Worst Kept Secrets

This Friday I dropped my digital camera in a toilet. And not just any toilet - a nasty, used squatter toilet. And not just any squatter - it was the Castle Bar squatter. This is Castle Bar:

Say what you want about me - I can be a gutless wimp about a lot of things, but by god I retrieved my camera. And I am possessed of knowledge of horrors well beyond the scope of the average human imagination as a result. I also now know that squatter toilets run DEEP. I had my entire arm down that thing, fishing through a puddle of god only knows what until I finally managed to get a grip on my slimy camera and pull it back up. Then I ran to the sink and scrubbed my arm for about twenty minutes, then I went outside, trying to outrun the pervasive stench of the CB restroom that had settled on me like that crap in Labyrinth that you can never wash off.

My camera still doesn’t work, and I don’t really want to touch it ever again, so I’m about to try to shop for a new one. Great. I’ve got my cyber eyes on an olympus stylus 790, even though I suspect the image quality won’t be much better than my old one, but it’s waterproof. So if I drop it in the most horrible place imaginable ever again, I’ll still be able to use it (with gloves, of course).

The other reason I’m gunning for a waterproof is one that I’ve been meaning to gloat about for a while: I’M GOING HERE IN THREE WEEKS. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a week than lying around on a gorgeous tropical beach with my awesome manfriend watching the giant fruit bats take flight against an ocean sunset. Yep. Giant fruit bats! I tried to find out what kind of wildlife we’re going to be up against, and read that of the 114 species of snakes in the Philipppines, only 14 are venomous. Huh, I thought. Then I found out that one of those 14 is a king freaking cobra. Rock me! Six days of snorkeling, jungle trips, fruit bats, seafood, sunshine, and sand. All I have to do is survive the next three weeks.

When is that other shoe going to drop, you know? My life just got crazy good during July of last year, and I still haven’t found the catch.

Anyway, back to my poor untouchable broken camera: I knew Castle Bar was going to claim that thing one day. I was positive that it would get left behind, get stolen, or get trampled eventually.

Castle Bar is … well, it’s Castle Bar. I’ve heard it described as a quiet place most of the time, but after midnight on Friday and Saturday it goes completely hogwild. There’s a lot of live music, which I’ve only recently started going to (quite happily), and it really is a different place at a more reasonable hour and level of sobriety. A graduate student I met back in December sagely noted, “after midnight, all roads in Nanjing lead to Castle Bar,” and that’s more or less true. I loved the place when I first got here - it was exciting and made me feel like I was living in an actual big city, where you could drink tequila and dance your heart out until four in the morning. It’s a huge foreigner magnet, and it’s very easy to forget that you’re in China in there. It’s also like a dungeon - you can hear the music thumping through the floor in the McDonald’s next door. The music is loud and the drinks are expensive and the drama is high.

My first few weekends in town we hit Castle Bar hard. Chris and Leif are on schmoozing terms with the owner, and have managed to get themselves deputized as fire marshals (which, if you’ve ever seen this place, is about as unrealistic a position as you can imagine). They get paid monthly (a shot of whiskey). There was much irresponsible behavior in there before I realized that people were noticing and remembering me. Lily and I were standing outside the entrance scarfing chicken nuggets one night when a couple of guys addressed Lily: “Hey, how’s Leif?” “Um, fine,” she said, confused. “We heard you talking about him in the bathroom last week,” they said. After they went in, she told me she had no idea who they were. Seconds later, a girl walked up to me and said, “hey, Chris’s girlfriend, right?” “Yeah…” I answered, wondering who in the world this person was. In regularly lit, daytime life, I’ve taken to just assuming that I already know anyone I meet from Castle Bar.

I’ve got a bit of a love/hate relationship with the place. Like I said, at first I thought it was amazing. I mean, the music’s not great, exactly, but it’s usually danceable, and there’s a huge energy charge. It was also fun at first to go in there with Chris and Leif and marvel at how they seemed to know everyone - it was a little bit like being in a mafia don’s entourage or something (later, we did meet an actual mob boss, but that’s another story not going on the blog that my parents read). But after a while, I started hating it. It seemed like something always went horribly wrong when we went to Castle Bar - there was squabbling in our unimaginably tight ranks, someone drank too much and got sick, a crazy man tried to bonk Leif on the head with a pitcher of ice, a mean Russian girl made someone feel bad, guys got fresh with me and Lily, etc, etc, etc. So we took a break from Castle Bar after a lot of passive aggressive grumbling from me (note on this: most of my previous boyfriends have at one point thrown up their hands and exclaimed, “ANNE! YOU CANNOT EXPECT ME TO READ YOUR MIND!” Mr. Clanton, however, can actually do it, and very well. So HA). Then at some point I forgave Castle Bar. I think it was on New Years Eve. Now it’s much more fun to go there, although it’s not as fever-pitched and liver-demolishing as the first few weeks I was here. Now it’s just the smoky, lewd, crowded, and weirdly charming place that I’m comfortable with and that I’m happy to end a weekend evening with.

Even though it finally ate my camera.

Uh, the end. Sorry, that was boring.