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Wuhan
Yangtze River at WuhanThose who are familiar with the film Groundhog day will know what I am talking about when I say that the last ten days have seemed oddly similar to me in form and content. Actually Groundhog day started only after I left Wuhan and entered Chongqing.
How did it happen? Well I was minding my own business behind a computer at the hostel I was staying in and next to me happened to sit a young fellow by the name of Charles. We started talking, then we started drinking and after that we managed to stay in a continues loop, reliving the same moments day after day. In other words everyday started the same and more or less ended the same.
Charles you see, being the young man he was, liked to go out and me being in the frame of mind I was in at the time thought this was a novel idea. I am normally not the person to explore the nightlife of a city when I am travelling, I rather spend my money on seeing the sight. But sometimes I am tired of the travelling and then in the right circumstances with the right people strange
Wuhan
Railway and road bridge things can happen. So in Chongqing everything conspired to make me decide that going out was the right thing to do.
Now nightclubs in China are a bit weird. They all look and feel the same, no matter where you are. What is this look? A raised stage area for dancing, a lot of tables with a bottle of strong drink and ice-tea or something else to mix it with and around those table there are groups of men and women heavily engaged in downing those beverages. At the same time a few brave souls are dancing rather badly on the stage on music that is invariably the same every night and in every night club. When a foreigner comes in he or she gets invited by all and sundry and gets poured free drinks which have to be downed with the Chinese who have invited him or her. In other words nightclubs are pretty much a free affair if you play it right. And we played it right. Charles was a master at getting himself invited by pretty much everyone and I followed suite.
So we went out in Chongqing and woke up around noon, had a
Wuhan
Yellow Crane Tower few beers and went out again. This was followed by a day of guilt in which we went to one sight. In Chongqing's case it was the Buddhist caves at Dazu, which I must say were perhaps the best I have seen in China.
We then went to Chengdu and followed a similar pattern, many days of going out and drinking followed by one day of guilt where we went to another Buddhist sight, this time the Giant Buddha in Leshan. Really there was no difference in my days except that the names of the cities I stayed in had changed. The nightclubs were the same, the evenings followed a similar pattern, the hang-overs the next day and the sitting on a rooftop terrace in a hostel with Charles and our comrade in arms, Mario from Croatia, drinking beer. It was all one long Groundhog day.
But just as Bill Murray finally manages to escape from the loop, so have we. Charles has gone to Nanning and will go to Vietnam, Mario is going to Tibet and I will leave to Kangding tomorrow. Groundhog day is over and I am quite happy about it. It was fun, it
Chongqing
Chongqing at night was needed, but now I need to get on with it, there is after all a whole world out there to explore.
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Nellienoos
Ornella Hulbert
Familiar...
Hey remembered to log in this time!!! There's something quite familiar about this story..... can't quite place my finger on it.......