11 days of mayhem - day 6

Friday the 10th of April was a massive day/night. The boys went out and did some shopping around Shanghai, while I worked my behind off in preparation for a long weekend in Beijing. I got home at around 7pm, and after a quick change we went out in search of Kakadu.

Kakadu is a small Aussie bar over in Puxi, near Xin Tian Di. Well, at least we thought it was. We'd been given a card by Sam, a girl we met the day the guys arrived, who was in charge of putting together an 'Aussie Drinks' night each Friday night. The card had directions on how to get to the bar, but we showed it to two taxi drivers and they didn't know how to take us there. Finally we just asked to go to Xin Tian Di as we figured we could just walk the rest of the way from there.

After getting directions from a helpful porter and walking for almost 20 minutes, we made it to the bar. We entered to find a much more business-type crowd than we were expecting - it seemed like a much more mature crowd than us, although there were a few people around our age. It was a sponsored event, which meant that beer was half-price between 6:30 and 9:30pm...although this ended up meaning that beers were still $5 per bottle, which I suppose is a pretty reasonable price for an imported beer. It gave me the chance to have a Coopers Pale Ale and a few Pure Blondes, which I haven't had since I've been here, so it was a nice change. We stayed around for about 2 hours and entered into a raffle...and Shotty actually won something. Not the grand prize of a trip to Tokyo, or the second prize which was 4 slabs of Aussie beer...he won a bottle of win and some meat vouchers, which he promptly gave to me. Not being a wine drinker, and not having an oven to cook the meat in meant that the prize was not really very useful. We gave the wine to Sam and the meat vouchers...well, they're still around here somewhere and have expired by now. Never mind.

I had planned on taking the guys to Windows Scoreboard for some cheap beers and pool-playing, but Sam mentioned that she and some friends were going to another bar named 'The Spot', which is on the famous Tongren Rd bar strip. Turns out Friday nights is free margarhita night for ladies from 10pm onwards, so we figured we'd go along and see what it was like. As you would expect when there are free drinks on offer, it was absolutely packed, so we got a table near the entrance and got ourselves some pizza for dinner. We had planned on having a (reasonably) quiet night, since we had to get up by 8:30 on Saturday for our flight to Beijing. Unfortunately, the best laid plans can often go awry. The Coronas at The Spot were tasting fantastic, so we got stuck into them. Shotty and Cookie did a few shots with some of the other people that we met there, and the night was off and running. We spent a few more hours at The Spot and were then whisked away to Velvet Lounge, another bar that stays open for most of the night.

That place was the busiest bar I've ever been to in my life. The somewhat common practice over here of no bouncers on the door meant that people just kept piling in. It was almost like being at Derby Day during the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival - too hard to get anywhere and very difficult to get a drink. Nevertheless, we ended up staying there until just after 4. We had previously considered staying up for the entire night and going straight to the airport in the morning, but a shred of common sense prevailed and we got out of there to grab a couple of hours sleep before our trip.