Coco

Confession: I went to a bar. No, no, wait…I legally went to a bar. Yeah, that sounds better. You would think that our roommates, being third years at this school, or possibly even Hangzhou locals, would take us to a bar. Instead, we took them! This little bar/club excursion of ours was on Saturday night. And we even started the night off right with a delicious banquet at a restaurant right outside the school gates.

The infamous boat ride was on Friday, and being incapacitated by exhaustion, I simply went home and passed out at a very geeky hour. However, Saturday night I guess I must have been feeling a little bit cooler, more hip, or maybe even just crazy, so I went with the group of kids who had gone clubbing the previous night (I guess they liked it enough to go twice in a row!) to a bar called Cocoa. At first everyone was confused, which is bound to happen to any group of 20 year olds, but especially if they are all in a strange country communicating in a foreign language. After some discussion we figured out which bar to go to and one person even magically knew how to get there, relaying the information to my brilliant and awesome roommate who dictated to the cabbies. One short taxi ride later and I stood before my very first real club.

Well, the main reason that many of our roommates (particularly the girls) couldn’t take us to a bar or club is because they’d never been to one! “Can you teach me how to dance??” ended up being a very popular question from our roommates. My roommate and I ordered one drink between the two of us. A simple screwdriver should suffice, I thought, because after having dried one sip of Chinese beer back in the dorm that same night I came to the conclusion that my life would be no worse off if I never went near that stuff again.

As my roommate and I sipped our drink, we had the unique pleasure of watching one of the Middlebury students get up on stage and proceed to take over the band on stage, singing an American song as a foreigner in China. I must say, he seemed to be well-received by the Chinese bar-goers.

I had a bit of booze, I danced a few dances on the cramped, sweaty stage that everyone piled onto when the band finished its set, I listened to some American tunes, observed the drunken locals, and even used a bathroom in which one has to squat all the way down to the toilet set into the floor to take a wiz. But, after that, I realized that I’m not really into drinking and heavily partying in loud, cramped spaces with mediocre music in any country. A bar is a bar is a bar…especially when, regardless of the country, they use American music!

I’m very glad to have met Coco. But I don’t think I will be seeing her again very soon.