Zai Jian, China!

Monday was my last full day in China, and I had some work to do. As part of this trip, I was charged with shooting a short video while in country, and I spent the morning and afternoon working on said project. I'm going to hold off for now discussing the subject matter of my shoot - I'd rather let my coworkers see the finished product with fresh eyes. But once I'm finished with the video and it's been presented at work, I'll post it here with a written account of the shoot.

From there, I went back to Tim's Texas BBQ for a wonderful dinner that was half Chinese (catered from a local restaurant), and half Texas. Once might think that this cuisinal mash-up could be a real disaster, but the two types of food actually compliment each other quite nicely. Babequed pork ribs met their equivalent in Chinese deep fried ribs; stuffed jalepeno peppers paired with sauteed green beans and red peppers; brisket played off of grilled pepper chicken. My only regret was not taking a photo of the speread to share with all of you.

From there, I met up with five friends from my tour group for a few drinks before heading out for a last night on the town. By 11:00pm or so I was starting to feel quite tired, and wondering whether to follow through on a night out or just head home for a final night of full sleep and then maybe get in some last sightseeing before departing on Tuesday. But when plans to visit the Great Wall on Tuesday morning fell through, I figured I might as well make a night of it. It's been so strange to be getting only 5 hours or so of sleep most nights - at that level I'm usually a zombie. But here, I've been functioning just fine, and that's with miles and miles of walking most days. Maybe I'm set for a huge crash when I get home - wouldn't be surprised at all. On the other hand, maybe this means my jet lag won't be too bad, since I never acclimated to a normal nocturnal sleep schedule in China. I'll know soon enough.

So it was 11:30 or so, and we were ready to head out. We had planned on heading over to Houhai Lake, north of the Forbidden City, where a number of clubs and restaurants have sprung up in the past couple of years and turned a sleepy neighborhood into a relatively hip and happening area. And I was ready for that, even eager to see what Beijing hipsters looked like. I've seen enough non-sensical Chinglish on locally-designed t-shirts that the idea of any locals adopting hipper-than-thou attitudes would be an amusing sight.

But suddenly, things took a turn when an alternate suggestion was made, and before I knew it, a cab was depositing me in front of Party Life! - four floors of karaoke. Now, I don't know if Party Life is representative of other karaoke joints in Beijing, or Asia for that matter,. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume they're all pretty similar, and go even further out on said limb and make the observation that the karaoke bar is to Asia what the bowling alley is to middle America. Lots and lots of kids, and some adult aficionados, gathered together in a casual setting made whole by a truly scary buffet of strange meats and fried potatoes. We had our own room, complete with a video screen, two microphones, maracas and a tambourine - oh, and about 40 beers among us. I'm not going to bore you with details, because as Bon Jovi and the Backstreet Boys and Madonna carried us through the night, what to us at the time seemed brilliant and hilarious would be tedious to everyone else. Like most drunken evenings that last until 5:00am, you had to be there. But we had a great time, and it was a great way to close out my time in Beijing.

On my way to the airport, where I'm writing this post now, I happened to glance out the window for one last glimpse of China. And what do you know, I saw sunshine breaking through puffy white clouds - for a moment, at least, it was a Blue Sky Day over Beijing.