ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING

The Internet at my brother's place flatlined for the last several days and I haven't been able to post any random adventures for your random gorging. I apologize to my loyal subscribers. I hope I haven't lost your eyes. I have random stories stockpiled and will now happily resume posting regularly with a renewed fury. (Alliterations are addictive.)

I wish I had a Super 8 camera with me to capture motion portraits of this city. Raw close ups. Grainy dutch angles. Friday night I saw a four foot tall Asian bouncer with a sick mohawk. He was litterally mock practicing karate in the streets in a tight tailored suit. No exaggeration. Too surreal to be unreal. He was guarding a superpowered Russian night club called CHOCOLATE.


It was 2AM when we went inside CHOCOLATE ... down an escalator ... into neon blasted sin. Beijing nightlife appears to ramp up late and push forward until you find the sun. Above you can see the only photograph I was able to aimlessly snap before sinking neck deep into the glamorous cheese of this dance club.

CHOCOLATE force feeds you a sleuth of random hedonist treats.

Faces of all shapes and sizes blow Hookah fueled smoke rings on repeat. Every other table has prostitutes dancing in slow motion, sniffing out 2,000 RMB for a night of capricious abandonment. Purple velvet sofas stare at your backside. Stripper poles beg for attention on the checker colored dance floor. Strippers stay all too close to naked, while never being naked, dancing on sporadically placed pedestals. At the core, a live Asian male pop band continuously spikes the room to techno flavored peak after peak.

The atmosphere was overwhelming compared to the typical low key dives I generally gravitate towards.

Every table vibrated with a different language. But it doesn't matter what language you speak when you're speaking through dance. So I danced like Cyndi Lauper live in Japan. Look it up. The band was singing in Chinese, but my body was singing something universally accessible ... and universally laughable ... and universally declinable. I welcomed getting lost in the noise and the motion.



The above is a photograph of me the morning after exploring Beijing dance clubs. The above is a photograph for those of you that miss the bottom half of my face.