Day 36: Soho Again?!

I'm really getting exhausted with all the trips to Soho, but it's so fun, and every time I go, I pick up more and more Chinese. I've started bringing a notepad to the bar with a pen, and Li Bin Hui and I just sit at the bar or in the back staff room and teach each other words. Other people have gotten into it too, so if he's busy serving someone, a bartender will help, or even just other patrons. My vocabulary has grown considerably because of this place.

One bad bit about Soho came up tonight. Alex, who goes to Soho even more than I do, had seen this lady before, but tonight was the first for me. She's this crazy lady up on stage, and Soho pays her presumably to sing and entertain the crowd. What she does, I do not call singing. I call it yelling too loud into the microphone. It was painful to the ears, mainly for the volume reason, but she wasn't great either. Jessica had her fingers in her ears the whole performance. The lady also drank a bottle of beer while she was up there. I say drank, but she would have said chugged. It took her forever to finish the bottle, and she had to stop halfway through. Unimpressive. My unintentional whisky chug was way better.

Also, while we were there, some people were admiring Alex's tattoo, which is the Chinese character for Dragon. They were already fairly chatty with us, but I remember their excitement when I pointed at her tattoo, then pulled up the back of my shirt and showed them an actual picture of a dragon (the tattoo on my back). From then on in, it became half of a Chinese lesson as they showed off some of their tattoos. They kept telling us the words for their tattoos. The weirdest part about this to me was that it's rare for the Chinese to get tattoos, but we happened upon a group who all had tattoos. It makes me wonder if they all have them, but actively hide them.

The last interesting bit about this night happened at the very end. Jessica was ready to go, I wanted one last drink, and Alex wanted to stay and drunkenly dance with her bartender (I'm beginning to think she's got an active crush on the guy). So I asked Li Bin Hui if he could swing us a pitcher of beer to satisfy my thirst, and give Jessica something to do while we waited for Alex to finish up.

As a bit of foreshadowing, the last time we went to Soho (the 26th), Icey - one of the gogo dancers - came up to me with a napkin saying "beer vinegar" and pointed at the free pitcher of beer I had. I told her I didn't think there was vinegar in it, she must have the wrong word, but she insisted. I couldn't taste it, so I kept drinking. This time, it tasted like I was drinking diluted vinegar, not beer. Both Jessica and I made a face and acknowledged the vinegar taste, so I asked Li Bin Hui about it. Apparently, the Chinese think vinegar and beer mixed together is "very delicious". We originally thought they were doing it to prevent us from asking for free stuff, or to cheap out on the beer, but apparently, they thought they were making the beer more enjoyable. Blech.