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(Sweat) Flows

The distinct lack of Chinese language skills in the first wave our out team’s arrival ensures that it takes a good half hour for us to check in to the hotel, and for the duration or the negotiations for rooms our expansive luggage clutters the lobby. I draw the short straw and am allocated the suite. A room with more space simply becomes a repository for the bulk of research gear, which in turn means more foot-fall and ultimately less sleep. The team is traveling heavy this trip - with about 80 kilos of equipment that will lose its virginity here in Chongqing before bouncing to meet up with us in Mumbai via a colleagues travelling to Helsinki. I’m reminded of a presentation by my colleague Hannu about the cost of moving atoms around the planet.

There are numerous benefits to having a suite - with mod-cons in this instance including a full sized stand alone plug-in mahjong table and a surround sound stereo with no obvious volume control and no off-switch belting out Chinese pop. Yeah, you might quibble and point out that in fact the music emanates from a building across the way. Signs advertising a disco and K-TV stare omniously through the urban mist. It's Friday night, and with a campus housing over 10,000 only minutes away this is student territory. Time to head clubbing then and our research team for tonight is made up of myself and two female colleagues - a Korean and an Indonesian-German - both of whom are often mistaken for locals.

A common night club format in China is to divide the venue into two: an over sized room with bars, seating, and some form of dance floor; complimented with a maze-like warren of corridors that can reveal dozens of side rooms devoted to the dark art of karaoke. Locals hit the main club with a possie, wait for a room to become available and retire there with a few rounds of drinks and sing and dance+ the night away, the privacy of the space being conducive to, well, whatever people the world over get up to in the privacy of their own space.

Being the only obvious looking foreigner in the joint provides a certain social leeway not least of which is that it’s just-about OK to stumble with crew into a private karaoke room, wait out the who-are-you-and-what-are-you-doing-here part of the greeting ritual and join in the festivities. I can appreciate that in most contexts taking your shirt off would be considered rude, but here in the intense humidity of 15 bodies dancing in a enclosed and weakly air conditioned space, it seems rude not to. And anyway half the room is already topless and sweaty and wigging out to a well-over-the-speed limit local variant of techno.

Tomorrow started hours ago.

Writing from Chongqing | May 26, 2007 | Permalink