TripDingo

A city like Shanghai certainly has no shortage of laundromats night clubs and bars. In fact, it can be said that Shanghai is incredibly boring once you’ve done your fair share of shopping and partying. After all, the novelty and excitement eventually wears off and the repeated late-nights and ensuing hangovers start wearing the body down.

Even so, it is still somewhat amusing to see how the various establishments of the night wax and wane over time. Which ones have been around the longest? The shortest? Which are the most popular? Which one is the cheapest? Which one has the best music? Which one has the best crowd? Etc. etc. etc. This is the wonderous trivia of the decadent, trendy, nocturnal socialite.

As I walked down from People’s Square, crossing Huai Hai Zhong Lu, on my way towards Xin Tian Di, I suddenly noticed that Judy Q is now known as Moment’s. That, in of itself, is largely unimportant to me though ever indicative of how one failed business is reborn as another. What amused me were the memories of what occupied that space before Judy’s Q: Club Pegasus.

Now, it’s hard to say whether anyone reading this is going to recall Pegasus because its heyday was most assuredly quite a few years ago. I’d venture to guess in 2004-2005, with 2006 definitely being a downward spiral before it became Judy Q in 2007.

Now, I fully subscribe to the notion that just about any place can play host to a rollicking good time as long as you have the right friends or people around you so I certainly had at least one great night at Pegasus back in early 2006. Oh, sure, the venue wasn’t particularly new, large, clean, grand, or whatnot but there were plenty of people, decent-enough music, a pool table, and a Street Fighter arcade machine!

Though that first experience was quite satisfactory, I will always remember Pegasus for my final experience there.

A group of friends and I paid the hefty cover charge and climbed up the stairs only to be greeted with a far smaller crowd than what we remembered it for. As we got ourselves situated and surveyed the landscape, a little portly white kid, who couldn’t have been more than 12-14 years old, sporting a jersey that protruded over his little belly pimp-limped past me with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. To top it all off, he had this massive bling chain around his neck. He was trying so hard to be or look hardcore, I was absolutely dumbfounded. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or immediately bitch-slap the little fucker upside the head.

The rest of the scene wasn’t much better. It soon became painfully obvious that we were probably at least 5-10 years older than the average age of the patrons that night, bewildering us as it confirmed several rumors we’d heard about Pegasus being known by that time for attracting the underage crowd.

So what do you do when you’re entirely on a different level in a different age group? Well, given that we’d already paid the ticket price for entry that included all-you-can-drink until something like 2am, we were quite hesitant to just throw it all away. So, in that situation, you do the only you can do: you resolve to get drunk in hopes that the pain will somehow go away.

“This is fucking ridiculous. I need a drink. Now.”

So there we were, hovering around the bar trying to drink our money’s worth double-time as little munchkins strutted amongst us. Even the arcade machine (which now featured Pacman, as if it were taunting us by harkening back to an even older age) could not save us from our bewildered misery.

“So, what brings you to Shanghai?”
“I’m studying here.”
“Oh, really? What year are you?”
“Sophmore.”
“Cool, what school do you go to?”
“Shanghai American School.”

And since SAS is a kindergarten to grade 12 school, that would be 14-15 years old fantastic.

And then it began…

A ring of people, no doubt with cracking voices and two mighty strands of pubic hair to rule them all to share amongst them all, formed on the dance floor. Like witnessing a train wreck, we edged away from the sanctuary of the bar to see what was going on.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

It was a dance-off…”You Got Served” style.

Like this, but with less puberty, dance skills, and black people.

Little pimps and pimpettes, battling for street-cred supremacy, took turns in the human arena to bust their best dance moves. The little flat-chested hoochies shook their ass and did their best to look seductively uninterested in their male counterpart who, in turn of course, played cocksure of how large their gonads must be.

To be there and witness such a travesty was quite possibly one of the lowest points of my life. It will stain me forever, quite possibly disqualifying me from any salvation by any god just by mere association.

Moment’s looks nice in the pictures, being that its all redecorated and stuff. But, whatever its format, I doubt it’ll survive for long in the highly competitive and sometimes mysterious nightlife market that is Shanghai.

Okay, no, Chinese people are not smaller. Oh sure, they can be, but I’ve seen some really big ass Chinese people before (usually from the North, where people are usually physically larger…like Germanic barbarians…I think…). But this post is about shots…alcohol shots, those beautiful little glasses full of delicious poison nectar we throw back to get our nights started or each other absolutely plastered.

But the question here is: what is “full?”

So what size is a shot anyway? Or, to be more specific, how much liquid should a shot contain? A quick search says 1 to 1.5 ounces (so says the pinnacle of knowledge that is Yahoo Answers, that is). Does everyone agree? That should bring the liquid level fairly close to the rim of the shot glass, right?

Yeah, I think so too.

So, as you can imagine, I was fairly amused upon walking into a group of young Chinese adults celebrating a birthday and toasting each other with whiskey shots…except the shot glasses were only about 1/3 to 1/2 filled. Oh sure, straight whiskey is reasonably strong (more so than the Lemon Drop or whatever one would emasculate the guys with)…but it just isn’t a shot if it isn’t filled up. It was like splashing some cologne on your tongue.

Of course, on behalf of all those who have had real shots, I had to comment.

…and everyone ignored me.

…and I just shut my yap and sat myself down. 

Now, to be fair, they did seem to slam those little droplets of whiskey (however tragic they appeared in their vastly empty vessels) back at a decent clip, especially when dice games are involved and penalties are awarded about once a minute.

That said, I’d like to take the time to make a public service announcement here: Chinese people are not light-weights when it comes to drinking. Yes, society likes to think that getting flush in the face equates to being a teetotaler but that’s really not true. Furthermore, I’m not certain Chinese (or Asians in general) get red in the face more than any other race anyway so let’s just throw all of that nonsense out. Fact is, if you haven’t had some hardcore Chinese liquor (baijiu) that often comes in toxicity levels ranging from 30-60 proof on average, you don’t know shit about how much fucking hair is on the Chinese chest when it comes to drinking.

Moreover, if you think buying a plastic jug of vodka on the bottom shelf at your local supermarket is risking blindness taking a walk on the wild side, then you haven’t tried bottom shelf Chinese baijiu. I once bought a small bottle of baijiu that cost something like 12.9 RMB (US$1.75) and that shit is straight rat poison. I’m not fucking kidding. Yes, alcohol burns through paper cups or even waxed paper cups (especially cheap Chinese waxed paper cups) but this stuff burned through as we poured.

Never have I so utterly feared losing at drinking games as I did that night. It was not fun.

In what may equate to hobos with paper-bagged whiskey bottles, I see plenty of lower class Chinese people buying swigging on these little bottles of disaster as if it were nothing. Oh sure, it’s usually the rugged manly men as I’ve never seen the gals take these on but still, Western guys need to stop thinking the Asians are all a bunch of pussies when it comes to inebriating oneself because they can definitely hold their own. Hell, they have champions.