Last night I frequented my old stomping grounds.  I didn’t realize it was such a trek to get to what is called Zhongshan Park, but I guess taking two subway lines and two short walks ends up taking 40 minutes (who would have thought?).  I ended up relaxing at the place I used to work like 3 or 4 days a week, The Coffee Bean.  I figured I could do the same, check up on some of the changes I made on Twinkle during the day and do some more testing on this rad queuing architecture that I wrote with the help of Jesse Andrews.  I don’t know why I expected the internet to be working to some capacity but like before, the internet was so slow that I was about to throw my computer midway through my Green Tea Frappuccino.

Following my trip to the Coffee Bean, I met back up with JJ and figured it was time to take advantage of the cheap Shanghai massage scene.  We ventured back to the area where our apartment is to find a massage parlor.  We walked about 15 minutes away from our building and what do you know, we found a cheap massage place (that was still up to a certain standard that I hold).  The price of this place was almost laughable.  30RMB or around $4 for 70 minutes of massage!  You can choose full body massage or just foot massage.  Even at double this price it would be super cheap, but this was a little embarrassing.  When we started the massage, they tried to up-sell us on  the additional services, and I would have been more than happy, only they were trying to sell us on things that were weird, such as oil massage and/or ear massage (How long could you possibly get an ear massage for?).

Comically, after about ten minutes into the massage, two other foreigners walked into the same room that JJ and I were in.  They appeared to be pretty intimidated by this place and obviously had never been to a place like this before (and their English seemed a bit sparse, although I’m sure they spoke English well enough).  This was not the kind of place that serviced foreigners.  So if you are a foreigner visiting one of these places and you are clueless, you better be with a Chinese person.  They were not and it was kind of funny.  The guy asked them “water or tea”, which is usually custom when you visit a massage place to be offered a drink while they are setting things up, although it was more like “wat tor tea”.  Their accent was so broken when he said ‘water or tea’ that they didn’t understand and probably thought they were trying to sell these guys something. (I once learned my lesson from this a long time ago when I was asked some question during a massage session with my good friend Arne and we both had no idea what they said so we just said yes.  It turned out they were asking us if we wanted some kind of coconut milk rubbed on our bodies during the massage, and besides being really fucking weird, it was of course their most expensive ‘oil’ on their massage menu.  My strategy of always just saying yes when you don’t understand someone doesn’t always work in China).

Following this incident of confusion, the masseuses in the room spent like 15-20 minutes laughing and talking about how he said it wrong and musing over what few words they knew in English.  Coming from my perspective, I could basically understand everything that was being said and it was all fun and games.  They were just having a good laugh (all in Chinese of course).  Probably from these two German guys perspectives though, they thought they were being made fun of or being talked about, considering they were asked a question, had no idea what was said and then heard 6 people laughing and joking about English words plus being asked where they were from (they actually knew how to say Germany in Chinese, albeit in a very very broken accent).  Maybe its just me, but I hate being in that situation, even though the reality of it all was that there was nothing said that was even remotely offensive.  It’s funny how some people can see things in a completely cordial and positive light knowing the full scope of the situation and other people, without the full understanding of the situation, can conclude there was something negative being said, and both sides have no ingrained bad feelings toward each other.  Always difficult making everyone happy…