Amongst the many wonderful things about the Pool Bar, its location is probably the key factor that has made it such an essential feature of my life this year. (It was brought home to me just how much of a regular I have become when Luke, the owner, took me aside last weekend to apologise for the fact that he would be opening late on Monday [he was taking his mum out to dinner for her birthday, probably wouldn't be unlocking the doors till 8 or 9]. I don't go in on Mondays, honestly. Not often. Still, it's nice to know these things....)
Location - yes. It is just so dangerously perfect in its location. It is on the way home for me. From almost anywhere I might happen to be.
It's at the top of Nanluoguxiang, the coolest little bar street in the city, and the main place I go to chill out these days. It's less than 5 minutes away from The Yacht Club (which is my other, older favourite bar..... but doesn't have quite the same party vibe). It's 10 or 15 minutes away from Jianghu (which is my other contender for Bar Of The Year..... although I really only go there for the music, whereas I go to the Pool Bar whenever......). It's directly opposite MAO Live House, these days the best music bar in Beijing. It's mid-way between my home and Gui Jie ("Ghost Street"), the city's famous 24-hour restaurant strip, which is the likeliest venue for dinner party engagements (nobody cooks at home over here - eating out is so much easier and cheaper). Even on those rare occasions when I have been out further afield, in the city centre, I will sometimes choose to walk home - or direct the taxi to go along that street...... and then not resist the temptation to stop off at the Pool Bar for "just the one", and leave myself with the now oh-so-familiar 25-minute stagger home.
Last night I was checking out a new bar on Andingmen Neidajie - half a block east, half a block north. If I had been seriously interested in getting to bed promptly, I would have gone north and then west. But it's such a boring walk along the 2nd Ringroad. No, I decided to walk south, half a mile out of my way.... just to have some more pleasant scenery along the way home, and a little more exercise, you understand. I really wasn't planning to go to the Pool Bar..... and get stuck there till 2 or 3 in the morning again.
[By the way, I loved that song as soon as I heard the Norah Jones cover of it. When I learned that it was a Tom Waits composition - well, I wasn't surprised; but I've never heard his version. If anyone is thinking of sending me a Christmas present this year (hint, hint), I don't have his Orphans triple album yet. I believe it's included in there somewhere. "Head full of lightning, hat full rain...."]
3 comments:
Oooh, I worry about the pickling of my brain sometimes. In that closing quotation from the song there, I initially typed "Head full of lightnight..." What was I thinking??
Mind you, sometimes these cognitive glitches can be happy accidents. The other day I was thinking about the recent weather, how it's been staying unusually mild, that it's not been much below zero even at night so far. That night it was perhaps just about freezing, and I thought to myself, "It must be just below zero." Well, that was the idea - but what I actually thought (and yes, this was just a thought; I wasn't actually language-mangling in conversation - although, god knows, that happens often enough as well) was, "Just below midnight."
Love that phrase! Got to try and do something with it. Maybe a title for the autobiography one day....
Note (for anyone who might be interested):
It is one of the more curious features of Beijing's urban design (and one of the key reasons for its appalling traffic congestion) that most of the city 'blocks' are a mile or a mile-and-a-half long. Between the major road junctions there are only webs of barely passable alleyways - or newer apartment complexes that are mostly closed to traffic altogether. Hence there is a fairly tiny mileage of usable highway per square mile. And high population density. And increasingly high percentage of car ownership. Equals nightmare.
I think this design has a subtle psychological impact on my willingness to walk home from bars, though. In London or New York, walking home 4 or 5 blocks would be nothing. Here - it's an hour-and-a-half trek. But I do it anyway - because it's only a few blocks, right?
I love this song, too.
and I like just below midnight.... you gotta do something with it.
HiK and I were reminiscing about taking the long way home just last night. and then we came across your Frost posting. and now I'm meandering my way through this posting.
I've had some great walking partners in my day, ppl crazy enough to let me lead them down dark unmarked alleyways.
I'm due a good long carefree walk, absent worries of getting home to get up to get to work to get to school to get to life.
I'm also due some clean air (or least air with less of a yellow-ish tint to it) but that's not likely to happen, either.
And I'll tell you why -- it's all to do with advertising... I'll explain later.... after December... after I stop spending all my weekends and weekdays and weeknights hunched over my laptop, writing this epic that will lead to more ads to more car sickness to more debt to more capitalism.
i'm just rambling now. I'll stop.
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