Waking up just in time to check out the hotel breakfast we enjoyed the tunes of Johnny Cash together with a fair amount of bacon, omelette and juice. Ulf, Laura and me broke off the itinerary by skipping lunch and instead strolled down to the waterfront (Pu-long river). Lots of nice views and stalls who had printed prices combined with pleasant weather made a few hours easily pass by. A bartered for a really nice silver scarf and ended up paying 2 €.

We got some omelette/pancake thing from a street vendor who made an argument about us paying too much, that’s a nice change compared to the lot of Beijing sellers who try to rip you off whenever possible. In total I paid little more than 1 € for my lunch, quite nice. More photos, a random bus ride and even more walking we ended up at the hotel just in time to prepare for cocktails and dinner.

First we were off to Tara’s lounge which had a really nice atmosphere for some cocktails, after that we were off to a japanese restaurant called Shintori. This was a minimalist place with awesome bathrooms, spacious and concrete interior design. I had the largest sashimi and this proved to be my best meal so far in China. The tuna was close to perfect, and the others were also very pleased with their courses. The place had a club section just around the corner so we headed there as well.

The first thing about this club was the entrance, after walking up a bunch of stairs you had nine illuminated holes in a wall. We thought we were at the wrong place but Mathias instructed us to check out the holes. After inserting hands in one the holes a door slided open to the right, cool. Except that the door revealed a wall with the text ‘Gotcha’, another hole (or sequence?) opened the real door to the club though. Inside it was again concrete, space and minimalist all over. Sweet music but again the bathrooms took the price.

At the restaurant the guys stall was simply glass stands where you looked out to a zen garden and peed on the glass wall, awesome indeed. The bathrooms at the club followed the same fashion as the entrance to the club; there were two corridors with three doors each and no signs of male/female or that this actually was bathrooms. Trying to pull the knobs didn’t open the doors, neither pushing them. The trick was to push the other side of the door (that is opposite to the knob) and the door opened. This didn’t give much confidence though since the room was very dark, when entering no lights appeared until you locked the door. Awesome. Of course there were speakers that played the nice jazz/electronic music in the bathroom as well.

It’s interesting that the coolest and best place so far in China has been a japanese one, but we have a few more candidates on the list to try out. Back at the hotel for some reason me and Ulf decided to try jumping over the beds with both feet together simultaneously. Laura was happy to document this contemporary expressionistic art form which seemed like a good idea at the moment. I’m sure our neighbors loved it.