YJ and I want to thank everybody for a wonderful time last night at our St. Patrick’s Day-Housewarming-Engagement party. We met a lot of new people and got to spend time with old friends, I hope that everybody else had as good a time as we did. At one point there were representatives from the USA, UK, Germany, Holland, Canada, France, and at least three provinces/municipalities of China (unfortunately no Irish–Brendan, where were you?) and conversations in at least three languages going on at any one time. The local Xinjiang restaurant provided the chuan’r and “gan zhao tu dou pian’r” (homefries) and Zoe and Greg from Walled Off were spot on with an early delivery of pizza. Chris Waugh and his wife were there. (Let me say that Chris is one the world’s true nice guys.) There were a host of others–the usual suspects–and representatives from all corners of the Beijing experience. YJ and I felt badly we couldn’t join all the different conversations going on and I hope people can forgive us our host duties. I thought it was also a real treat when I….er….got a chance to propose to YJ at the behest of some of our guests.
YJ and I gave our engagement party toasts. Mine, if I do say so myself, I thought was a heartfelt sentiment of love to my beautiful bride-to-be. To which YJ replied, “Yeah. Thank you everybody. So…let’s drink!” Ladies and gentlemen: The love of my life.
After the party a bevy of us took off for Nanjie and managed to shove our way into a booth at this great addition to the Beijing “dive bar” scene. (We also managed to include a brief, unscheduled stop, at the notorious Bus Bar as well. Double bonus.)
Finally, a few of us wandered over to an even more notorious Beijing institution–Maggie’s. The old Maggie’s had a feel of “cozy sketchy,” set back in the willow trees near Gongti, it reminded me of some sort of crazy Mongolian reproduction of the set from “Porky’s.” The new place is nice and conveniently (if bizarrely) located in a restored Chinese building right at the front entrance to Beijing’s most beautiful downtown park. But inside it’s way too…slick. A new friend of ours from the party, a British woman named H., remarked when we walked in that it was “so posh.” Posh, indeed. In the old Maggies you were afraid to touch anything–that was part of its charm. The new place still has the good music and the dance floor remains the best source of unintentional high comedy in this city (Have you ever seen a 300-lb Bulgarian try to line dance with a 100-lb Mongolian hooker? You’re trying to picture it now, aren’t you? The real thing is 10x funnier in person, trust me.) But the edges have been filed off and the whole thing seems too corporate, too much money. Could Maggie’s be a metaphor for Beijing’s pre-Olympic facelift? All in all, it was…Disappointing. Like when you finally meet up with your crazy friend from college–the guy who would always be counted on to get blitzed and dance on the bar–and he’s now a chiropracter who thinks Jaegermeister is for high school kids. (It is…but that’s beside the point.)
Anyway, good times all around. Thank you to everybody for a fun and memorable evening.
Ps. If anybody left a coat at the party…we have it. Send me an email to claim.
5 responses so far ↓
1 bezdomny // Mar 18, 2007 at 3:42 am
Excellent party, Jeremiah, you and YJ performed your hosting duties admirably. However, I’m going to be not such a nice guy and tell you you got a link wrong. I’m no longer at Live Journal, I shifted to blogspot cos I hate dealing with proxies, and I’d rather my blog be freely available in China. So I’m now at bezdomny.blogspot.com.
And I didn’t leave a coat at your place, but I did leave behind that brochure from the New Zealand exhibition with a wee disk inside. I don’t care about the brochure, but I’d like to see what’s on the disk.
Chris Waugh
2 花崗齋之愚公 // Mar 18, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Thanks for your kind words, Chris. I especially enjoyed your review of our bathroom on your blog. That is a first for me.
My bad, I fixed the link in the post and in my links section. Should all be in proper working order now.
Ps. I’ve got your disk here. No worries.
3 bezdomny // Mar 18, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Reviewing a bathroom is a first for me, too. Maybe this could be a new speciality for me…. Beijing bathroom reviews… worth thinking about.
4 Froog // Mar 19, 2007 at 9:17 am
Very sorry I missed it.
Nanjie and the Bus Bar are my favourite places when I feel like slumming it (not so often these days; middle age is catching up with me). Ace music bar Yugong Yishan (they have one of the best pool tables in town too) makes up the third point of what I used to call ‘the Devil’s triangle’ - many episodes of memory loss late-sleeping resulting from party nights out around that parking lot!
I hear they’re all under a ‘chai’ now, so we must make the most of them while we can.
Maggie’s? No, thank you.
I wonder if “H” is my ex-girlfriend? The Jing is a very small world at times!
5 Brendan // Mar 20, 2007 at 4:10 am
Oh, man — I’d thought it was just a St. Patrick’s Day party! Apologies for flaking — between a hangover from the previous night (a do at the Irish embassy with free half-pints of Guinness, of which I drank seven or eight, followed by a friend’s going-away party, which I don’t remember all that clearly) and a thing that came up with my girlfriend, I ended up figuring that I probably wouldn’t be missed anyway.
Do give me a call the next time you’re out, anyway. I’m probably not up for going to Maggie’s (funny story there), but am pretty much open to any other venue.
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