Chinese nightlife is a crazy beast. Let me preface this post by saying I very rarely ever went out to nightclubs in the states. Not really my scene, cheesy music/people, etc - preferred small bars and chilling at house parties. That being said though, I've spent a decent amount of time here at various nightclubs. Lan Kwai Fong district in Hong Kong, No. 88 Bar and G Plus in Shanghai, Phoebe Bar in Hangzhou, and a few places in my city Jiaxing. They're really crazy places, way different then American establishments. A lot of them are all decked out with chandeliers and crazy couches, really stylish. The usual lack of a dancefloor was upsetting at first, but you adjust to it. Chinese people can't dance apparently, and they all just like to stand at their tables and move around a little bit. In addition to that, just think clowns on stilts, singers and dancers, and fruit buckets. Yeah, it's definitely different then anything I've ever seen before.
Oh man. There's been a lot of memorable nights out. One really standout story is the night I was meeting a few friends at Lo Has, the biggest and most popular club in our town. As we were waiting for one friend, a friggin' Lamborghini pulled up to the entrance of the club. In Jiaxing, there's plenty of nice cars i.e. BMWs, Mercedes, etc, but a Lambo was something I'd never seen before. Later on that night, some random Chinese guy walked up to our table and said hello. I gave him a cup of beer out of politeness, since you never know who you're dealing with. Sure enough, a few minutes later he came back over and invited us all to his party's table. The head of the table was the guy driving the Lamborghini! My roommate Kyle even went for a ride in it, said it was nuts. Another interesting side note to that was that they may very well have been gangsters - Kyle refused a toast after being coerced into drinking 4 straight glasses of Hennessey, and the guy poured the entire drink down his shirt. His friends intervened, but still - very unlike the majority of Chinese culture.
I'm a DJ too, so a lot of this time was spent evaluating the music/crowd/etc. My computer started having real problems when I got to China, so I couldn't use my preferred DJ setup - Ableton. Spent well over a 100 hours warping and chopping tracks to DJ with that I can't use now. But used it enough to impress some people at a local club, Club TNT, and got in the door. Spent a few weeks practicing and learning how to CDJ, with CD turntables, and got things down with that. Had my debut on a Friday night, and things seemed to go pretty well! Arranged to spin there every Friday, and I went back on the Monday and DJ'ed again. However, this is China and anything and everything can happen, and apparently they shut down the club a day or two after I had been there. It was a pretty big shock and dissapointment, nobody even told me besides a friend that DJs at Lo Has. Pretty big setback, but at least now I know CDJs, and am going to look for DJ gigs in Shanghai. Life goes on..
