I got distinctive flashbacks to my high school years; the place was small and crowded, and the audio was decent but not brilliant. The bands were also decent and quite worth watching, even though I guess I won’t be telling my grandchildren about them in years to come. There were also lots of Germans present at the club. Apparently this was part of a Chinese-German cultural exchange thing.

I don’t recall the band names, but they were a pop band with a female singer, a pop-punk band with some young guys, and some celtic death metal to top it all off. Very interesting mix.

On Wednesday we decided to explore the Sanlitun bar area, starting with a visit to The Tree, a quite hidden and secretive little Belgian pub. They have an excellent athmosphere, cozy interior, good selection of beer and quite possibly one of the best stone-oven baked pizzas that I’ve ever tasted. And some quite expensive beer…

We moved on to the appropriately nicknamed Gauntlet – the tourist trap street of Sanlitun – where we got ripped off and ended up paying 80 RMB for a Heineken at one of the places. 80 RMB equals about 8 Euros. That’s one-a expensive-a beer-a! After that we learned to always look at the menu first. Another interesting thing that happened was that we got lured into a place that offered pole dancing. Unfortunately for us we forgot to check what gender…

Eventually a girl did go up on the stage as well, but by that time we were howling with laughter, thinking that we just had gotten screwed for the second time that night. Still, that pole dancing guy really was impressive!

A lot more restaurants and pubs followed that week, and we explored the Sanlitun area quite well. The 80′s night at Alfa is particularly worth mentioning! That place rocks. I also hadn’t had enough of live music so I watched a phenomenal reggae band at the MAO Live House, close to Houhai. Quite impressive – and well worth the 60 RMB entrance fee.

Afterwards I went on to Houhai, a bar district next to the lake from which it receives its name, and ended up chatting with a Danish troubadour.

“So, I guess you’re singing to earn a little extra at the side?”
“Oh.. Nah… I just get free booze.”

For some reason I decided to walk around the lake and ended up meeting a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) harassing a couple of guards.

I spent a couple of hours walking along with the banana, his wife and a friend of theirs, experiencing bad Vietnamese coffee and strange youths fishing for clams or something in the lake.

After a while I bade them a drunken farewell and made my way home.

The week ended with a trip to the Forbidden City. It’s a very impressive place…but somehow not as impressive as I expected. It’s a gigantic area covered with statues and elaborately painted houses; it’s strange to think that all of it belonged to the Emperor in days of yore, but it wasn’t varied enough to keep up my interest very long. Well worth a visit, but nothing compared to the Great Wall. I have high hopes that the Summer Palace will be more interesting, whenever I end up going there.

Some more shopping also ensued. 70 RMB for an 128 GB USB memory? Too good to be true?

Indeed, it was too good to be true. After filling it with 32 GB of data it crashed. I wonder what’s inside…

Hmm, looks like a USB controller chip of some sort. What does the flash chip say?

D’oh! The sneaky bastards! They removed all useful information from the flash chip!

Stay tuned for more Beijing stories in the following weeks.