Michelle's Wild Adventures: see you on the other side

Right now I am on a plane, on my way back to Boston. I’m returning two (or three, depending on how you count) weeks early, missing half of the Spring School in Hangzhou. Nothing terrible (permanently) happened. Its just that I, er, cracked.

That’s right. On Tuesday, I reached the level of emotional stress that I had difficulty making it through a few hours without spontaneously and randomly bursting into tears. I decided that I was fed up and it was time to go home.

The stress wasn’t due to stolen taxis and too much sweet and sour pork, although that didn’t help. I’ve been working by myself and got stuck on my project. My social circle was incredibly small: we’re all miserable together which sometimes makes it hard to be happy. And I was unhappy enough that I had difficulty paying attention to the lectures or working. So, it was time to go home.

During my last twenty-four hours in Hangzhou I had a pretty fun time. On Thursday night, the group took me out to dinner to an Indian restaurant, complete with belly dancing. (belly dancing?!? Well, why not. But the dancers all had flat abs so it didn’t quite fit)

(This is Lisa’s cousin, Paul. He’s visiting and they’re going to visit their village. Notice that he looks absolutely nothing like her. I was expecting a male version of Lisa so when he answered their door, I was sure that I had the wrong apartment)

Afterwards we decided to go out for drinks. Curiosity and loneliness for our SO’s, brought us to a bar where we could drink and watch pole dancing.

It was a strip club without the strippers. The lingerie clad dancers performed synchronized dancers with fake guns and cigarettes. There was one who hung upside down from the pole or spun around it. The floor was glass with red under-lighting. And green lasers lit up the ceiling in random squiggly patterns that moved discontinuously. The other customers (booths full of men, mostly) drank beer by the case and smoked lots of cigarettes. My eyes burned.

And then Monica danced.

After the stripper-less strip club, we stopped in our old friend, Night and Day, for a little salsa. Most of the tables were empty but the band was going strong and the dance floor was full. I camped out at a table with Aaron for some people watching.

I forgot I had the zoom on. This is Aaron.

There was really-good-salsa guy who dipped Monica three times. (Apparently she accidently elbowed him hard in the face but I didn’t see that.) For some reason, he was friends with the foreigner-with-the-attitude-problem who was mean to the waiter. We also watched mister lonely inch his way over to talk to two very drunk girls. He moved at a rate of about two inches every fifteen minutes, smiling and keeping his eyes glued to them. They ignored the creepiness or else they were just too drunk.

Finally we decided to head home. I took one last taxi movie: this one is along the lake.

The next day (yesterday), I rolled out of bed at the bright and early hours of one in the afternoon and went for a bike ride around the lake. For the past month, I’ve been admiring Hangzhou’s street lamps and I wanted to document some of them before leaving town. (Every time I mentioned this to the other students, they gave me that five-heads look.)

It seems that every street in Hangzhou has different (and unique) street lights. For example, the ones on campus remind me of the Starship Enterprise and the pole reminds me of the interior lighting, in the Star Trek lounges.