End of an era: goodbye to The Shed

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.

Massive weekend - part 1

Ok, so I've had a fairly busy weekend. Well, today has been fairly slow due to a massive hangover, so I guess it would be more accurate so say that I had a busy Friday night/Saturday/Saturday night/Sunday morning. In fact, it was so massive that I'm splitting it into three posts.

Friday night after work I wolfed down some dumplings and decided to venture over to Puxi to have a bit of a stroll along Nanjing Rd, which is the main shopping street in Shanghai. For those of you that haven't been to Nanjing Rd, it's a long street with shops/restaurants lining the sides. It's closed to traffic, so it's basically a pedestrian shopping strip. It's extremely popular with tourists and as you walk along, it's not uncommon to see people posing for photos in front of particular stores/landmarks.

I jumped on a train just after 9 and was there in about 20 minutes. I took my new camera along to try out some night shots (I still think I have some tweaking to do there - I'll post some pics shortly). As I wandered down the road, I was approached at least every 2 or 3 minutes by guys in their twenties asking me if I wanted to buy a watch, or DVDs. As I said, it's a big tourist area, so there are plenty of people around trying to make money. I've been down the road plenty of times before, so I knew what to expect (I was warned about such things during my first trip to Shanghai). You have two choices here: if you are interested in buying something, you can let them know, and they'll take you off the main strip through a maze of alleyways into some shady establishment where you'll be shown into a room to look at whatever merchandise you were interested in.

The second option, to be employed if you do not want to buy anything, is to say no or simply ignore them. I had my headphones on with music up fairly loud, so while I saw them approach, I didn't actually hear which products they were spruiking. Most of the time I just shook my head and they quickly moved away again.

It wasn't just young guys approaching me - the girls get in on the action too. I was approached by some girls on a number of occasions - usually in pairs. They typically start out by asking where you are from and ask if it's ok to walk along with you and practice their English. While this sounds harmless, the girls then usually suggest to go to a nearby shop/bar and have a coffee to continue talking/get to know you better. Also sounds harmless...but I've heard tales of people ordering a coffee and having whisky or something like that brought out at hyper-inflated prices. Or getting stuck with the bill after the girls order food/drinks/whatever else. Once again, two ways of dealing with it - you can either ignore them, or answer their questions and (politely) refuse any of their suggestions.

So anyway, I strolled along Nanjing Rd for about half an hour taking pictures and just looking around. I ended up walking all the way to The Bund, which is an area along the western side of the Huangpu River. The Bund has lots of historical buildings and is also a pretty popular tourist area. I went over to take some pictures of the view across the river, which includes the Oriental Pearl TV tower (I'll upload the pics if any of them turned out well). By this time I was getting kind of thirsty, so I figured I'd head out in search of beer. I had three places in mind that I wanted to check out - Windows Scoreboard, Blue Frog and Studio 78. I started at Windows Scoreboard.

The oddly named Windows Scoreboard was a short (10 minutes or so) taxi ride away from The Bund (it cost me $3). I liked what I saw when I walked in - plenty of seating (pretty much all occupied), a couple of big TVs with various sports playing, a few dart boards and a big pool table. The place was absolutely packed, and seems to be a popular expat hangout as there were far more foreigners than locals. I squeezed my way up to the bar where I got my first happy surprise for the night - extremely cheap beer. A bottle of Tiger was only $AUS2. Sweet. I had a couple of beers over the next hour while watching some of the NCAA basketball, and then left. I still had two more places to visit and wasn't planning on having a massive night.

A foolish, foolish dream.

This ends part 1 - next up, the other two bars on Friday night and my day of physical activity on Saturday.