Okay, so.... Pinky (pictured below) suggested we go to the club in Weinan. This was news to most of us, as nobdoy knew Weinan had a club (there's no nightlife.) Curious, we agreed and walked up the road out of town, before entering a generic looking lobby. We headed down 2-3 flights of stairs to be greeted by an airport-style metal detector to walk through. We all went through, we all set it off, the security guards didn't give a damn, so we continued into the club. We parted the curtain and were greeted by a wall of music and led to a booth. I'm not 100% sure on how these places work, but from what I gathered different booths come with different prices. We went for a booth right at the base of the stage and were given a list of "packages" to choose from. I went for the Tsingtao package, which came with 15 bottles of Tsingtao and a bunch of snacks. This went for 150RMB; about £15. Our beers arrived, delivered by waitresses in schoolgirl outfits and flanked by men-in-black-esque security guards. After opening and pouring our first round of beers, we were handed "clap-rattles"... hand-shaped maracca-type things... applause for the lazy / hyper-active. Then the entertainment started...
( All photos from my phone... so sorry. :( )
^ Pinky (right) and his friend, who's name escapes me (left.)
^ Tim + Tim's GF and Dumi + Dumi's GF rounded out our 7-strong booth.
^ our booth table in all its glory. Horrible pic, my apologies.
^ The first of the entertainment, a young Chinese girl wearing a cross between a victorian dress and a maid's outfit. Thoughts that she was a piece of eye candy and that we were in the wrong kind of club were soon dispelled when she opened her mouth. The girl could sing. A very impressive 2-3 song set. All Chinese songs. Lots of applause.
^ Another set. A kind of fairly tale theme. Chick on her swing singing along, a few dudes swanning around. You know, the normal? ( at this point, my mind was imploding )
^ The natural progression after the fairly tale? Hip-hop of course! The dudes were actually really good breakers and poppers. Impressive set.
^ This pair rolled onto stage clad in their 4-wheel roller boots. Imagine dancing on ice... minus the ice, and with more gymnastics. More applause.
^ This gymnast / hula-hoop-enthusiast was super talented. A pretty young girl, around 12-14yrs old. Highlights included some contorsionism and hula-hooping about 40 hoops.
^ The two roller booters returned, sans boots. A circus-style gymnast set was on the cards. Mighty impressive stuff. Pictured: The guy on the floor is balancing the younger guy on his feet, then "kicks" him in the air, the guy does a backflip, and lands back on the other guys feet. (how they started) They did about 6-7 sommersaults in a row. The rest of the set was equally impressive. Mesmorising.
^ this final set was like something from Butlins, but Chinese. Very entertaining.
The whole event was MC'd by a very charismatic and enthusastic gentleman. He announced the presence of our foreigner-centric booth, we got an applause and a lot of stares. We smiled nervously. Somewhere in the middle of the entertainment there was also a bingo-type-raffle-thing that went on way too long, but the drunk Chinese guys were loving it. After dusting off our snacks, we also got more delivered... sent over by a booth Chinese girls behind our booth. We thanked them as best as we could accross both the noisy room and language barrier.
Following the entertainment, the stage became the dance floor, and the DJ started playing some dance music. Now slightly intoxicated I proceeded to the dance floor, where I vaguely remember getting lots of high-fives from the MC, doing some crazy footwork dancing with the break-dancing guys and then some 1990s-esque 'discotech!' dancing with the Chinese girls who bought our snacks.
The dancing only lasted about 30minutes before being faded out. Feeling boiling hot, dehydrated, and really feeling the beer consumption (I was one of only 3 people drinking alcohol on my table and wasn't gonna waste any) I headed back to our booth. I was ready to leave, and in need of fresh air or a huge glass of water. The locals had other ideas. A few Chinese guys from another booth came over and essentially challenged us to a down a glass of beer. I tried to cheat and switch my glass for one of my empty ones, but one of the guys caught on. Grrr. Turns out, Chinamen can't drink beer too fast, as even little old me was able to empty my glass before them.
Worse for ware and very tired we headed home and I fumbled my way into bed.
Awesome night.
( Went to Xi'an today... way too tired to blog about it now though... I took 196 photos! Will post about it tomorrow. )
Hahaha that sounds awesome!!! And the first girl was wearing a gothic lolita dress just so you know, all the rage in Asia :P