucky draw where everybody bought one gift and then fortune got to decide who got what. We numbered all the gifts and had numbers in a Santa-hat and the score in bowling decided who to draw first. You should have seen Joyce playing bowling by the way, damn the girl can stance, hahaha.

I got Ariel's gift, a two piece set of cute cat's where one holds curtains and the other is a storage box for napkins. Almen got my gift which was a beginner's guide to palm-reading book. And of course there were lots of photos taken and many joyful sounds so soon after the gift exchange we got a complaint call that we were too noisy.

We still kept playing a bit more silently and had the cakes and some Champagne that Wilson had brought but around 2am everybody started to get tired and left. I think that was a bit premature and was slightly disappointed but what can I do? Everyone else had been working all day and it was pretty late. I still sit with a lot of leftovers now so I don't have to buy and food today.

On Christmas Day I went out with Ariel and her friends; first we had hot-pot, which was actually a bit too expensive and not so fun for me; it is just not easy to join a group that speaks another language. After that we had a room in a club in TST but there had been some booking mistake and after less than an hour we were basically thrown out and moved to another club, which had a significantly better room; much bigger and with a nice view that I doubt anyone noticed.
We also had gifts exchange and I "won" a wallet from Quicksilver, so I guess it's time for me to start using wallet again, after about five or six years with my metal cardholder. My Klappa Panda from IKEA (IKEA is useful) went to a random girl that I don't know, I think Candy's friend. Ariel got a Hello Kitty play set for making labels.

The whole gift exchange was rather complicated, and took a long long time as we were about 20 people exchanging. First we had a lucky draw like on Christmas Eve but then we went through the whole group and had a blind exchange; basically your eyes were covered and someone pointed at someone else’s gift and you could say yes or no to exchange it with yours, if you said no three times you got to keep the one you had. I don't know the first one I had because I didn't see who finally got it but it was something from Sasa (a cosmetics store) so I guess something for girls, then I had some kind of first-aid for lonely men; something that would supposedly make you more charming, after that I got a tie which I finally lost to Fish and got myself the wallet, which I'm pretty happy about actually.

After that we played all night and had lots to drink, Ariel left around 4am I think but I stayed to the very end where the all nighters went to have breakfast at MacDonald's, which I despise by the way; what is the point of only serving ham stuff and nasty potato cakes when you actually have the means to make real burgers? And even when you ask nicely they completely refuse to do it, and it's just bureaucracy. It was still fun though and I didn't step through my door at home until around 8am.

Today I have to try and clean up the rest of the party (it is not as bad as the girls did all the dishes after dinner and we were actually rather clean), finish the leftover food and lesson plan my classes for tomorrow.

yao ling ling

Last night they had a fund raiser for the local rugby team at Carol's too, for this they had hired a pole-dancer who did a 10 minute show in the evening, a MALE pole-dancer; black leather west and tight fitting black briefs, very sexy and extremely gay. To make money for the team they had a lottery going on so the players and other people involved with the team were running around convincing people to buy lottery tickets to win the big price; a bottle of wine, or a small price; random funny stuff.

Ryan and Andrew (US and Aussie friends) were convinced early on to get a ticket but I wasn't so easy to convince, eventually I also came through and bought number 21 from a guy with a panda hat. Not long after I paid my 20 kuai for the ticket Kelly showed up and complained that I hadn't bought a ticket from her so I ended up paying another 20 kuai for number 100. So when they started drawing the first round of tickets we sat there with four tickets between us, the girls with us only seemed to care for dancing so they hadn't bought any.

In the beginning they mostly gave out the funny stuff but the last one of the first round was a bottle of wine but of course I didn't get it, I think that one was for 007 actually. They did several drawings through the night but my numbers never came up, I heard 23, 19, 18, 010, lots of 00x numbers also; there was actually a lot more numbers drawn than actual gifts because two numbers out of three were never claimed. And so it came to the last drawing; they still had several bottles of wine left and we still had four potential winners. Of course there were several misses first, I heard 102, and 103, and for Andrew's 62 there came a 61. At this point Andrew was standing behind me yelling 62 and suddenly he got the reply he wanted, 62!!! Andrew was the winner of a 2006 Bordeaux and as soon as he knew it he announced wine for everybody.

When he got up with his bottle they had already started drawing for the next one, yao ling yao (101), dammit so close! But no one came to claim it, another one: yao ling ling, say again?!? one zero zero, oh yes box!

Not long after we had gathered a load of wine glasses, but even sharing a few glasses with other friends; Kelly got one for selling me the ticket of course, Aaron had one too, and Andrew and Ryan had some other friends, the girls with is are not much of drinkers so there was a lot of wine between the three of us. I got pretty well loaded before I left that night.

Clubs in Hong Kong

After being here for a few weeks and seen much of the night life I actually had the feeling that there are no clubs here and that local people don't really go out, fortunately I was wrong though; last night I went out with an American friend that I met the first week I was here and he finally brought me to a real club, with local people. I did cost a lot though, entrance alone was 220HKD and even though I didn't really drink there I still spent 120HKD on drinks (I ordered one but for some reason got two). It did become a long night, I took a taxi back at about 4.30 or 5.00 in the morning but at least I have nothing to do today so it was pretty fine.

Nightlife

Already on the first night I came here I got to experience Hong Kong night life, this was actually the worst night life experience I had though. I met a random stranger from UK and we went out drinking together, soon Ariel joined us and when time drew closer to midnight we decided to try a club. The club we went to is called "Why bar" and can be found in TST pretty close to my hostel actually, we paid our 160HKD each (free for girls though) and went inside to find it... totally empty, there was not a single patron there when we arrived. Later three others came in and the six of us actually managed to have some good time, got a few drinks for free and enjoyed the night until about 2 or 3 in the morning.

Since then I have tried quite a lot of different things; One night I went out alone, since no one at the hostel wanted to go out, and managed to find some foreigners in central that brought me around in Lan Kwai Fong in Central, which is one of the bigger bar scenes in Hong Kong and is where basically all, and only, the foreigners go. Before the end of the night we had explored Wan Chai as well as central and I had seen the sun rise over Victoria harbor. This was so far the most affordable night since we just kept buying beer at Seven-11 for 6HKD a can instead of the 50+HKD in the bars and I took the MTR both there and back again.

Another night I just spent in a bar in TST, this time with more than 3 people, and talked to some old professor and got treated Bacardi 151 (which apparently is 75.5% rum) by my Canadian friend from the hostel.

I made a Greek friend at the hostel too and together we explored a more local scene when we went to an open mike night at a live restaurant, that is a restaurant that has live music by local talents, and got tipped off by that owner, who my Greek friend is out having drinks with tonight, to go to one of two towers in Causeway Bay and explore the karaoke scene; it took a while for us to actually find any lounge karaoke but jumping around on 10 different floors (which is only half of one of the buildings she talked about) we did see a lot of bars (that were basically exactly the same).

Mostly a night out has cost me around 300-400HKD, but like the longest night I only spent about 100HKD (and I still bought one beer in a bar) and another I should have spent way more but my Canadian brother is, or pretends to be, loaded so he bought a lot of drinks for us.

Singapura

I think staying with Deming I seriously hurt his health both physical and financial, from the first night we had dinner with his friend Lynette, who is really cool by the way, and cute too for that matter. Who we also got to see a lot of the rest of the week, and after that we went to an Irish bar, Scruffy Murphy's, on the east coast. It is damn funny how everybody in Singapore knows every single place there by name and semi accurate descriptions; people always asked me where I had been and I never remembered the places, but there wasn't a single person who couldn't get it right on the first try when I said something like "Irish place somewhere on the east coast" or "Some shopping mall close this or that MRT station", truly amazing, I can probably do that in Lund but the size is slightly different.

Turns out that the people I met the most where the ones I had least expected to meet at all, except for Deming of course who I was staying with I mostly saw Yi Ling (one zero in Chinese) who came and met us at the bar that Evening. Yan Wei who I thought I would spend a bit more time with was really busy so I actually didn't meet her until Saturday lunch and later again on my last night in Singapore. Kelly too, who share my birthday, hardly had any time at all but we did go out for dinner, clubbing and finally a lunch too, with Elgin joining everything except clubbing. Kunshan and Glen I didn't see at all, nor did I meet any of the people that were in Lund same time as Yan Wei.

Day by day the story goes:

1. A few beers the first night with Deming, Lynette and Yi Ling, then I pretty much crashed at 1am when we got back home.
   
2. Lunch with Yi Ling and a brief visit to IKEA to buy some Elderberry flower juice concentrate for Karen who I met for dinner in the evening. This was after waking up at 6.30am and wondering why the hell I couldn't sleep though, then finally finding that Deming didn't get up until 9.30ish. Meeting Karen was really nice, we had Chinese food at one of the central buildings on Orchard road, and she seems to be doing well with her work here and is as lovely as always.
   
   The hours between lunch and dinner I spent walking in the really nice botanical garden and the national orchid garden. That would have been so much more fun had I not been alone and if I just had had a camera, I actually tried to make Lynette come and join me since she had half a day off, but unfortunately it was the first half of the day so that didn't happen. I ended up making my own way home and after some major confusion at bus stops I finally came back and crashed before the clock struck 10pm.
   
3. Again waking up around 5-6am I spent my whole morning at home and had lunch at a local place, but western food it turns out. The evening was my first club night but before that I met up with Yi Ling for some drinks, she had taken the afternoon off and we explored the central happy hours (still rather expensive I might say) and even before dinner I had gotten so tired I could hardly sit straight. Nothing to do but power through though and even though I might not have been the best conversationalist at the Italian dinner with Yi Ling and her friend at least I didn't fall asleep.
   
   Deming joined us there and after that we went from bar to bar, meeting up with random people, friends of Yi Ling mostly, and had quite a lot of red bull vodkas. By around 1am we found our way to a club called The Butter Factory (for butter cookies I guess) where eventually Lynette joined us too. Still being tired when we got there I wasn't much fun I guess, but by the time they closed at 3am I had somehow turned around and gotten really energetic, so we headed out for the main clubbing attraction that Singapore offers (or so they say), Zouk, a clubbing venue that offers the most expensive drinks from multiple bars and several dance floors, we only had water and that was free.
   
   We pretty much stayed at a dance floor for about half an hour until they closed it down and we had to move on to the next one, ending up at a pretty boring techno floor at 4.30 or 5am where I managed to drop my shades and dance them to pieces, which Lynette found rather fun and Yi Ling sorry, she actually offered to buy new ones, I think Deming didn't even notice it.
   
   Eventually we gave up though and went for some after party food where I accidentally ate a piece of minced prawn that nearly had me throw up, I really don't take prawn. Yi Ling and her friend Marcus pretty much fell asleep on the way back but Deming and I stayed up a bit longer when we came back. Clubbing in Singapore is fun, but really expensive, entrance fees to places is around 20-40 S$, which is basically 100-200kr, and drinks are worse than in Sweden, Deming is really happy to buy jugs of drinks though, sharing on a few people, which is fun but it's probably not too good for his wallet.

to be continued...

Back home

Back home I spent the first day just hanging with my sister and Sofia and later in the evening I had dinner with them and mom and dad. The day after was a lot more eventful with meeting loads of friends for real Swedish pizza and then drinking too much, first at the restaurant then at Maja's, Sofia's and Madde's apartment in Klostergården and then later at Mat's place also in Klostergården and then finally walk in to town to have a real Swedish kebab at kebabvagnen, and take a 150kr taxi back to Bjärred, I really do miss cheap drink and really cheap taxis. It was the first time to meet Sandra's boyfriend Varij, that was quite interesting.

More things going on on Saturday with dad's 60th birthday party and all the family coming over, I was a bit hangover half the day but was fine in the evening, just really tired. The party was fine, lots of gifts for dad, among them was mainly an exclusive bottle of Cognac that we tried later on, I also got to give my gifts I had brought, unfortunately we have to wait for the correct ones for cousin Anna, aunt Gordana and uncle Per, they were all wrong. We had great barbecued lamb and sausages and a great cake and things too, I was actually worried I would start gaining weight already but it was still OK the morning after. For some reason everybody was really tired so everybody went home early and I slept around 11pm already.

Between earthquakes and storms

We just had some drinks at the Hemp house garden, Hemp house's own little outdoor serving area, when suddenly a heavy wind rose and started shaking all the parasols and not long after it had started raining heavily. We, who had been considering giving up for a while already decided to ditch the place and go home so we headed down for the street to get a taxi. We stood there looking for a taxi for about 30 minutes in the rain, there were not many out and most of them were taken and the few that weren't ignored us for some reason.

The rain was still very heavy but rather than just standing there in it we decided to take a walk to a "nearby" McDonald's at TianFu square, only about 40 minutes walk it turned out, actually the goal was not TianFu square, I thought there was another one on the way there but that one was not a 24hours one. The one at TianFu was though but they were closed anyone, the staff was there and it was lit, but they had locked it up and when Aaron asked about it they claimed they were "preparing" for the 5am breakfast, it was only about 2am then.

We finally did get a taxi each then and not long after that I was home, just about 2 hours later than expected. Turns out there was a rather big aftershock just before the storm started, I guess it was just strong enough to be felt where we were but all the taxi drivers must have felt it.

A very weird night in Shanghai

I met some friendly people at the hostel right away and sat down to drink with them and at about 2am a few of us decided to head out to a club, I have heard good things about Shanghai clubbing scene so I really wanted to check it out for myself. We went to a club called bonbon where we would get entry and free drinks for 88kuai each, the club was really skanky (I think this word actually doesn't exist in English but it sounds very right), hard to explain in a good way actually but try to visualize: first the guard was definitely the largest man I've ever seen, he was easily 2.20m tall and proportionally big, he seemed a bit retarded too, a quite scary first impression. In the club itself there were loads of cheap looking Chinese girls, a few overly intoxicated western girls and loads of overly intoxicated western guys, and some Chinese guys too of course. They played hip hop music and had it's own MC for the night and the whole scene was very American, at least to me. In Chengdu we have a lot of western bar, western style places with western music and western people, this was probably the next step; a western club.

We got there pretty late though and the place started thinning out and pretty soon my friends were the only people on the dance floor. I got bored of it and started checking out other groups of people and sat down with one such, I talked a little to a few people and suddenly a girl, I think she was American at least not Chinese, asked me very rudely who I knew there, when I replied no one she just said "then go away". I was totally stunned by it, never before have I encountered anything like it, especially not in China, so I said sorry and left, now I'm totally disappointed at myself for not coming up with some better and wittier reply but I was a unsober and chocked.

A Portuguese guy we met there took us to another place when we left bonbon, I think it was just called Dragon. And that place was really shady. When we got there we were the only customers, but there were quite a lot of pretty girls there, one of our group, a Philippino guy claimed the girls were also Philippino but we never got that confirmed. The Portuguese guy started out buying as all drinks and he really spent a lot of money on us, I bought a beer by myself later and it was 50kuai, he must have spent over 300yuan to keep us there so I started to suspect that he might actually be working there, I'm not sure he heard me when I asked but he said yes.

A lot more foreigners turned up and just about all of them were just really really rude, not a single Chinese person got there except the people working there and when the Portuguese guy started making weird suggestions to my friends, like if they wanted to sleep with him, we left, he was very gay.

Back at the hostel one of the guys showed us his toy he had bought in Hong Kong, a teaser disguised as a torch, we played with it for a while, not stunning anyone but seriously considering testing it, at least after reading up on it a little, but the night caretaker overheard us and confiscated it, which resulted in a huge conflict which I felt responsible for since I had actually held it and showed it to the caretaker when he came up to check on us. We kept arguing with him for quite a while but it was really hard to get some understanding between them since the caretaker didn't speak any English and the other guy didn't understand Chinese culture, I finally manged to convince him that he would leave it at the front desk until today so I could argue with the English speaking staff instead. All went well finally and he will get it back when he leaves on Monday.

Damn weird day!

KTV

It's been a while since I wrote here and it's basically because nothing interesting at all has happened. That is not entirely true thought but it's just not interesting enough to write about. I have seen loads of small things like stupid car accidents and new born kittens and stuff, and I've been working so much that I've hardly had time to do anything else.

What I have managed to do though is to join a gym, 1200 kuai for 3 months, or it was actually 1199 but same same. I go there basically three times a week now, doing the training bike for 20-30 minutes every time and then just lifting weight, so I think I've become more fit now, after a month, but I've of course gained some weight and is again around 90kg.

There has hardly been any time left over for party, I've been out to clubs like once over the last month but at least I went out today, some friend's friend's birthday and we found them at a KTV, karaoke, which was fun, and I just got back from there now so I'm pretty tipsy, which was pretty easily managed considering I haven't been drinking properly for a month and that I just came back from the gym before I went out.

I'm going to Hong Kong again next week to renew my visa, and that has turned out to be a big problem, there are a lot of changes in the visa rules and I'll be happy to get more than 30 days this time, which means I'll probably have to go back to Hong Kong again in the beginning of June. This time I will not only go to Hong Kong though, I will also make a stop in Shanghai and visit Wenying (Sharon) again, to finally give her the pear cognac that dad brought me as her Christmas gift, better late than never I guess. Now I must sleep, I actually have classes tomorrow, even though it's only in the afternoon.

About time

I'm sorry that I haven't written in such a long time, to be honest there just wasn't anything going on at first and then I was really busy, and it is boring to write about nothing. Well the first two-three weeks after I came back I really didn't do much, work didn't begin until February 29th and until then I mostly slept, worked on my Procrastination game and chatted with friends back home (since I slept all day and was up all night I was suddenly on the same time schedule as Sweden, close to it at least). I did apply for some jobs but got really frustrated after a while since most schools and companies tended to ask where I was from and then never bothered to call back after I told them Sweden. I know I'm not a native speaker but I also know that most native speakers can't tell until I tell them or they really spend a lot of time with me.

I went out clubbing a few times too during this time but not many since I'm lacking the money needed to go out, mostly I just went out for dinner (breakfast that is) at McDonald's around 8 or 9 pm and had some snacks around midnight, the few times I did go out clubbing though was quite fun, mostly with Kevin. I did more things the first week I was back, Li Min's birthday for once and I also met and cooked with friends a few times, I baked bread two more times of which one was a total failure with dead baked bread and the other got a little burnt but was still decent, the last week I was basically home alone all the time though, slightly frustrated about work, bored of not doing anything and a little bit homesick.

But finally on Friday last week I started working, and it was a bliss despite how bothersome and annoying some of the kids are and can be. I have been trying to avoid working too much in kindergarten but since almost every serious school turns me down for being a non-native speaker I have to fall back on that, and I decided to help Starpoint (my old company) out until they find more full time teachers so this week my schedule was really full. I'm still getting paid by the hour though so more classes mean more money but I ended up with some gastric problems on Monday, which is of course and unfortunately my longest and therefor most prosperous day, and couldn't work that day. I still managed to get as much as 16 hours and approximately 2000kuai, which basically doubles last semesters salary.

Starpoint has found their full time teacher now so all those classes where only a one time deal, but I am still getting a lot of classes from Starpoint, still getting the long Mondays for example, Ivy,my "boss" at Starpoint, have some private deals with some schools also and I'm working for her with those, paying a bit better actually, I'm also working for another company which has contract with a kindergarten no more than 5 minutes walk from my home and finally a training school that is a bit far from my home but gives me enough classes with enough concentration in time to be worth it, all in all I will get eight or nine thousand per month this semester, but my free time is severely compromised because of this, and of course I'm still working too much with kindergartens.

The good thing about Jordan, the training school, is that it's quite close to Li Min's (Jane's) school, so I usually meet her for dinner, lunch or both the days I work there and hang out after, and twice now, both days I've been working there, have we ended up taking a late night massage when I have seen her. Last week we went to a place for a Thai massage, which ended up hurting like hell but they say it's good for you, and this week we went to the same place and had a Chinese foot massage, which was much nicer I think. The Thai massage covers more of the upper body though and I had a lot off aching muscles after my travelling (the backpacks were a little heavy) and this week I had strangely aching thighs and calves, so well right now I'm feeling really OK.

New week is coming up and I hope I can manage all these hours, it is more now that it was last semester but it is also more motivating when I get more money for the work, and that it is totally proportional, also I'm not going outside Chengdu as often and never as far as Da Yi and De Yang (like 1-2 hours transport one way).

Beijing

Just a brief photo update of my days in Beijing.

I had dinner with Guanglu's friend Annie and after that we took a weird subway ride to nowhere and back again. The dinner was a great version of hotpot.

At least one day spent doing tourist stuff; some friends from the hostel, Saffron, Charline and JC, went out to the summare palace and walked on the ice.

And finally our last night together (Saffron left in the morning after and other people just started to disappear after that)

Weekends in Beijing

Pretty much suck when it comes to night life. For some reason the clubs that are bustling with life on weekdays are totally dead on weekends, and the ones that actually have life on weekends are quite bad. There is some reasonable explanation though, at least for this weekend; this weekend is a "moved" weekend, the Chinese New Year starts next Friday, or Thursday, so to get a longer continuous holiday they move the weekend from Saturday and Sunday to Tuesday and Wednesday, so a lot of people are working now and can't go out. That does not explain why it was equally bad last weekend though.

I have a few theories about this, one is a matter of money, having money and wanting money; the clubs in Beijing are expensive, I would say there are the same price as clubs in Sweden actually, but in Sweden we have a salary that is at an average about 10 times higher than an average salary in Beijing, so how can people afford to go out? The answer is really quite simple: they just can't. But they still go out, not because it's culture but because it’s what you are supposed to do, it's modern. For the girls the solution is easy, they go out and get treated whatever drinks they want, entrance is often free for girl and it's not that hard to find one of the richer guys, those are the only ones who goes to clubs anyway, it seems. And on weekends it is not free for girls, at least not the place I've been to, so there are only a few guys going there and almost no girls.

Anyway, weekends suck so if you want to have a good time here you'd better go out on a Thursday.

Drinking up vaccation

It is fun but rather stupid, I have been partying for 6 nights straight and my sleeping rhythm until this morning was basically 6am to 2 or 3pm, or even later, it is as I said fun though, a new social experience of staying in a hostel and getting along with just about any type of person, even managing to get a few out to clubs once in a while, and I have managed to keep the spending down after the water incident last Thursday and the Whiskey incident the night after. This has actually not been my fault, both on Saturday and Sunday I really wanted to just rest and go to bed early but one of the weird Manchester guys forced me to join them drinking (not that it's hard to force me to drink).

Today I'm in TianJin though and here is no partying, I forgot my camera when we went out so there are no pictures but I think I can get some tomorrow. Next week I will try to get to the Great Wall again, do the trekking this time to really make up for what I missed out the last and also the Summer Palace would be fun to visit in winter.

I went to the Silk Street market yesterday afternoon too and found my helicopter and finally bought it, I was hoping to get her down to 350 or even 300 and my hope grew when she started at 500, I said 200 and she said she knew that I knew how much it cost so she started reasonable and I gave up and gave her 400 for it, which was my budget for it anyway. I bought a pair of class A fake Diesel jeans too for 210kuai which I think is ok and I tried to find some nice silk underwear like some I bought last summer but I couldn't find anything like that at all.

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.

More venues

We ended up going out to this bar street where we have been once before, but this time we tried out all of them; First was The Zoo Bar, a really cool place that almost reminded me of places back home, with "normal" club music, a dance floor (even though tiny, only about 10-20% of the whole place) but unfortunately not so many people. The next place, NO.88, was pretty much the opposite, a smaller place by itself but oh my god it was crowded, there was no room for us at all so we went outside to have our beers there, it was pretty cool with such a crowded place though, it would just have been more fun if you had been part of the crowd. The last place we went to was Fair club, the place I'd been to before but only for a short time, it was more like the normal Chinese venue but there were not many people at all, we stayed there for a while but finally gave up, just not our day. We went back to NO.88 but still stayed outside and since it was getting late, 2 am (is not late according to me but still), so we decided to head homeward. We went to Carol's which is not far from Aaron's place and actually spend more than an hour there playing pool, and left when there was no one else there. Interesting but rather boring night, I'm a bit disappointed actually; this was supposed to be my celebration of freedom.

Fakking <90kg

Yes, it has happened, I'm finally below the 90kg line! I discovered this last night at around 4-5am when I came back home from clubbing, I was pretty unsober and when I was about to take a shower I saw my scale and figured "why not?" So I stood up on it and lo, 89kg. I smiled happily to myself.

This I rather surprising actually because I have eaten quite a lot this last week, and rather irregularly too. Sunday last week I cooked and ate a lot of "flygande jakob" with A Jiao, on Tuesday I met with Li Min and we cooked potato buns (fried mashed potatoes), Wednesday I was with A Jiao again and this time she cooked loads of Chinese food, Thursday was the only day I was eating out; I went for Muslim food with Aaron and ended up having a few beers at Paname (and my bike stolen), Friday again with A Jiao, this time I cooked something Chinese style á la Johan and finally last night Aaron, Li Min and I made pizza that was absolutely awesome, then went out and met Kelly at Jah Bah.

It was a really funny night last night actually; I bought some wine (a nice Chilean Merlot) that we had with the pizza and a big bottle of Bailyes that we had after and some of the Xanté (pear cognac) too. After we met Kelly we mostly had beer, we played a game, a simplified version of King (the card game where you do different things for different cards) and that had us keeping our buzzes going for more than two hours. Finally when we left everybody just wanted to go out for barbecue but I somehow managed to convince them to go to a club instead, I think because it's really close to Aaron's and Kelly's homes. The first thing I managed to do there was to take a wrong step down a stair that I didn't notice and sprain my ankle, it is quite ok now but I have to be careful when I walk.

Christmas in China

I don't really know where to begin actually but I guess it is, as they always say, to begin at the beginning. But if the beginning is Christmas itself I want to begin a bit earlier, on what we in Sweden call, dan före dopparedan (the day before Christmas eve):

Christmas spirit and feeling is something that is very alien to Chinese people, not in a way that they don't understand the feeling, because I assume this is almost the exact feeling they have for the Chinese New Year, but because they don't seem to associate it with Christmas at all, which is quite natural since they don't really have Christmas except in McDonald's, which is by the way the place you should go to if you want any Christmas feeling. A lot of places have Christmas decorations, including McDonald's, but it's less than one in twenty stores and usually only the hotels. I didn't come here to celebrate Christmas though and didn't have any expectations, but all this almost and close to attempts to create Christmas here just made me feel worse; so on the night before Christmas eve I was feeling really really low, with the only thing to look forward to for Christmas was work and not even a little; I was out from home for work from 7.30am to 7.30pm on Christmas eve and 8.15am to 4pm on Christmas day, and a long day on the day after too.

So to get my mind off too much Christmas things I had agreed to go to some kind of estate party that my friend Bella was helping her friend with, apparently it was some kind of scam where the estate owners wanted the estate to seem better so they hired foreigners to join the party to seem they lived there, not that I get why that would make it better, perhaps it's something about foreigners having more money, and they would have paid around 300 yuan for dancing for 30 minutes. When I was going there though, with no clue of where it was and my only way to get there was to have Bella talk to the taxi driver, her phone died and I couldn't contact her. It wasn't so bad though, I went over to see my American friends instead and had dinner with them for about an hour or two, then I went home to call home, which was really nice.

I did get loads of invitations though, people here party on Christmas and just everybody I know here called or messaged me to join them, with work and no mood at all to party away a non-existing Christmas I turned them all down.

On Christmas day I went to see my American friends again, this time according to plan even, but because they had stayed up all night drinking and had a really late breakfast they were just not up for dinner until around 10pm, by then I was pretty much starving and the place we went to Carol's, which is basically a bar/club/restaurant, managed to forget to tell us that the chef had left before we ordered our food, so we sat there waiting for about half an hour until someone braved up and told us, one of the waitresses nearly started crying over it.

So instead we went to another bar/club/restaurant not far from there and I had my life's first Christmas burger, two actually. For some reason we stayed there, probably because we had already started drinking and it is hard to stop once you have started, and we befriended the sister of the owner of the place and she hooked us up with wine and drinks and stuff. So even though we didn't really do anything I still didn't get back home until after 2am, and of course I had to get up by 8am the morning.

Christmas gifts:
A machete and a deck of cards with Chinese patriotic motifs from Aaron.
A tiny (lightest ever, like the one dad has I guess) Helicopter from Jane, because she is still feeling bad over the big helicopter accident.
The big helicopter from dad, which is still broken but will be replaced soon (more about that in another post).
A Swedish cook book from my little cousins, it is really nice and Jane has already drawled on half the pages.
Money from grandma, uncle Pär and aunt Gordana and from my parents too, that will be spent on travel quite soon (I'm pretty much buying my flight tickets today).
I am expecting gifts from two other friends as well and a package from my family, I don't know what anything is though.
I bought myself a set of magnets like the one I sent with dad for my siblings and cousins too, a bigger box for me, hehe, 520 pieces, more about that in another post too.

I gave Jane the lovika mittens and the bag with a green Julbock and I bought a bottle of Chilean Carmeniere for Aaron. Except for that I didn't give much, well except the magnets stuff for my siblings and cousins, but I wasn't really there to give them and I gave Kelly some Chocolate.