One of my American friends has starting working at 88 club, one of the most popular clubs in Hangzhou. Eight or so foreigners work there. They all get free alcohol and are paid to dance and mingle. The patrons are generally young Chinese people, many of which are in Hangzhou on vacation and heard about the club because it’s a big chain (over 30 in China.)

The inside of 88 looks like a fancy saloon, and has tons of gaudy looking chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Like most clubs in China, entrance is free but people are “strongly encouraged” to buy a table, the cost of which includes a certain amount of alcohol. Some of the high roller tables cost a minimum of 10,000 RMB (US$ 1500).

It’s a cool place to party because the atmosphere builds as the night progresses. Everyone drinks hard until about midnight and then the place goes nuts. Some people pile on to the stage in the middle to dance, while others latch on to each other to form long trains that weave through the crowd. The club flips on a bunch of flashing lights, light sticks get passed out, and in between songs they put on live ramp performances.

The 88 club in Hangzhou has a particularly infamous reputation. A few months ago some local university students were killed there during a brawl with security guards. Apparently the students made some lewd comments and for whatever crazy reason the guards stomped a few of them to death. Violent crime is very uncommon in China, so the news shocked the community when it first came out. The club reopened recently, however, and the violent event certainly hasn’t hurt business. Even on a Monday or Tues night the place is packed.

I’m amazed my friend found this kind of job in the first place. When she first showed up at my house with 4 suitcases packed with party clothes I laughed, but now she’s actually using all that stuff.

I just got back from a 6 day trek through central Mongolia. What a different place than China! Click here to see pics. Mongolia’s population density is only 3 people per square mile! It’s practically all country and no people. Asphalt roads are almost non existent, so getting around was awfully bumpy, but the upshot of course is that bad roads disincentivize economic development and all the junk that comes with it. I saw tons of wild animals including horses, a fox, and even eagles! China ate all their wild animals long ago.

I went on the trip with an high school buddy, Brockett, and two other friends from Hangzhou. We stayed in yurts, which are kind of like tepees but they are bigger and round, with a metal stove in the middle for cooking and heating. Every day we’d drive a few hundred kilometers, and then settle at a new site. We saw some historic sites and did a bunch of hiking, horseback riding, and even camel riding.

One night we played a popular Mongolian game that is kind of like jacks. The pieces are made out of the ankle bones of sheep. Each bone has four sides that look sort of like a goat, a lamb, a horse, or a camel. You roll the bones and then try to flick the ones that match at each other. If you flick successfully, then you get to pick up those bones and keep going until you miss or there are no more matches. The rest gets picked up by the next player, who rolls the bones again. There are a bunch of other rules I don’t know.

The highlight of the trip was our last night on the trek. We’d been driving all day and pulled into our camp as the sun was setting. We soon discovered that the nomads we were planning to stay with had already left. Previously nights we’d had our own yurt to ourselves, provided by friends of our tour guide, but this time we were going to have to crash at a stranger’s yurt; it was too cold to simply sleep outside.

A woman and her 1 year old baby popped out of the nearest yurt and our guide quickly convinced her to let us stay. The four of us, along with another Argentinean guy that joined our tour, lined up like sausages on her floor to sleep, but not before being “forced” to drink copious amounts of vodka. 10 shots in, as we were dozing off, I decided to turn my body 180 degrees so I wouldn’t feel so cramped, but all the Mongolians immediately berated me for pointing my feet at the sacred back side of the yurt, smiled real big, and then proceeded to give me 3 penalty vodka shots. I slept like a log that night.

As we headed back to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, we saw a big asphalt road being built. We were told the Chinese are “helping” the Mongolians to build a central, north-south road all the way through Mongolia from China to Russia. Our tour guide, at least, wasn’t too happy about it. He’s worried about China’s tightening economic control over Mongolia and thinks that continued economic development will destroy Mongolia’s rural communities. Half the population already lives in Ulaanbaatar, and the city has doubled in size in the last ten years. Urbanization is in full swing.

A few weeks back I heard a knock on the door of my little home office, which is on the second floor. I opened the door and two little kids burst in wanting to play. This is one of them slung over my shoulder last Sunday. Now that the sun is out we have been hosting BBQs and inviting the loads of college kids that my brother and other roommate Jason teach. The highlight, for sure, has been the water balloons. I've also been working on my badminton game.

Wouldn't think the kid in green had just accidentally killed someone racing his car, eh? He seems way too relaxed. Then again, he's from a rich Hangzhou family, so he probably expects to get off easy. That's how the Chinese internet community interpreted this photo. Within hours, all of the kid's personal information was put online. His name, ID card #, address, school, cell phone #, etc., all probably pulled from social networking sites. It's an interesting shaming tactic that's becoming very popular in China. Check out this article for more info.

Life has stayed busy lately. Days after I got back from Taiwan, my dad visited for a week. Since then I've been working late nearly every night on two different consulting projects. Also, unexpectedly, I managed to get outrageously drunk two weekends in a row. Got a bit more to go with work, and another rock concert this weekend, so the adventure continues...

I'm in a remarkably good mood despite all this. I guess i just needed to go a bit nuts, and I'm actually really excited about my latest project, which involves a newly invented electric motor that may very well revolutionize the industry.

Definitely plan to calm down in May though, and get myself back in order.

Last weekend I tore it up at Taiwan's version of spring break and thoroughly fell in love with the island. The incentives were in place to party all night: I was staying in a tiny room with 6 guys, and out on the street and down on the beaches was the rowdiest party I'd ever attended, with by far the highest concentration of beautiful women I'd ever seen.

I'm left with a delightful montage of memories: only three mattresses for 6 people! beers. building a fire on the beach. trip to 7-11. bikini truck! going into the middle of nowhere in a cab. punk rocker screaming. whoa, the beach party is where it's at. crazy blond girl introduces me to everyone. laying out on the beach the next day. got so burned. hot sisters. gangsters eating beetle nut. even bigger fire, so everyone we met found us. said i was a yoga teacher, very good idea. so many people arriving now. crazy all night. sun comes up, thought the night was over, it wasn't. find my friends drinking whiskey at 10Am. A round of espresso, whiskey, tequila, and a long island ice tea. ha. party is dieing down. suddenly at a dance party, then in the ocean. fuck my phone is broken. back in Taipei. somehow going out again. almost beat up by gangsters. just barely woke up on time. at the airport eating some good bread and sipping brown rice milk.

I am in Taipei right now for business and pleasure. For business I'm trying to promote American dehydrated potatoes (boring, but at least I'm hitting the street and stretching my Chinese). For pleasure I'm headed down to Spring Scream, a huge 200 band, 4 day raucous beach party in the south of Taiwan. A bunch of friends from Shanghai are coming over. We leave tomorrow morning and I could not be more psyched.

The other good thing is that Taiwan itself is awesome. I'm definitely going to move here at some point. Every person I've met has been very friendly. Beautiful women are everywhere. The food, especially the street food, is incredible fresh, tasty and diverse. I could go on and on. Basically it's China in a developed country form. One thing that's really interesting for me is that I can communicate with old people and working people here much more naturally. They are not awed by me. They don't go on about my Chinese or America. We just talk.

Every now and then something interesting goes on outside my window. Today the sludge cleaners have arrived. Not sewage, just collected runoff water and mud, but still fairly stinky. The cleaners work in a 5 man team. One guy uses a pick axe to lift out the lid. Another brings over a sludge bucket. A third uses a long bamboo pole with with a sack on the end to scoop out the sludge. The sack has a ring on the bottom, and one guy uses a metal rod to lift the sack up and dump out the contents. Once a bucket is filled, two other guys mount it onto a truck. A fairly clean operation, unless the truck tipped over.

The best place to hangout outside when it's rainy and cold is a hot spring; that or a heated rock slab. A bunch of us did both this weekend in a little city called Wuyi, about 3 hrs drive south of Hangzhou. Like so many places in China, we worked our way through worn out looking streets and found a little oasis amongst all the mess. The hot spring resort had 20+ piping hot pools, each infused with different substances including chinese medicine, coffee, and wine. Afterwards we got massages, wrapped in towels laying on rock slabs that must have been heated with water pipes below. After a month of rain, today the warm sun finally returned. Our timing was perfect.

Last Sunday, after a pleasant walk in the mountains with my dog, I passed by the organic food place in my neighborhood and went to buy some buckwheat noodles. The usually sleepy venue was packed with people, most of them, it turned out, avid environmentalists. In the picture is Mrs. Hu, the store owner (and quickly becoming my personal hero), showing off her trash cans made from trash. She plans to sell them and donate the proceeds to environmental cleanup efforts.

I got into a conversation about trash cleanup. Lots of Chinese throw trash on the ground without a thought. One lady was talking up organizing a group to pick up trash somewhere in Hangzhou. She also runs a big brother big sister like program, and suggested she could bring some of the kids along. Another lady said she had some media contacts and perhaps could make a story out of it.

Mrs. Hu was telling me a story the other day about a foreigner in Western China that started picking up trash himself on the weekends and ended up inspiring more than a thousand people to join him in the process every weekend. Very inspiring to be amidst all the passion.