Given how long I was offline, I think a lil recap is long overdue... so here goes.

I got here this past Saturday and left for ShangHai on Sunday to meet up with one of my very good buddies: Joo. We met around noon and had Zhen Zhu Nai Cha (That'd be bubble tea for you damn foreigners :P ). After having dinner with Joo and her parents later that night we hung out on Mao Ming street literally bar hopping from one bar to another one drink after another. I think we covered around 6 bars or so, just catching up on stuff. Then I felt like dancing so Joo took me to club California. Grr... trance and progressive house music... not my cup o' tea, so we just drank more. On Monday we just went around the market place looking for stuff to buy, but I couldn't find anything. I really wanted to check my e-mail and stuff so we stopped by at Joo's place to do that, but damn... modems suck... It took me forever (it was seriously intolerable) to log into my e-mail account... after like 2 hours I just gave up. Then we headed to Wai Tan for the night scenary. There I just totally forgot that I was in Shanghai... it was pretty much as if I were in Hong Kong. Lights, neon signs, and more lights... pretty cool. We also checked out the tall ass Grand Hayatt hotel to look down on the night scene. Yeah I'm a damn tourist. :P Then we checked out this club that had 1 Yuan Draft beer (now that's CHEAP!!!!), but it was pretty deserted given that it was a Monday night. It could've been cool if it were the weekends, but oh well. It was pretty funny seeing these Chinese girls who really didn't look any older than 16 going up against other Chinese guys (again, no older than 16 I bet) and just hooking up pretty easily... man... I'm telling you... Chinese girls are WAY more aggressive than other Asian girls. ;) Tuesday after some good quality dim sum, I bid farewell to Joo and Shanghai.

Nothing much happened in Beijing until Friday night when I called Paul's brother, Karl, up (he was visiting his parents) and also met up with a hoobae from highschool (Ahrum). Karl had two friends visiting from Corea so we all hooked up and perused the San Li Tun Bar Street. The entire street is filled with bars and people soliciting for sex. It used to be much less obvious when I was living here, but now it's just flat out in your face. Basically a lot less people asking you ig you want pirated DVDs or CDs, and much more people asking you if you want sex. We went into one bar called "Boys and girls", sat down and chilled for a bit with a few drinks, and just kinda looked around in awe thinking to ourselves; "Damn... Beijing has changed" Then we checked out The Den for a little while before we went clubbing at Vics and Mix as I talked about earlier. Having experienced the nightlife of both Shanghai and Beijing all over again, it's pretty obvious that if you're single (or in a relationship, but you're just a jerk), these two wild cities are enough to fulfil your endeavors. Yes, these towns are, in my opinion, just as, if not more, happening as any other big cities in the world. I must be getting pretty tired of Pittsburgh... *SIGH*