Two weeks in China. Since Julia has been to Israel twice already, it has been decided (if you get my drift) that it’s time we went to her motherland. Fine, her parents’ motherland. Her grandmotherland, I suppose.
So we took a China Eastern flight to Shanghai. The personal entertainment unit offers foreign language learning games, which I used to brush up on my Chinese. Unfortunately the game broke after an hour or so, and restarting it did not change anything. I decided to diagnose the bug as a memory leak and tried to get some sleep.
About half an hour before landing, China Eastern offers the passengers some Taichi practice, or as they like to call it, “Taichi in the microspace”.
A lot of passengers cooperated, and so did I, as I already drew too much attention as one of the very few non Chinese passengers on the flight.
After landing, we took a train to the city and walked to the Fish Inn Bund which turned out to be a nice little hotel. We checked in and went on to the city to find some beer.
As we were walking around Nanjing Road, we heard a girl calling “massage! massage!” and immediately after a male voice replying “Lo, lo massage!” (Hebrew: “no, not a massage!”)
- “Lama lo? (why not?)” I yelled to the guy.
- “Gam po?! (here too?!)” the guy responded.
I like how easy it is for me to have a meaningful conversation in so few words when it’s in my native language. Also interesting is the fact that my first interaction on the streets of Shanghai is with an Israeli.
We walked for quite a lot, and after a while finally saw a sign: “Beer and Coffee”. We did it! But when we went through the door, I realized we might have a problem: There was a bar, but there was only one table. Around it sat mostly girls. “We’re in the wrong place” I told Julia, but it was obvious she doesn’t understand what’s going on.
All the girls got up at once, and one of them approached me. Not “us” - “me”,
- “Come in, we have pretty girls” she said as she touched my wrist. Then she pointed at Julia - “and it’s free to watch”. I said “no thank you”, and dragged Julia outside. Only then could I quietly explain to her that we stumbled into a whore house. To be fair, it was her first time. I had inadvertently stumbled into whore houses before.
By now we were hungry, so we found a small place to have some dumplings. The menu did not disappoint us and provided long moments of Chingrish fun:
We finally found something that looked more like a bar, although I’m not completely convinced that it wasn’t a whore house as well. We had one drink and went back to the hotel to get some sleep.
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