啤酒

Generally I think it's a bad thing to drink every day of the weekend - especially on Sunday, but that's how it all went down this time. I don't mind though. I had a good time.

Friday evening:
Out with Toni, playing games in arcade and drinking beer. Didn't drink too much and didn't even stay up that late. Got home with MTR (which is also a code-word for an early return (since the MTR stops running at 00:30am)).

Actually. "Got home with MTR" can mean two things. Like explained, it can mean "I got home early" since the last train leaves at 00:30am and this way you'll be home at 01.30 am at latest. This makes it a milk-train option. I'll explain later.

The second option for "Got home with MTR" of course refers to the opposite which is to miss the last train and take the first one next morning, which is at 06:00am. This is the true Hard-Core version of a night out. You know you're been out for a nice amount of time when you can watch the sunrise in the train and you're among the only ones traveling out of central.

Aside from the two MTR options; between 00:30am and 06:00am there's also the option of a Bus. Route N21 can take you to Tung Chung all-through the night in 20 minute intervals. This, however, is the shitty option if you're at all drunk. After a certain amount of drinks, the shaking and waving bus is not where you want to be. Actually, I would prefer a ride on rickshaw driven by a pack of mentally disabled baboons on Guangzhou-Shenzhen freeway. That is how much it sucks.

So, yes. Friday evening I got home with MTR. Got a nice rest and that's about it.

Saturday evening:
Again, out to play some games in arcades and drink some beer. This time Markus joined us too and we had happy times. All was pretty normal and we got home with MTR. When we arrived to Tung Chung at around 01:00am, Chi* and I had the bestest idea of her coming over as well. The more the merrier, I suppose! We got some more beer from the 7/11.

She arrived in Tung Chung at 03:00am.

What started as a regular night out, with an early MTR home, ended with something quite different. Eventually we stayed up until about 07:00am and I got way too much to drink. We played a kind of a drinking game which is always a bad idea. Once we ran out of beer, we switched to Salmiakkikossu, which was even worse of an idea. I can't think of anything worse than me on strong liquor. I should know better. 我係白痴鬼佬!!
Well, I live still and I got myself a nice lesson and a reminder again why not to drink too much, especially stronger stuff. The lesson was the classic: "I will never drink again, I will never drink again, I will never drink again"-hangover.

Anyway, the evening itself was really fun so I don't complain about it, only about the aftermath. Eventually I slept more or less until 19:00 on Sunday.

Sunday evening:
So, I woke up at 19:00 finally. I had been up a few times before to remember my lessons of last night. However, at 19:00 I chose to ignore that lesson and started planning yet another night out. Chi's friend had a birthday party so of course I would attend. HKD 200 entry charge and free drinks for the rest of the evening! Even with the hangover I had had, I could not refuse. Such is the logic on man-animal.

So, we head out (Markus and Toni AKA. "The Food Boyz" joined me too) to Tsim Sha Tsui. At 22:30 we meet Chi at the MTR-station and she then leads us through the maze of Hong Kong and I find myself rather dazzled at how far we're going and whether I'd know my way back. The good thing about having locals around is that they supposedly know their way around the neighborhood - or in truth they are even more clueless and take strange detours that take longer than the one route you'd take yourself. I'm not saying it happened this time. No, wait. I am.

Well, alls good. We get there finally. A shady small bar with long tables and a few young locals who apparently are the birthday hero and a friend. We're introduced. Instantly a series of local games start. We begin with dices. Fun games actually. I know Markus and Toni really appreciated all the games because they were having the time of their lives.

More friends come over and soon we have dice-games of 8 people and more. Beer's flowing and we're all having a good time, especially Markus and Toni.

Aside from dice-games, we also had a games which names I can only translate as "Bäng, Bang, Whaaa!", "Banana Tree" and "Mona Lisa". All good fun. I won't go into details but basically they were just group games where amids talking and merry-making random things would occur. Maybe I'll explain the stuff later on a better time.

So, anyway... I had a really good time Sunday. Markus and Toni had excellent time as well and left a little early because they knew the night couldn't get any better and didn't want to see it ruined. Better to keep the good memory alive, I suppose. It is one of those classic concepts of beauty and its inevitable demise; how all that is good and pure will undeniably eventually become twisted and corrupt. I understand their views, but I just couldn't resist staying to see how it all ends.

The rest of the evening remained pretty much the same: games, beer and fun. I met a lot of cool local people, some of which actually spoke more than 10 words in English. It is surprising to see how little English a lot of the younger people here speak. Even more surprising is how happy they are to use their 10-word-vocabulary. In Finland, no one speaks English or other languages unless they're completely fluent and absolutely sure they can't make a mistake. A mistake would mean you're an evil person and not worth breathing the same air with the rest of us. Here, it's totally different. If they see some foreigner, they are actually eager to talk to improve their language by practical conversation.

While the cultural differences and culture shock and all that have been really small for me, there's always an interesting atmosphere when hanging out with locals. They are just like anyone I've known before in Finland, or anywhere else, and outside the tourist-way-of-life the books about Chinese ways and etiquette can be thrown to a bowl of hot magma. Yet it's somehow different when going out with locals. They approach having fun in different ways I'm used to, and their way of acting is quite different.

On a side note: I just got a word from Chi that last night our party spent around HKD 2,000 on beer, with bottle price being HKD 12. This means, our party of around 10 people drank all together some 160 bottles of beer.

Got home with MTR.

* Chi is the girl I've been seeing for the last one months or so, and for the sake of convenience I will refer to her as Chi from now on because it just makes no sense not to do so.