A female companion objected the other night that The Pool Bar, though a fine drinking establishment, was missing a certain 'romance'.
That sound you hear (or can imagine, at least, since you know me well enough now) is my flabber gasting.
The Pool Bar is a classic dive dive. How can someone be blind to the romance of that?
The romance of being on first name terms with the owner (and getting an advance warning if he's planning to open up late); the romance of knowing that you will almost always run into a few old friends there, or make some new ones around the pool table; the romance of staying up talking shit with anyone who'll listen until 3 or 4 in the morning; the romance of sending out for food to the Xinjiang restaurant a couple of doors down; the romance of drinking yourself back sober after 5 or 6 hours and recovering your pool-playing mojo.
There are some bars which can tick off most of the individual elements I identified a while back for Great Bar-ness and yet still they somehow don't quite work. And then there are other bars which seem pretty unremarkable, and yet stuff happens there all the time.
The Pool Bar is one such. For me - incorrigible old soak that I am - it is one of the most romantic places in Beijing; romantic in the older, truer sense of being full of stories.
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