Back from Baise to massage then nightclub

Everyday had been supposed to be the last day in Baise according to Tan, but today really was. Had a lie in till 8am then got delivered breakfast in the form of dumplings. As I was digesting them we went out for lunch. It was baking hot yet Leilei decided to play in the sun. Eventually we got him a balloon and he agreed to enter the restaurant, where we met up with the hotel owner’s daughter and son (the daughter is older, by four years) and a couple of other people. Had a really good meal, then a taxi turned up to take us back to the hotel and then back to Pingguo.

Apparently there were no train tickets available till 7^th October but I don’t believe that. I think they just liked to pay for the more expensive taxi like they paid for just about everything else including food and clothes.

In the evening we went for a massage for the third time in the last month. It is an hour of full body massage from head to toes, and usually women do blokes and vice versa. They really work hard on loosening your bones, although I couldn’t relax my neck muscles enough to have them crack.

This is what it feels like to have a woman walk over you (Xiao Li in foreground)

One of the best although more painful parts is when they walk on your back and legs; they have sort of parallel bars fixed to the ceiling so they don’t always put their whole weight on you.

She's enjoying it more than me



It's more comfortable than it looks

Leilei was with aunty Lin Hong who then rang to say she was taking him to the nightclub while Tan and Xiao Wei had their massages. So Xiao Li and I took a three wheel cab (they’re all red motorbike fronts attached to what looks a bit like a rickshaw behind) to some dodgy looking disco place where we discovered Leilei and aunty Lin Hong hadn’t yet turned up.

We met Tan’s pretty cousin who either has unfeasibly large pupils or is on drugs, who invited us in. The main bar was trembling to the beat of the crap music, and on the wall they beamed film of what looked like lingerie adverts from the 80s with slightly podgy Western women (by today’s model standards). Interestingly no-one was dancing, although I didn’t see a dance floor either; people were sat around tables drinking beer and eating nuts and pig penises.

I sat down with a group of her friends and was offered a tiny glass of 2.8% beer, which they already seemed to be drunk on (or it was drugs). I noticed that the three girls other than the cousin were quite dressed up while the blokes were in dirty tee shirts and weren’t particularly good looking. Then I noticed that the women all had badges on with numbers, rather like the waitresses in restaurants. They were smiling and playing dice games with the blokes and talking to them. I kept being offered drinks and cigarettes, but wasn’t particularly comfortable as I couldn’t work out if they were prostitutes or not. I suspect they were more like cheap Geisha’s employed to keep the men there spending money.

I certainly didn’t think this was the place for a one and a half year old, but I hadn’t realised that they had karaoke rooms upstairs so we went there where we met some more friends and sang till gone midnight as Leilei still hadn’t gone to sleep.

Leilei picking up nasty habits while daddy's head is turned

When we got back I had a couple of real beers before retiring and resolved never to return to that place (not with Leilei, anyway).