It has been a very busy past couple of weeks. With people to see and places to go I have done a lot and had a ton of fun. Yesterday I had my last day of classes and two final exams. Now I just have to pack my bags and catch my plane tommorrow night to Beijing. I don’t know what to do with myself.
Some notes on these past several days. Thursday night, the night before my finals, I went and say my favorite Chinese band at one of my favorite bars: the Speakeasy. The band is called New Pants (新裤子）and they are from Beijing. Their style could be called a mix of the Sex Pistols and Devo. They use lots of synth and even more punk rock. The show was amazing and I was able to shake their hands and take part in a Chinese mosh-pit. I’ll try and put some photos up later.
Last night we celebrated our end of term and my classmate John’s birthday. It was nice seeing most of our foreign friends together and hit the town. We ended up going to a bar/club called Shelter which is located in an underground tunnel/bunker created during the Cultural Revolution. Crazy stuff. My good friend from Georgia, Lee Moore, just wrote an email about it and I’m going to steal his words:
“We got out of the taxi on the back side of the Kunming Zoo, seeing a door with some neon lights we walked into the building, hugging the side of the Zoo. The first room we entered was a classy sort of place, Ella Fitzgerald was singing quietly in the background, with customers seated in plush red chairs.The only thing that didn’t seem like a 1950’s New York jazz club was, on the walls, there were large ventilation fans spinning slowly.
We pushed his way past some red velvet doors, and the music changed, the soft jazz being drowned out by some much louder and more modern music. We went down a flight of stairs, past three concrete doors, each 3 inches thick, and each real concrete. At the third door, a large, fifty-year old man greeted us “Huanying, waigouren tongzhimen” (welcome foreign comrades).
Above our heads ran a red pipe about three feet in circumference, with small fans poking out of it. I ordered a glass of milk at the bar, which was actually a little bunker in the corner of the room, with a thin opening through which the customer could make his order. While waiting, I knocked on the bunker, a hollow thud signalling that the bunker bar had been added for style.
While Jon and I drank our orange juice and milk respectively, Jon mentioned that we were now directly under the elephants sleeping quarters in Zoo, and that the door behind the dj, supposedly guarded tunnels leading through a several miles long labyrinth which ended not far from our school. I asked him if we could go check them out, and he replied “Not tonight.”
Apparently, these tunnels where build by hand during the cultural revolution, when Mao feared that the Soviet Union or the US were going to nuke his glorious socialist dream of a country (for good reason, China and Russia came within hours of nuclear war in 1969). These tunnels were meant to serve as a safe place for those communist officials important enough to get a spot in the tunnels, and in a way, as a safe place for communism itself.
And now it houses a trendy bar where rich Chinese businessmen buy Manhattans for all there girlfriends. No longer communisms salvation, it really represents how far China has come from communism. Of all the places I’ve been in China, this is the one that best symbolizes the way the new market-oriented China is fitting into, if awkwardly, into the old communist China.”
Tommorrow I take a plane to Beijing. While in the city I plan to see my old haunts and meet up with some American friends of mine. Should be a nice way to wrap up these pas seven months in China before I return to the States on Wednesday.
