Summer Daze
In light of the retroactive blogging that I am forced to do to cover the amount of temporal surface area I originally neglected the first time around, I will try present a montage of my first full summer in Shanghai, hopefully by juicing it up enough that you’ll want to keep reading while keeping the salaciousness down to a minimum for those of you on low-carb diets.
Highlight #1: Many friends from California came out and brought a little bit of home to Shanghai. The big one was Monica doing a summer law program in Hong Kong for two months. I went to Hong Kong twice, met with her in Beijing for a weekend, and then was blessed with her visit to Shanghai at the end of July. I basically tried to get as much of my Monica fix taken care of as possible. Let’s just say that it sucks when the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” comes up on my iPod.
Cheryl also came out on a whirlwind tour of Hong Kong, China, and Mongolia. Being the experienced globetrotter that she is, she meticulously mapped out her entire convoluted itinerary so that everywhere she went, she’d be able to do the touristy thing with good friends who also had yet to do those touristy things. One of my HK trips was made because both Cheryl and Monica were in town, and though I had been to Hong Kong many times before, I found myself at places I didn’t even know existed (wait, you mean there’s a BEACH in this two-bit hick town?!). Beijing was nice, what with the sprightly duo of Ting Ni and Cheryl Scott bounding up the steps at the Great Wall, while Monica (bless her heart) and I sat towards the bottom, consoling the maturing beer belly that is mine. I have to credit Cheryl for being one of the only people on this planet that can pull me away from a crappy martial arts movie on HBO to take three different subway trains + a cab to get to a place where I have to pay money to enter. That’s exactly what she did on my first day in Beijing, where we met up at the Summer Palace. I forgot to add in the part about having to actually find her once I got to the Summer Palace, being that Cheryl looks exactly like every other Chinese person in the proximity.
With both Monica and Cheryl in China, I couldn’t ask for much more, but I got it with multiple visits from Jack Cheng and my brother Andrew. This called for some serious celebrating, and what better outlet than buying bootleg DVDs? All in all, quality time spent with quality friends and family, and that itself makes it on the top of the Eric Shanghai Summer Highlight List.
Hightlight #2: I’m a summer birthday boy, and given so much activity with friends and family and all, I had one of those elongated birthday weeks that people who have inflated egos try to build on each additional year. Since I was pretty new at my company, I thought a great ice breaker would be to invite all my new co-workers to go singing, which apparently is what the Chinese youth species enjoy doing when they’re not eating and working. This was when the awful truth came out: they don’t drink! I was forced to gulp down as many brews as I could with my boss, Jeff, who thankfully is from California and partied at Chico State. Little did I realize at the time that when I lost to him in a chugging contest, that it would be a foreshadowing of me losing much more later that night.
After ditching the Gang of Dry, the few of us that did enjoy imbibing got soused at all-you-can-eat sushi, which has made plenty an appearance on this blog in months past. Cheryl arrived that afternoon, and along with Chace, Keith, Tina, Kim, Mike, and Sanjay, we made a sport out of making myself look stupid. Of course, it was more like the SF Giants, with me being Barry Bonds and everyone else being Neifi Perez (for you non-baseball people, basically it was a one man wrecking crew with me doing the wrecking to myself). Our next stop was Cotton, one of my favorite pubs in Shanghai because it has an outdoor patio which is perfect for warm evenings. Problem is, everyone else feels the same way, so on the warm evening of my birthday, we forced our way through the crowd and got ourselves a table, where Jeff promptly insisted that I drink one shot of tequila after we had already had a few rounds.
“No thanks, Jeff, I’m really drunk right now and I’m probably going to end up puking all over this nice patio if I have anything else to drink.”
“Eric, it’s your birthday, you have to have this one last shot of tequila.”
“Jeff, I appreciate that you are celebrating my birthday with me, but I have alcohol up to here (gesturing to throat) and I don’t think I can take anymore.”
“Eric, do you know what a CLM is?”
“Um…Charming Little Mouse?”
“It stands for Career Limiting Move, and if you don’t have this shot of tequila in front of you, this might be considered a CLM down the road”
Gulp.
First of all, when two drunk people are having a dialogue, it's never grammatically correct. Second, when your boss is shoving big words like CLM down your throat, regardless of how drunk he and you both are, you oblige. I took the shot and immediately tried to supress that inevitable tequila burp. Unfortunately, neither my hand nor the force of gravity could stop the hurl, and before I knew it the beautiful patio at Cotton’s in addition to someone’s cute blue sandal were awash in panda chowder. And that, my friends, is how Highlight #2 transformed into Lowlight #1.
Hey, at least I kept my word.
Highlight #1: Many friends from California came out and brought a little bit of home to Shanghai. The big one was Monica doing a summer law program in Hong Kong for two months. I went to Hong Kong twice, met with her in Beijing for a weekend, and then was blessed with her visit to Shanghai at the end of July. I basically tried to get as much of my Monica fix taken care of as possible. Let’s just say that it sucks when the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” comes up on my iPod.
Cheryl also came out on a whirlwind tour of Hong Kong, China, and Mongolia. Being the experienced globetrotter that she is, she meticulously mapped out her entire convoluted itinerary so that everywhere she went, she’d be able to do the touristy thing with good friends who also had yet to do those touristy things. One of my HK trips was made because both Cheryl and Monica were in town, and though I had been to Hong Kong many times before, I found myself at places I didn’t even know existed (wait, you mean there’s a BEACH in this two-bit hick town?!). Beijing was nice, what with the sprightly duo of Ting Ni and Cheryl Scott bounding up the steps at the Great Wall, while Monica (bless her heart) and I sat towards the bottom, consoling the maturing beer belly that is mine. I have to credit Cheryl for being one of the only people on this planet that can pull me away from a crappy martial arts movie on HBO to take three different subway trains + a cab to get to a place where I have to pay money to enter. That’s exactly what she did on my first day in Beijing, where we met up at the Summer Palace. I forgot to add in the part about having to actually find her once I got to the Summer Palace, being that Cheryl looks exactly like every other Chinese person in the proximity.
With both Monica and Cheryl in China, I couldn’t ask for much more, but I got it with multiple visits from Jack Cheng and my brother Andrew. This called for some serious celebrating, and what better outlet than buying bootleg DVDs? All in all, quality time spent with quality friends and family, and that itself makes it on the top of the Eric Shanghai Summer Highlight List.
Hightlight #2: I’m a summer birthday boy, and given so much activity with friends and family and all, I had one of those elongated birthday weeks that people who have inflated egos try to build on each additional year. Since I was pretty new at my company, I thought a great ice breaker would be to invite all my new co-workers to go singing, which apparently is what the Chinese youth species enjoy doing when they’re not eating and working. This was when the awful truth came out: they don’t drink! I was forced to gulp down as many brews as I could with my boss, Jeff, who thankfully is from California and partied at Chico State. Little did I realize at the time that when I lost to him in a chugging contest, that it would be a foreshadowing of me losing much more later that night.
After ditching the Gang of Dry, the few of us that did enjoy imbibing got soused at all-you-can-eat sushi, which has made plenty an appearance on this blog in months past. Cheryl arrived that afternoon, and along with Chace, Keith, Tina, Kim, Mike, and Sanjay, we made a sport out of making myself look stupid. Of course, it was more like the SF Giants, with me being Barry Bonds and everyone else being Neifi Perez (for you non-baseball people, basically it was a one man wrecking crew with me doing the wrecking to myself). Our next stop was Cotton, one of my favorite pubs in Shanghai because it has an outdoor patio which is perfect for warm evenings. Problem is, everyone else feels the same way, so on the warm evening of my birthday, we forced our way through the crowd and got ourselves a table, where Jeff promptly insisted that I drink one shot of tequila after we had already had a few rounds.
“No thanks, Jeff, I’m really drunk right now and I’m probably going to end up puking all over this nice patio if I have anything else to drink.”
“Eric, it’s your birthday, you have to have this one last shot of tequila.”
“Jeff, I appreciate that you are celebrating my birthday with me, but I have alcohol up to here (gesturing to throat) and I don’t think I can take anymore.”
“Eric, do you know what a CLM is?”
“Um…Charming Little Mouse?”
“It stands for Career Limiting Move, and if you don’t have this shot of tequila in front of you, this might be considered a CLM down the road”
Gulp.
First of all, when two drunk people are having a dialogue, it's never grammatically correct. Second, when your boss is shoving big words like CLM down your throat, regardless of how drunk he and you both are, you oblige. I took the shot and immediately tried to supress that inevitable tequila burp. Unfortunately, neither my hand nor the force of gravity could stop the hurl, and before I knew it the beautiful patio at Cotton’s in addition to someone’s cute blue sandal were awash in panda chowder. And that, my friends, is how Highlight #2 transformed into Lowlight #1.
Hey, at least I kept my word.