dancing makes you brave

---

guest appearance by aabeyta!

we went out dancing last night! so molly and i arrived to Mics (not to be confused with Vics across the parking lot) which is a hot club. massive luxury club with all kinds of bars, booths boasting leather seat bed things, mirrors, tables, fancy drinks, weird drinks, awesome djs, smoke machines, fake snow machines, BUBBLE MACHINES! STROBE LIGHTS, RED LIGHTS, BRIGHT LIGHTS, DISCO LIGHTS! every kind of light! we went and danced danced danced. bumping back and forth, swaying to the music for hours, singing along, the lights and the smoke and snow and bubbles made it feel like being in some kind of awesome movie club scene. allllll night. i ended up a bit queasy due to a second asian red bull. red bull to begin with is like liquid crack in a can with warnings not to exceed one serving per day (or drink them if you're pregnant or have heart issues) but when you take away FDA approval, make it chinese and decide that 2 am is the PERFECT time to drink a second one...not necessarily the best of decisions. molly, in her infinate youth and wisdom drank only one bottle of water but as i was in china i decided to go with the asian redbull rush which left my head spinning till dawn. but that's okay cause we danced the pain away!

we've been suffering from bad juju for days. everything was going wrong. we were swimming up the chinese stream. our air conditioner broke and then it cost us a small repairman fortune and then it broke again. the forbidden city closed JUST as we got there. the massage parlor we searched high and low for had closed down mere days before our aching arrival, our borat dvd was in russian, taxi drivers dropping us off half a mile away from our destination in the blistering noon sun. hardcore vendors scoffing at our offered prices, a restaurant THAT DIDN'T HAVE WATER. it was over a hundred degrees out, sweat was running down our shoulders, our backs, and every crevice and cranny molly and ben looked like tomatoes, i was stumbling around panting with my mouth open and finally after hours of this (we were shopping) we found a restaurant and that fancy restaurant with white tablecloths and fancy wine glasses didn't have that rare commodity of...water. bad juju has been our unfortunate motto for about the last four days. everything. EVERYTHING was just impossible. it was to the point that we were alternately laughing and crying with each new obstacle, like something out of a meet the fockers movies. everything just went wrong.

BUT! luckily i put my foot down and demanded that we go get massages. we had to get rid of that bad juju. and so we did. we went to an AWESOME massage parlor and had aromatherapy lavender massages. lit by candles, filled with gauze draped rooms, walkways with water on either side and lotus flowers drifting over the river rocks. molly and i had a shared room and giggled into our strange asian koolat shorts and pimp bathrobes. oh it was awesome! these small pretty girls spoke to us in solitious whispers and then gave us such strong massages that i could feel the muscles quivering. it was awesome. AWESOME!

and with our massage went all our bad juju, suddenly we were smiley, we were thirsty and suddenly appears one of the girls with water. later on the street we wanted more water and there was a boy with water. then we were magically in front of molly's favorite restaurants and then we were home and then we were dancing! and now our air conditioner works!

---

Comments

[Memo]

Hi there
Let me tell you that like the song said "There is a shiny sun behind the clouds", or "There is a big blue sky waiting for you", it happens all time, today we saw the sun after six cold, cloudy and rainy days.

[Sylvia]

ahhhhhhh....betta betta betta!
Thank you, Arielle, for your oh-so-colorful "catch-up"! Guess you all got rid of ALL of the bad stuff all in 4 days!! Now, the rest will be SMOOTH SAILIN'! It's so good to hear that all 3 of you are trying and enjoying such a variety of pleasures while you're in Beijing, Summer 2008!

[Cristina Pena]

Media Request
Dear Photographer Hi my name is Cristina Pena and I’m apart of American Public Media’s nationwide radio show called “Weekend America.” Every month we run a short piece on the various weekend photos we receive on our Weekend America Flickr. However, for the month of August, we would like to have a special “Olympics in Beijing” photo theme. Since you plan on staying in China during the Olympic Games, Weekend America would like to know if you would be open to sharing any Olympic/Beijing photos for our special themed flickr page. We would love to not only have dynamic, candid and colorful photos but also hear a bit about your experience in China. If you are interested in sharing your Beijing Olympic photo flickr story, or know of anyone else traveling to Beijing during the Olympics, please contact me at [e-mail] or 213.621.3523 x 523 Thank you. Here is a link to give you an idea of what we do! http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/04/24/americas_weekend/ Cristina Pena Weekend America 261 Figueroa Street., Suit 200 Los Angeles, CA 90012 [phone] x523 [e-mail]