The strangest night out with friends...

So we met friends of our out for drinks last Saturday night. It was something we were really looking forward to. They live in the building next to ours, and the husband, Kurt, set me up with a pick up basketball game at a local International School. I don’t even hold it against him that he’s from Michigan!

We met them as they were finishing up dinner at a tapas restaurant that we are definently going to try out ourselves. After finishing up a drink there, we headed to a local German bar, called ‘Paulaner’. They have German beer on tap and, per Martha, Kurt’s wife, a great band. We got there and the place was packed with local Chinese – a good first sign. The band was decent. The strange part of the night was when I realized, we are sitting in a German bar listening to a Philippino band, playing music in Spanish (La Bamba by Richie Valens), surrounded by local Chinese in Shanghai! Just crazy.

We tried out another place – an American styled bar called ‘Malone’s’. They were also supposed to have a good band… and the band was good… just that it happened to be 50’s night at Malones, so now we are in a bar that is primarily expats, with a Philippino band dressed in poodle skirts, hair in 50’s style hairstyles, playing things like ‘Runaround Sue’. Again, just crazy.

Last stop of the evening for the Welsh family (we are always the first to leave these things, given the fact that our kids are 6:30am wake up calls) was a bar called Manhattan. This place had, what I believe was 2 Chinese gals singing… there was a good thing and a bad thing about this… the bad – they were not very good… the good – they ended early! The place played decent dance music after that, but the weird thing about this place was seeing all the working girls file into the place. Steph and I don’t go out a tremendous amount in the US (remember the 6:30am wake up call) so I can’t say for 100% certain I have ever seen a working girl… Not the case anymore. They come in, usually in packs, and congregate in one area of the bar… It’s like they want to stick out so that you know for sure where to find them… then one peels off every so often after making eye contact with a single guy at the bar by himself… or a single white guy walks up to the crowd of girls, picks one by dancing with them for a couple of songs, then – poof – they disappear. The last thing that was crazy about Manhattan was that at some point I turned around to pick up my drink off the bar, where I had set it down, and much to my surprise, there was a woman in her underwear dancing on the bar. This gal is evidently an employee of the bar. This is when we noticed the poles running from the bar to the ceiling. Looking at our friends quizzically, their response was, ‘welcome to Asia, this is normal’. Yet again, our friend Dwayne’s patented phrase rings true – ‘China, it’s just different here.’