Pics, 前街演艺会所, 观唱KTV

Sometimes, I want to get the hell out.

A city on the hill? How about a high rise on the sea?

The street on the way out of the west gate of my campus.

Old writing carved in old rocks. No idea what it says, but the last character is about being scholastic or something like that.

I, like these trees, look best in soft night light.

It's too hot for me to stand and take a picture; I'm really just trying to get from point A to point B.

Last night, I went out with Phebe and Grace, along with 阿山 (A-Shan) and 阿龙 (A-Long), the two boys who cut hair at the place near our school who the girls are infatuated with，and マサ (Masa), the cute Japanese exchange student, last night. The plan was initially to go to out and KTV, but the place we went to ended up being full. 阿山, apparently, cut the hair or someone who worked at the club across the street, 前街演艺会所， so we ended up going there. Little did I know before going in that it was more a host club that a dancing bar, so we spent the majority of the time watching performances by women with dead eyes and keeping the company of two verrrry skinny hostesses who had a thing for the hair cutting boys. Whenever Phebe, Grace, マサ, and I got up to dance near our table, we were shut down by management who basically told us to stop being loud and blatant foreigners through the Chinese people with us.

After about 2 hours there, we headed back to the KTV bar across the street, 观唱KTV, and found a room. It was great singing with them all, enjoying peanuts and tomato-flavored Lay's chips, and getting special praise from 阿山 for being able to sing a song in Cantonese by, of course, 张国荣 (Leslie Cheung) called 无需要太多 (“No Need for Much"). I also liked trying to get the Japanese boy マサ to keep up with me through shots of beer (yea, I know--shots?). The last time I got a Japanese man drunk, all sorts of neat stuff happened in terms of what he revealed about himself. Japanese people rarely go abroad for undergrad, much less to China. He said that his dad does business in China and that he's really interested in Chinese culture (who isn't?), yet I don't completely believe that. Alcohol reveals everything that a person wants to keep secret. That's the secret to the CIA, I suppose.