A Slothful Visitation

Sloth: A very slow moving mammal with three toes that hangs upside down in jungles.

For those fortunate enough not to know Mike Goodland, you will have no idea what I am drivelling on about. Suffice it to say that on several occasions people challenged to guess his nickname, knowing it was an animal, have hit the mark with no trouble.

The Sloth has been my first visitor to China (they will shortly be arriving in droves) and, as such, it has been my onerous duty to give him a flavour of life in China and, hence, my readers get the vicarious pleasure. It also gives me chance to answer my critics, who complain about the absence of sex and violence in my stories.

Sloth is a well travelled sort of chap whom, as a lecturer at a third rate university, often takes six or eight week breaks to swan around the world. So to make an impression on this recalcitrant fellow you have to do something different.

The Game. First night in town Mike has to be taught. This game must have been invented by the Irish; if you lose you drink. How else can I put it; you are right – you do not drink (a game for the English); you are wrong – you drink. It is a dice game with lots of lying and you have to be quick or people know that you are lying. A game lasts a few seconds and then at least one of you has to drink; it is not a game that the abstemious will approve of. Sloths do not really stand much chance and Mike drank quite a lot.

Pearl River Cruises by Xueyang Feng - CC

There is a boat trip along the Pearl River, which is pretty good so this was an obvious way to start the second evening. The king of organization had arranged this and was completely in control – well nearly. In practice May, our secretary/assistant, organizes anything like this and I just claim the credit. Taxi ($1.50) to the departure point in plenty of time for a 6.30 sailing. I explain to the taxi driver, in my best Chinese of course, that he has taken us to the wrong place. He drops us where I want to be dropped and we wander up to the reception area with the tickets. Wrong place – back to where the Cab Driver tried to drop us first time in time to see the boat pull away from the pier. A few inquiries suggest that there is another one at 7.30.

We retire a couple of hundred metres to the street and find a restaurant where, not surprisingly, I have to buy the beers and one appetiser. Discussions about how to deal with this situation – will we get on the next
boat, will we have to pay more money, what about the rest of the evening, have we got time for three beers etc. – get interrupted. This was by a woman whom we had asked about times by the pier, telling us to hurry up, there was a 7 o'clock boat. How did she know where we were? Why had she taken the trouble to find us? What was in it for her? How long is a piece of string? Who knows – this is China, where service is king – the West are about 300 years behind China in this respect. We get hassled out of the restaurant and down the back stairs, down the road and on to the boat as it is pulling away. The boat trip is pretty good but I have done it before and it was merely a trick to lull Mike before Deep Rock.

No, not Hard Rock, that is a different place entirely. Where do you think you are? Guangzhou is a quality joint. The Hard Rock Cafe is expensive and full of (quality) hookers – would I be taking an innocent like Mike there on his second night? Please, Deep Rock only. This is a place for the purveyance of alcohol with which I am moderately familiar. What marks it as a bit unusual (although not in Guangzhou) is that young women are delegated to assist you to consume the aforementioned alcoholic beverages. The way that this service is provided is by beating you at The Game so they drink a bit (on the odd occasion that they lose) and you drink a lot (on the many times you lose). In good form and soberish I am competitive with the girls (if they get fed up with me winning they wield out the local blokes, by which time I am always to far gone to win) but The Sloth on his second day – please? He tried diversionary tactics of trying to get the girls to tell him things in Chinese and he had a regular change of girl because, being a Sloth, he took so long to play that the girls would doze off. Measuring drinking rates here would be ridiculous but have you ever seen a Sloth open and close it's mouth?

Anyway, after that, we have a happy Sloth who ferrets around the tourist bit of Guangzhou (yes, there is such a thing) on his own some of the following day before the evening's entertainment. He was not informed, but the idea was to make sure that Mike got propositioned by a lady of the night. It is regrettable for the characters of several people that this requirement had been agreed with one of Sloth's and my mutual (female) acquaintances that this was necessary. The three of us (Nuri, one of my work colleagues and part-time friend was along) set off to a bar in the right part of town – the richest bit. Sure enough, we are only there about twenty minutes when in comes a "young lady" who sizes us up in about half a second. She starts a conversation; one she had probably only had about two thousand times before. Anyway it was quite entertaining and, this being the country that has really taken to the mobile phone, girls start to appear at regular intervals over the next half an hour until our leading lady is happy that she has the right two companions for the job. Our lady orders a change of bar and all the drinks – funny she did not seem to pay though – the whole show was quite entertaining (Mike thinks that his girl is really interested in teaching him some Chinese). We were actually drinking quite slowly and when it came to time to leave we were sober enough for most things. So, what happened to Mike; a price was mentioned but not the services that would be provided. We left. Mike & I tried Hard Rock this time to see if more entertainment was to be had, but it was closed.

Mike's introduction to Guangzhou was now sufficiently advanced that we ventured an hour's flight up the coast. This was to Xiamen (used to be called Amoy for students of Chinese geography) a nice "small" city of 1 1/4 million of which the main attraction is an offshore island that had heavy colonial influence – French Architecture, that sort of thing. The flight was straight-forward; we found the hotel fine and walked to the ferry for a ten-minute ride. By then we were flagging a bit (because the Hard Rock Cafe was shut at 2.30 we had been forced to attack my supply of San Miguel and the flight had been at 8 something) so we were looking for foods and liquids. We wandered into a Park. This was very good, as most Chinese parks are – they are a cross between what we, Westerners, think of as a Park with some sports facilities and a botanical garden. You have to pay to get in but it is well worth it, they are surprising havens of peace in the cities. I have digressed; this particular park had one key failing – no restaurant – so by the time we had deduced this and staggered out of the park we were not interested in parks, islands, architecture or any damn thing except eating and drinking.

Xiamen, Gulangyu by Jakob Montrasio - CC BY 2.0

We appeared to be the only Gweilos (White Ghosts) on the island, so we were the usual object of curiosity when we sat down to stuff our gobs with lots of food (using our stylish chopsticks techniques naturally) and tea, oh and the odd beer. One old bloke brought his grandson over to look at us for ten minutes. This is normal behaviour and not meant to be offensive; it is just curiosity. However, some little brat staring at you for ten minutes would be disconcerting by itself. The fact that Mike & I spent quite a while trying to entertain it really was beyond the pale – imagine your granny drooling over the fence to entertain the ducks – that was us. I normally find it quite entertaining because you can behave how you want and they
think that it is normal Gweilo behaviour but even my (as you know) brilliant good humour was stretched.

Suitably replete we set off to explore the island properly. We found a nice beach and it seemed like time for a rest and a beer. Very peaceful. I suppose that I should point out at this stage that Chinese beaches are a haven for Dirty Old Men – Phillipino and Thai women may be better looking but the bodies of Chinese women .... More later. Further wandering and another brief stop brought us to a pier. This took us by surprise, this was the wrong side of the island and going out to sea you hit Taiwan so that was a no-no. A little enquiry revealed that there was a ferry back to the mainland in 45 minutes. It was 4 something and we have all seen lots of colonial architecture before, haven't we, so time for a beer and a nice half-hour ferry ride back to the mainland.

We had realised that, after a nice relaxing day, when we got cleaned up we would be ready for a decent night out so we wandered back to the hotel looking for suitable places of hospitality. I bought a Harry Potter watch but we did not find anything to do with entertainment. Cleaned up and fed we asked in the hotel where some fabulous young fellow sent us off on a $4 taxi ride to God knows where.

We walked into this joint; it was a Show Bar. Now, dear reader, I realise that many of you will not know what a Show Bar is but the name gives it away; it is a bar with a show. The show is normally mainly singing but can include acrobats, table dancers, jugglers and erotic dancers; it is continuous for about five or six hours with minimal or no breaks. It has to be said that the dancing is not usually that erotic, China is catching up very fast with the West but they are not quite up to speed on this one yet – some of us are measuring progress nightly There is, of course, also a bar or several – these are normally pretty big joints.

Anyway the first thing that we meet is an empty bar (it was quite early – 10 or so) with girls in rather smart uniforms behind it. Now many of you may not realise but Southern China is populated by petite (sorry Dean) young ladies, many of whom are quite good looking. I realise that my female readers will not be interested in this but, hey, they stopped reading at the second reference to the Sloth anyway. Now this bar had obviously decided that the best way to attract customers was get the best looking girls in; we sat down. Beer (by the bucket of course) was bought. Perhaps I had better explain that. In most bars in Guangzhou there is a price for a bottle or can of beer. However, if you buy lots – usually about ten or a dozen – at a time then you get a substantial discount – usually twenty or fifty percent. I should have realised that something was amiss when they said that the price was 30 ($4) a bottle and when I asked about the bucket price they looked blank. I offered 200 for 9 and they happily accepted – shit I should have done better.

Anyway the Game is produced and I start playing the boss of the bar who is good looking but has an attention span to compete with a goldfish so I started winning. Mike was playing the best looking girl in the bar and losing. The boss lady did not like losing and departed (only to return once to claim the commission for the second bucket – I will not mention the commission wars, they are too horrible) and Mike very generously suggested that his young lady might care to play the GrandMaster. It soon became
apparent to the aforementioned GM that these girls were not experts and I think that the Game had been only introduced that week. Maybe even the bar had not been running long. Anyway, I was happy; she was very sweet, extremely good-looking and not very good at the Game. When she lost she would drink "just a leetle" and I would drink the same. When I lost I would drink the whole glass, but no matter how hard I tried (and I tried very hard to lose) she was always more pissed than me. A third bucket and Teddy were duly bought. I had better explain Teddy. He is the usual moderately made toy of a large size that can be bought in Guangzhou for a dollar. Asking price in Xiamen was $6, agreed price $4, cash tendered $8, change received $0 – yes I was on the ball. Now I was really Mister Popular – my, by now, stunningly beautiful, young friend would come round our side of the bar occasionally to give me a cuddle and I began to realise why she was pissed – about 22 and not much more than half my weight. The boss lady got pissed off and made her do a stretch of table dancing – now what was I saying about the Chinese ability as erotic dancers – forget that. Mike wandered off occasionally to watch the rather good floor show but I am afraid that I had lost interest in his welfare by then.

How does this incident end? Another bucket was bought with a Credit Card (previously unheard of in a year in China, and I kid you not) and I went for a pee. Hum, what an ending! Whilst I was away Mike got soaked in beer from a fight. Mike and the other bar girls conspired against me and decided that the only way that this could not end in tears was if Mike and I "left" or my young friend would keep drinking. Surprising isn't it, but I was I was not actually stone cold sober by then and (extremely stupidly) did not offer much resistance. Mike wandered back to the bar later and she was in tears. So there you have it; violence (missed) and sex (missed), a not untypical story.

The rest of the slothful visit? Mike went off to Shanghai and Nuri and I flew up to meet him in Ningbo to go to an island. Well not quite, we were checked in and were due to board. I had just sat down to start my second beer after checking the display when I hear that a flight is cancelled – it sounded like our number. I checked and sure enough, come back at 8.45 in the morning. Nuri cancelled but I did not have much choice, I had Mike's ticket to Beijing. We suspected that the airline was short of punters but I was told by those that know better that the airline cannot do that, I would find out in the morning if it was the same flight number. It was not the same flight number; it was not only even the same airline. Get to Ningbo – ferry cancelled. (Both flight and ferry were because of a typhoon.) Mike had a new plan and we went off to a different town – Xioashing or something similar (as if anybody cares) which was quite pleasant but when it came to the evening's entertainment we could find the pink light district and two discos that closed at 11.00 p.m. – yes nightlife was cancelled.

Shaoxing by Zhangzhugang - CC BY-SA 4.0

Mike went of to Beijing and various other places before we went to Tibet – but that is another story.