There is a developing nightlife here in Jinzhou. People with money celebrate the weekend by taking their friends out to dinner, and then to Karaoke bars. At the end of the night they go out for barbeque. The foreign teachers are discouraged from taking part in all this rabble-rousing. We have a ten o’clock curfew. After ten, they lock the doors to the hotel where we live.

They say that the curfew is for our protection, but we all know it is really to prevent illicit behavior. Last semester one of the foreign teachers had a Chinese girlfriend he liked to bring back to his room. The hotel manager, Mr. Wong, thought this woman was a professional, because she was a masseuse and had dated other foreign teachers in town. The teacher would not stop seeing his girlfriend, so he was fired. He got a job all the way out in Urumqi, and the girlfriend followed him, so it must have been true love. Good for them, but bad for us. We are left with a ridiculous 10 o’clock curfew.

One of our colleagues, a Belgian woman named Elke, regularly breaks curfew. She gets away with it because she has a great relationship with Mr. Wong. She calls him “yeye”, which means “grandpa”, and she also bribes him with cigarettes. It is really fun to see the two of them joke around in Chinese. She can come home at any hour and call Mr. Wong to open up the gates. She says that we could do this, too, but we are a little intimidated by Mr. Wong. He is so grumpy all the time.

Josh and I went out with Elke and some other foreign teachers last Friday. We went to a pizzeria and then out to Angel, Jinzhou’s fanciest nightclub. Angel is much too posh to serve any of the local beers, so we had to order the fancy beer: Coors Light! They charge 20 yuan for a bottle, which is four or five times the average cost for a perfectly good Tsingdao of twice the size. It had been fifteen-years since I had a Coors Light, and I had stayed away from that stuff for a reason! Yuck!

Angel featured a pretty good Chinese garage band, with a really great guitarist. Then after the band, strippers came out and danced around a pole. There were two women and one man. This being China, the strippers did not take their clothes off, but they did some very good imitations of American-style, exotic dancing. They must have studied the movie “Striptease” very carefully.

After the strippers were finished, a DJ played house music and people started dancing. I danced with Maggie, an Englishwoman and a friend of Elke’s. We got lots of stares. A Chinese man bought Josh a ginger ale because he was so impressed with my dancing. Maggie thought this was terribly sexist, but I thought it was pretty funny.

We got home after midnight and Elke called Mr. Wong to open the door for us. He grumpily obliged.

That night was very unusual for us. Normally, we are in bed by 10 o’clock. Sometimes we will celebrate the weekend at home with a special cocktail we invented. We mix baijiu, the local fire-water, with a splash of vermouth. Vermouth is a luxury item, but it just takes a little bit to make the baijiu more palatable. Then we garnish it with one or two hot peppers. We call it the No Gin, Joe Martini.