Tai Bai Bo. Tai Bai Bo. Tai Bai BO!

6/9

Today it was just dumping rain so I went to the Shanghai Museum, which was supposed to be fantastic, but I found it a bit boring.  I was particularly disappointed in their Calligraphy exhibition, though their Minorities exhibit (showing traditional costumes of the many minority groups in China) was impressive.

I convinced Terry, an English guy I met at my hostel, to go with me to Zapata's because even though it was a seriously cheesy, trashy ex-pat bar, they had free margaritas on Wednesday Ladies Night.  The margaritas tasted okay but had almost no alcohol in them whatsoever and all the other drinks were wildly overpriced, so we left shortly.  We were walking back through the French Concession area (which was never French but previously very British and is still a big ex-pat enclave) and looking for a bar Terry thought he'd been to last night (he'd been too drunk to remember properly) when I saw it so we went over.  60RMB ($9 USD) got you an all you can drink bracelet but we were both unsure if we should go in because we realized we'd end up drunk and have to get a taxi back since the Metro stopped running at 11:30/12.

We caved.  It was a really cool bar called CD Soho.  He'd explained it previously and it had sounded, well, pretty much like any other pretentious bar, but it was awesome in reality.  It was like walking through a futuristic ipod commercial with curving plastic white walls.  The bathroom stalls circled a giant hollow ball made of hundreds of 2" diameter mirrors; the inside served as a vanity room, naturally.  Plus it was just fun.  The music was surprisingly good, and even though it was in an ex-pat area, it was obviously a local bar and except for maybe ten other foreigners, the bar was filled with a couple hundred Chinese. 

Eventually we started hanging out with a group of Chinese, who decided that we needed more alcohol in our system (I managed to not get too drunk, but Terry lost count after 20 beers, yes 20) and starting making us drink premixed jaeger bombs and eat random food.  With them, we played a game called Tai Bai Bo! where you each have a yahtzee cup of dice and try to guess the total count.  It was easy enough to play once you knew the Chinese way to count on your fingers (different than ours).  We both were fairly trashed, but because I'd paced myself by making myself drink one glass of Sprite in between the drinks, I got us a cab and we both got back to the hostel safely.