I want to live in a Hutong

Although my apartment complex is supposedly one of the nicest in the city, and has a patch of greenery, and there are ferraris in the parking garage I still fucking hate the place. It is a soulless russian compound and I am planning on escaping as soon as I possibly can.

I realized just how much I hate it last night when I went to an apartment warming party at this awesome Hutong up in the north section of the city. This place was SO cool. It was a traditional Hutong, so one story, with a central courtyard surrounded by rooms (I will post pics shortly). The central courtyard had a little table to sit at and a BBQ for grilling and the whole thing was very cozy and authentic chinese, unlike my apartment complex. It was in a traditional Hutong area; a labrynth of narrow alleys connecting the different houses, usually crisscrossed with laundry and overgrown with vines. It is also a better area of people my age because you can bike to all of the major bar streets. They had decorated the place really well and had hung up prayer flags, which their neighbors were angry about because it could be a sign of them supporting Tibet, heaven forbid.

They have an extra room that I could move into right now, but I paid my rent through october and It would be an extremely low move to ditch out on Adam and Shobhit without warning.

Back to the night:
Veronica met up with me at Dongjiamen station and then we went together to try and find his apt.
I think we must have gone through at least 50 large beers, which are each only two kuai, so it didn't set them back too much I think. We played some classy card games, also known as Kings Cup and Indian Poker.. the later was an awesome game requiring even less mental capacity than Kings Cup if that is possible. All you do is draw a card, stick it to your forehead while making indian war sounds, and then bet sips of beer on whether you think your card is the highest or not.

We also played Wii for Baijio (I spelled that wrong) shots for a while... but that was nasty. I won a free breakfast at Rickshaw off of Jeff so I need to claim that pronto... since I have a love affair with rickshaw food.

At 2 in the morning we went for Tuar (things on sticks) (I was supposed to be asleep at this point), eggplant on a stick, bread on a stick, chicken feet on a stick - you can really get anything on a stick in china. I left in the middle of the meal since I was so exhausted and had quite the interesting cab ride home. Kind of on the scary side in a funny way actually, but not as bad as when we hit that pedestrian in SF. My cab driver kept saying I was Hen Piaoliang (means pretty) the whole way home ... all thirty minutes of it, and then when I went to get out of the car in my parking garage at Pinguo, he grabbed my arm and said I love you like 8 times in english and wouldn't let me go.. it was annoying since I was already in a bad mood from being tired and knowing I had to get up in 6 hours. I think I just made an indiscriminate angry noise, yanked my arm away and marched off.