We arrive at Lijiang, the ornamental old town being a bit of ancient China.
There is a much more relaxed atmosphere settling in as the sun is out and it is briefly warm enough to sit around in t-shirts. Also, the ‘MCA’ hostel we are staying at has nice rustic atmosphere, with a courtyard for gathering and a restaurant / bar that promises full English breakfast in the morning, which pleases some. It’s basic, but it’s comfortable and clean and much more the type of place we should expect to stay. The staff are helpful and one or two speak passable English too, so we are able to get some guidance from them.
As soon as we arrived at the hostel, I decided to have a couple of drinks. As the sun goes down, I walk down towards town and find a few others gathered in a bar at the bottom of the path into town called the Amsterdam Bar. This is the first western run business I have found in China, so we are definitely into a big tourist centre.
I stay for a while, but decide that I have had enough by ten in the evening. However, for others, the party has just begun. Tales and pictures emerge the next day of elevated dancing, trousers (and more) dropped around ankles and general drunken revelry. One of the key perpetrators was Essex Sam (Essex, lager, Brit abroad, er, teacher), who for some reason ends up walking back to the hostel in the small hours naked and having to climb over the walls to get in.
Another key player was Joost, the man with the energetic smile. Wherever Joost wanders into bars, Irishman Shay and is too far behind. Being Dutch, Joost was able to share a lot of small talk with the bar owner, whose country of origin was given away by the name of the bar. Joost is also able to convince him to put some music on to suite the occasion of a communal lightening of UK to Ozzers mood. However, when people started dancing on the bar itself, you might think the owner might object. Maybe it’s a Dutch thing, but this one gets on the bar and starts dancing with them. By the end of the night, he is probably a lot richer, but not as rich as he could have been had he been more attentive to who had paid for what.
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