Wednesday, November 12, 2008

This Could Not Happen in America, a.k.a. the Chicken Foot/Bath House Story

This is a two-part story in that it occurs over the course of two days, namely the Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. It begins with the night before me and another teacher left for Shanghai to watch the Tennis Masters tournament at the local watering hole, let's call it "Jason's" (because that is the real name, silly). I arrived with some other teachers at about 11 PM and started playing pool/foosball and shooting the shit, per usual. All of a sudden, one of the cute bar staff girls comes up to me and asks me to play Connect Four with her (this is not innuendo, it really is that game from the early 90s). Needless to say, it will be a cold day in hell when an American loses in Connect Four to a Chinese girl, so to make a long story short I beat her ass and then we played foosball and pool. At about 12:30, the bar closed and instead of going our separate ways, the teachers, staff and some other patrons all decided to go to a local club because most of us were drunk. On the way there, me and Connect Four Girl start flirting (in Chinese, because she speaks virtually no English) and then making out while her friend takes pictures. Nice. Let's take a moment to appreciate what happened to me in an abstract sense. I was totally in with this cute Chinese girl (and yes other guys told me she was cute, ass) having done nothing but playing games that I would have voluntarily played anyway. I didn't have to initiate contact, nor make the first move...the only thing that would have been better/easier is if we had first played Crossfire instead of Connect Four. I dare anyone to find me a similar scenario of this happening in America, especially when you consider what happened next:
We get to the club and Connect Four Girl (from this point on, to be known as Ada) is all over my shit but mercifully not in the clingy gold-digging way that usually characterizes Chinese female/foreigner interaction. We dance, we make out. We dance some more followed by protracted periods of making out and more incriminating pictures. Food arrives to the table because some people are lightweight pansies. Ada then proceeds to make out and exchange food with me at the same time, like a mother sparrow feeding her young. Things were peachy until the fourth round of feeding, when I couldn't see what she had in her mouth clearly. As she got closer to me, I realized she had the toe from a chicken's foot in her mouth (considered a delicacy by most Chinese and fucking weird by others) and fully intended swapping spit with me so I too could eat it.
At this point, the evening reached a crossroads. I decided that if I did eat the chicken's foot, then I wanted there to be payoff at the end of the night. Because I was drunk, the part of my brain that is opposed to eating chicken's feet was force-fed snow until it died, Russian KGB-style. For those of you considering eating chicken's feet, I can tell you it's not as bad as you think, but if you can get away with only eating one, that would be optimal. Because I'm an idiot, I stayed at the club until 5 AM instead of going home to rest up prior to taking the train. I thought I had everything locked up until I saw the teacher who was going to Shanghai with was in the same cab as me, but on his arm was a key to the locker that his bag (and therefore, our tennis tickets) resided in. Caught between a rock and a hard place, I decided to be a good friend and forget the girl, instead opting to go on a drunk search-and-rescue mission that amounted to nothing. I hope that fruitless quest by itself gets me out of some time in purgatory because I was not a happy camper when I got five hours of sleep and had to haul ass to the train station.
Side note: me and Ada are still talking. She texts me inappropriate messages in Chinese. I told her to get MSN so she can add emoticons to her inappropriate messages.

The second part of the story takes place in Shanghai after we watched a couple tennis matches. Upon exiting the stadium my friend and I realized we had no idea where in the blue hell we were and that we had also missed the last train back to Wuxi. Compounding this problem was the fact that neither of us had brought our passports, which is a must for getting a hotel. At about 2 in the morning our options were becoming increasingly limited, until a friend texted us and suggested that we stay the night in a massage parlor/bath house. If you think this is a sketchy idea, you are correct sir, especially when you consider that some massage parlors interpret "staying the night" as Viagra-powered orgies with the walking STDs that work there.
So our first goal was finding a bath house where we could just pass out and then maybe have girls wank our puds. Having accomplished this after two failed attempts we then proceeded to get two hour-long massages from girls who had no problem massaging every part of the body, probably even the colon if you let them. However, the massage parlor girls were very considerate, leaving to go home at 4 in the morning but not before tucking us in so we could sleep on the same tables where we got the massages from. At the time this idea sounded smarter than Steven Hawking's black hole theory, because I was so fatigued that I didn't care that I was practically nude, sleeping on a massage table in a bath house in Shanghai. Because being covered in Johnson & Johnson baby oil and cockteasing isn't conducive to sleeping in, I woke up as early as possible the next day to catch a train, any train back home but not before eating fast food for the third meal in a row and witnessing a murder. Just kidding with the last part, but it's not really shocking given what you just read is it?