I was considering moving to another hostel today just to change things up, but I was feeling really lazy at breakfast, so I passed. I met 2 girls from Scotland and a girl from Sweden while eating breakfast They were telling me about Laos. Wow, Laos sounds Swiss Family Robinson fun. The Swedish girl, Erika, needed to buy a train ticket, so I went with her, because I needed to get mine for Hong Kong. I introduced her to the Baozi, which I usually eat for breakfast (or in this case, secondies). Some Baozi's are like grenades of juice, or oil, or some mystery liquid. They seem to always go off on rookies. Good thing Erika had swooshy pants on. She didn't seem to care though. Some people have gotten mad. Warning them would be the nice thing to do.
The Train station was just a few stops on the subway. It looked like an atom bomb had been used to level sports stadium, and then they had built the train station on top of it, using some of the larger chunks of wreckage in the construction because they were too difficult to move. We found the automatic ticket machines. But oh no, you can only buy certain tickets with the automatic machines! That is so bunk. So we walked around a bit until we found the ticket counter. It was kinda busy--we popped in a line. Erika got her ticket to Guilin, but they lady wouldn't sell me one to Hong Kong--she was pointing to another area of the room. So I went over there and waited in line again, got to the booth, and same thing, except this time the guy at the ticket counter said "Line 12". Ok, I got it. Hong Kong is a really special super irritating thing to buy. Unfortunately I had to get to my pseudo job interview and I couldn't wait anymore, so I left.
I had a pseudo interview at Concept Art House, which is an outsourcing company based in SF. I probably shouldn't discuss the details of it, but the studio was in a cool neighborhood. It looked like SOMA of San Fran, an ex-industrial now-trendtastical shopping, living, business district. I could work here, totally.
The girls I met for breakfast wanted to get a group together for dinner, so we all met at 7PM at the hostel. It was me, Erika, Scottish girl (Debs and Nan), a Russian guy, Ryan from Florida, and Juliet from France. We walked down to this food street south of People's Square. There were a lot of seafood places with bins of fish and such at the front. Just like in Korea--gross. No thanks. We went to a Hot Pot place instead. It was really good, but the waitress really didn't seem to like us. It was probably just overwhelming for her. Juliet didn't want to pay for the chopsticks (you have to pay if you use the ones they give you) and kept trying to give them back, then the waitress just stormed off. Maybe a cultural nerve? The food was good and wasn't too expensive, but we were all still hungry after, so I suggested we go to Raffles, the mall with the excellent food court with the excellent egg tart place, and the Scottish girls had to see a movie there anyway. We got to Raffles and it was just closing. Ack, but there was a huge crowd gathering for Harry Potter, which is what the Scottish girls were going to see. We were going to go out to a bar later, so we told the Harry Potter Girls that we would leave them a note at our hostel to tell them where we went. We left them and headed back to the hostel. On our way back we found a street food guy making noodles. YES. It was really good--costs 10 Yuan, and was more filling than the 70 Yuan dinner.
We got back to the hostel around midnight, but we were still determined to go out. I wrote a beautiful not to the Harry Potter girls in a most harry potter style (I will try to find it and get a picture). We tried to leave it with the girl from reception but she didn't understand and said she would be off work soon, so she wouldn't be around the deliver it, so we just put it in a bush at the front of the hostel. We went to this Spanish bar in the French concession called Zapatas first. I had been by there before but not on a weekend. It was terrible--we might as well have been in the US. We got one drink and left. Erika tried to leave a note, for the Harry Potter girls, with the bartender but he didn't quite get it, but took it anyway.
We went to a more Chinese club next--it was a lot cooler. The Chinese are more private when they go out; they like to hang out with just their friends at their own table and be themselves--they don't go out to be seen. Instead they stand at their tables and do things like dance with one hand in their pocket or grab their girlfriend and try to giver her a sexual heimlich maneuver. We went home after this, at around 4 AM.
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