As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my favourite places to gas on in Shanghai, The Shed was due to close soon. Sadly, it came to pass on Saturday. Fate had favoured us with a beautiful sunny day in Shanghai - about 25 degrees, not a cloud in the sky - in short, perfect conditions to spend all day drinking inside a bar smaller than most living rooms.
Word about the closing had spread far and wide, and by the time I rocked up at 1pm the place was already packed. They had a very reasonable deal for the last day of operation: 20rmb ($AUS3) per beer or 100rmb for all you could drink. The words had not even left bartender Steve's mouth before I had handed over my hundy, gotten my first beer out of the fridge and proceeded to swig half of it down. From there, I settled in for a big day, and was not disappointed.
Men, women, and thankfully no children (not the best environment for the kids) passed through the door that day, and when there was no room left inside, they simply spilled out onto the deck. There was a pie warmer complete with meat pies and sausage rolls, of which I consumed many. They had a laptop hooked up to the television to broadcast some horse racing from back home in Aus, which didn't excite me too much but it was a big deal to plenty of other patrons. Eventually the AFL started and we proceeded to see Geelong whip Collingwood, which is always good to see.
As the day progressed things got rowdier. At a certain point someone decided it would be a good idea to start carving up pieces of the bar to take away as mementos of the occasion. I was handed a hacksaw at some point (by one of the owners so it was perfectly sanctioned) and put in a solid bit of work sawing away. I still have some blisters on my hands from helping disassemble the woodend structure. Craziness.
Before we knew it the footy had finished and things wound up at around 10pm. A guy that I'd met during the day (Phil) suggested we take the party to Windows Scoreboard. Always happy to continue consuming relatively cheap beer, I agreed. Upon arriving we sat down with a few beers, but didn't last long there before Phil decided we needed to go to the other Windows establishment (which I had never heard of) named Windows Too. We got a taxi and got there pretty quickly (from what I can recall, I was fairly drunk at this stage) to find the place was about four times bigger than Scoreboard and absolutely full of people.
We took some seats at the bar and proceeded to do some shots of god knows what - I just drank whatever showed up in front of me. A couple of girls sitting nearby invited us to play some dice with them, and we agreed - not remembering that every time we lost a roll of the dice we had to take a drink. As you may imagine, I did not roll well in the state that I was in, which just helped me get drunker faster.
After a while the girls got bored of winning all the time and moved on. It was at this point that Phil decided to get it into his head that he wanted to fight someone and picked out a German guy nearby that was 'looking at him funny'. I had to do some fairly fast talking to change his mind about it (the German guy seemed fairly keen to have a go as well - why do some people get so violent when they drink?) and finally convinced him that it wasn't worth the trouble. At this point he got extremely upset and said that he had 'lost face' in front of all of the other people in the bar (of course he didn't know a single one of them) and left.
This gave me no reason to pause whatsoever, and I proceeded to spend the next couple of hours drinking with a number of random other people that I met just wandering around. Gotta love the nightlife when you're drunk in a foreign country. Finally went home at around 3am and amazingly didn't feel like I was going to die on Sunday. Yes, I'm shocked too.
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