A more cynical 'bucket list': 10 things you probably will have done before you leave China

My earlier list of things to do before you leave Beijing was mostly rather jolly and upbeat, wasn't it? Most out of keeping with my usual year-end curmudgeonliness and depression!

This selection might seem more in character.

10 more-or-less obligatory expat rites of passage

Spend several months in full-time Chinese studies, culminating in an immersion experience and a failed attempt to pass the HSK

Discover that you can learn all the Chinese you will ever need from taxi drivers

Start dating a Chinese girlfriend/boyfriend, and find yourself railroaded into marriage in under a year

Invest in a bar or restaurant

Have your bar or restaurant stolen out from under you by your Chinese business partner

Divorce your Chinese spouse (who was probably your errant business partner, or one of their relatives)

Open a t-shirt shop (as being the only kind of business small enough for you to have a chance of being able to set it up without a Chinese partner/spouse)

Forget almost all the Chinese you ever knew, apart from the swear words (which provide most of your t-shirt slogans)

Make enough money to retire back in your homeland, but then find that revaluation of the renminbi has taken 30% off the value of your savings (and/or that the bank has frozen your account because, as a foreigner, you have no truly valid form of ID in China)

Get yourself arrested on your last night in China for some minor drunken indiscretion such as spitting in public or urinating in public, and spend another big chunk of your savings bribing the police to release you

Great Drinking Songs (39)

Mention of Chumbawamba last week prompted me to play the whole of their Tubthumping album - one of the greatest, if not the greatest of the '90s - all the way through for the first time in quite a while, and I was bowled over by it afresh. It is amazingly good from beginning to end; the enormous titular hit was about the weakest thing on it.

This, Scapegoat, the track that ends the album, is my personal favourite. Not the best song (that's probably Drip, Drip, Drip or Good Ship Lifestyle), but it's got such energy about it, it's an irresistible singalong. And I tend to think of this as my No. 1 'China song' - rather too painfully apposite for a country in which buck-passing is a national pastime. [This looks like a fan video; a crude compilation of video clips, mostly of unfortunate mishaps. Mildly amusing. And at least it's a good quality sound recording. There don't seem to be any live performance videos of this.]

The Shanghai bar scene

Does it have one?

Well, yes, obviously it does.

Just not one that I can afford.

And, even though there are exceptions to that affordability barrier (more than there were when I last visited 4 or 5 years ago, I think), I'm not sure that any of them would entice me into becoming a regular. I was in Shanghai the week before last, and in four days of walking the streets on the lookout for a promising bar, and four days of canvassing friends for suggestions, I drew a big fat blank.

I probably shouldn't blame Shanghai, as such. At least it has some bars, whereas most cities in China, even quite large ones, still don't, really. Even in Beijing, surely China's Western bar capital, a place that seems to have a much greater frequency and diversity of bars than Shanghai, there are only about half a dozen or so to which I would give my custom, and only two for which I have a real fondness (12 Square Metres and the Pool Bar). I'm picky: there probably aren't that many bars in the world - and increasingly few, it seems, even in the UK and the US - that would appeal to me. But in Shanghai, alas, it would appear that there are NONE.

It probably didn't help that I was mostly conducting my reconnaissance by day, when even bars that were supposed to be open often appeared in practice not to be - or, if they were, had not yet managed to draw in a single customer.

I cruised by Judy's, for example - a place that appeared to be divily cheap (a good thing!), at least by Shanghai standards, but had the most vile decor, and gave off the vibe of a Chinese bar that is desperate to attract a foreign clientele but has very little idea how to do so. (Maybe I'm wrong about that. I can imagine its prices alone, however bad the service or charmless the ambience, could draw pretty big crowds in the evenings. But I noted that its entry in the listings on City Weekend had only attracted a solitary user review, and that shortly after it opened 18 months ago. Not promising.)

I cruised past nearby Oscar's, my usual default bar on previous visits, but the place seems to have become even more charmless, and perhaps to have migrated just a little upmarket (I don't remember the fenced garden area out the front being so big before, or them having such an extensive food menu).

I cruised along Taikang Lu, where my friend Ruby had told me she thought she remembered there being a rather good bar. I found a large-ish event venue sort of place, The Melting Pot, which might possibly be worth a look in the future - but it was clearly not a homely boozing spot. (Turns out the directions may have been faulty. She claims there's decent 12 Square Metres clone on some little alleyway just off Taikang Lu. Next time...)

There was a gaggle of vaguely promising-looking bars along Hengshan Lu - but again, I was too early in the day. And I was put off by their undifferentiatedness. I liked the dim lighting and the preponderance of wood, but... I found a spot where there were two or perhaps three almost identical bars side by side, and it really was pretty much impossible to tell whether they were a single interconnected venue or not. It was also impossible to tell what they (it??) were called, because, although festooned with promotional signs for various beers, there was no obvious indication of a bar name, either in Chinese or English. Well, no, there was one sign that said, in English/pinyin, Dun Di Bar, I think. I wondered if they were trying for Dundee. I couldn't find any online listing for that name.

The only place to lure me in for a drink during this rather dull and lonely spell of wandering around the city was the Shanghai Brewery. Another American-style craft brew company! These places are spreading like Giant Hogweed! I gather it won the 'Best New Bar' gong in City Weekend's Shanghai Bar Awards this year - but perhaps only for want of competition. Decent barebones American sports bar sort of ambience, decent staff, a smattering of patrons already drinking in the mid afternoon - and a two-for-one deal on the burgers on a Tuesday (unfortunately, these are 70 or 80-kuai burgers, and I was on my own). More importantly, the home-brewed beer, at least on the extended happy hour (3pm-8pm, if I recall correctly), was only 28 kuai, which would be cheap for Beijing these days, and is virtually giving it away in Shanghai. On the downside, though, the TV picture for the sports wasn't much good (I think I've observed on here before that big-screen TV is a waste of time unless you've got an HD feed, and that's still a rarity in Asia), and the beer was... well, all right, but unspectacular, compromised by the excessive fruitiness that American brewers increasingly seem to feel is de rigueur. (You have to applaud them for making an effort, though: they've built quite an impressive website to promote this bar. That's still not something you often see here.)

The only place in Shanghai where I really quite enjoyed a drink on this last visit was Windows Too (apparently one of a fairly extensive chain of affordable dive bars) - although I wasn't really lured in, more goaded into it by JK's recommendation, and despairing of other options as the penetrating drizzle I'd been putting up with all day began to get even heavier. Upstairs in a mall, which is a very bad start for bar appeal; and hence pretty inconspicuous, pretty much unfindable unless you have detailed directions (mine weren't, but I got lucky). It had a similar problem with its large space lacking atmosphere, and its TV picture being shit, but... the staff were good, and the drink - at least on happy hour - was very, very cheap. 

I encountered this place in a receptive mood, when, after a gruelling and vexing few days, I suddenly felt like I needed to get off my face as quickly as possible, and not have to spend very much money doing it. When you find a place that will conspire with you in your self-destruction at a time like that, you get the warm fuzzies for it, however lacking it may be in every other kind of positive quality.

Forgive me if I seem to be too harsh on poor old Shanghai. I can well imagine having an equally shit time in Beijing if I came here as a stranger, not knowing where the handful of good bars are. In fact, I very often have had equally shit times here, especially out around Sanlitun.

So, sorry, Shanghai. I did at least find a few glimmers of hope for you this time, a few places that I'm actually curious to check out further on a return visit - something I'd failed to do in several previous visits to the city. Maybe Shanghai is slowly becoming LESS SHIT, just as Beijing is becoming MORE SHIT; and perhaps Shanghai's bar scene will be better than Beijing's before very long. Now, there's a depressing thought - at least, if you live in Beijing.

Timely escape

The enigmatically delayed, ever-so hush-hush National Party Congress is finally taking place in Beijing this week. I believe the official start date is Thursday 8th, but there'll probably be some kind of welcome shindig on the 7th, and various preliminary meetings even before that. The delegates are already starting to roll in from all around the country.

A hotel a few doors down from me is usually used to house quite a few of the less important delegates for meetings like this; so, my street is likely to be swarming with armed police for the next week. And - of course - the Internet is being filtered to hell, and is slow, slow, SLOW.

It is an excellent time to NOT be in Beijing. And, as luck would have it, a stack of different pretexts to be elsewhere all presented themselves in quick succession - so, I'm going to be off on a little 'southern tour' of my own for the next three weeks. [And, oh boy, did my VPN get crashed a lot of times when I was looking for that link! The Kafka Boys are outdoing themselves at the moment.]

I have tried to pre-bake a few posts to maintain the semblance of my still being here at my keyboard daily, but in fact.... well, I haven't decided if I'll even bother to take a laptop with me, and I'm not expecting to have very regular Internet access, or to be using it if I do. I'm on holiday, after all.

Have fun without me.

By the by, if martial law is declared in Beijing this week - you heard it here first. And if it isn't, I was joking.

[And - oh god! - Beijing is now reeling from an early onset of winter, beset by snow, ice, and fog over the last three days. There is a dangerously high probability that my flight out of Beijing will get cancelled. Oh, woe!]

Party panic*

Throwing a party in Beijing is an exhausting task.

For one thing, almost no-one ever manages to give you a really firm and convincing RSVP: my expected numbers are between 15 and 45.

(I am guesstimating low-20s, but it could get crowded - or be deserted! You never can tell.)

For another, shopping involves massive treks across the city. Outlets of the two main supermarket chains specialising in foreigner-targeted imports are all clustered over on the east side; neither has a branch within the 2nd Ringroad. What's more, they are wildly inconsistent in their stocking: different branches of the same store may carry very different items, so you often find yourself traipsing to two or three different ones in hopes of finding something you crave - as often as not, ultimately in vain. This week, for example, I found that three different Jenny Lou's locations were mysteriously out of cheddar.

To add to my vexation, I discovered that my local Chinese supermarket has just stopped selling beer by the case. (There was welcome karmic compensation in the fact that one of the five or six 7-11 type stores on my street has just started selling beer by the case.)

In the UK these days, the major supermarket chains have started setting up numerous mini-branches in the middle of urban areas: in a big town or city, it seems you're rarely more than half a mile away from a Tesco Metro or a Sainsbury's Local - and they stock just about EVERYTHING you might ever want. Here in Beijing, you have to visit 5 or 6 different stores, and they're scattered all over the map. I've put in well over 50 road miles this week - the majority of them on foot!

And just when I was finally getting on top of the shopping list (lettuces are damned hard to come by... and the radish season has passed?!), I realised that I didn't have a serviceable barbecue - which is a pity, given that I had advertised an outdoor party and bought a ton of food for barbecueing. I had thought I had TWO barbecues left behind by previous tenants, but in fact I seem to have bits of three - from which I can only cobble together one complete one. And that's very small. And will take hours of cleaning to make fit for use.

I knew this was going to be kind of a problem. I had always planned to buy a similar barbecue of my own to boost my grilling capacity, but... I hadn't counted on them being such a seasonal item. Two local stores where I've seen them in the past (one of them, as recently as a month or so ago) no longer have any in stock. I also tried a multi-storey sundries market that stocks everything from plumbing supplies to My Little Ponies; after half an hour of searching, I ascertained that it did not stock barbecues. Well, no matter: I thought at least one of my friends would have one they could lend me....

Well, eventually, my problem is sorted. I had been contemplating building an open fire from pieces of broken furniture, but that will not be necessary: I have managed to procure a barbecue.

But that's another TWO DAYS of my life gone. And I haven't even done the BIG SHOP yet.

It'll probably rain, too....

* This post title cunningly chosen to aggravate the Chinese censors.

That feeling once again

The dismal prospect of the week-long bore-a-thon that is China's National Holiday tends to bring on a heavy dose of the blues.

What better way to dispel that stifling funk than with a heavy dose of the blues? Here are Cream performing the T-Bone Walker classic Stormy Monday, at one of the awesome series of reunion shows they played at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2005. So sorry I missed this - they look to have been some of the greatest concerts ever (for those of us who like blues-rock). Luckily, it seems as though the whole of the high-quality concert film has now been posted to Youtube, so you can browse for any of your favourite songs.

Alas, poor Wudaoying!

We appear to be going through a particularly severe, over-the-top phase of pavement relaying here in Beijing. Sidewalks all over town have been partly or wholly ripped up, particularly in the Sanlitun bar district, making it irksome to travel far on foot. And, as happened at the outset of the global financial crisis 4 years ago, this work seems to be proceeding agonisingly slowly, has perhaps been abandoned for a while in midstream. It is especially galling that in so many places the workmen have laid out rows of loose bricks on the sand, presumably in preparation for the next phase of laying pavement; these are irregularly spaced and often very wobbly - an appalling trip-and-fall hazard. It's better to avoid these stretches of dug-up sidewalk altogether, and just take your chances walking in the road.

However, Sanlitun's got it easy compared to poor old Wudaoying Hutong at the moment. I hadn't visited this up-and-coming little bar-and-restaurant strip since I got back to Beijing a month ago, so was going to take a stroll along it to see what was new on my way into Sanlitun yesterday. I was soon forced back by all the half-arsed "construction" that is currently rendering the west end of the street completely impassable. I walked along the 2nd Ringroad instead, and checked out the eastern entrance to the street off Yonghegong Dajie: that was blocked as well. The works, whatever they are, seem to stretch along the entire length of this narrow street.

But it's really not at all clear what work is supposed to be under way. There are lots of bricks, lots of sand, and lots of workmen, arranged in clumps or piles or stacks all along the street; but no obvious productive activity. There are no signs I could see that the road is being resurfaced, or that walls are being rebuilt, or whatever. All that seems to have happened is that lots of sand - and, intermittently, lots of water - has been spread over every square inch of the road surface, reducing it to a muddy mess. Of course, this is discouraging any foot traffic. But the ubiquity of the piles of building materials, and the numerous wheelbarrows and sand-sieves and so on ranged along the street, and the gaggles of workmen mooching about doing nothing in the middle of the road, make the street equally unappealing for the attempted passage of motor vehicles. Businesses down there must have almost zero custom at the moment.

One might almost suspect that it's just a 'protection' scam by someone in the local government: an unnecessary and endlessly protracted "road improvement" scheme kills all the local tenants' business; hints are then dropped that a "community contribution", a "voluntary payment" to the "civic maintenance" fund may help to bring these works to a speedier conclusion. In China, this is all too plausible a possibility.

I can't imagine what else it could be!

A pocket full of moonshine

Gawd, am I really coming back to THIS?????

Well, NO. Much as I have loved to drink to excess over the years, and curious as I am to try new types of alcoholic beverage, reckless as I often am of my own safety, and indulgent though I be towards many of the less obviously appealing quirkinesses of life in China... I have never liked erguotou.

Even though it is the cheapest way of getting drunk in Beijing (and perhaps in the whole world), I have always believed that, above all, drinking should be a pleasurable experience. I can tolerate most forms of baijiu (Chinese spirit); tolerate with difficulty, but, yes, tolerate; and there are just a few varieties that I even quite like. But erguotou is the cheapest and crummiest of the lot, wildly uneven in its taste and quality - varying from nasty to disgusting.

There are very many things that I have enjoyed about drinking in China over the years, and may enjoy again, but... the hip bottle of erguotou is not one of them. You can use this stuff for disinfecting work surfaces or for lighting a barbecue, but for drinking - never!

However, in searching out the above photograph just now, I was fortunate to stumble across a new China blog in which intrepid laowai Derek Sandhaus is attempting to cultivate a genuine appreciation for the 'subtleties' of baijiu by pushing himself beyond its alleged 300-shot threshold of acclimatisation. 

Good luck to him! I'm glad he's doing it, so that no-one else has to. 

[Although, come to think of it, I must be getting pretty damn close to that consumption total myself. In fact, I probably exceeded it on my first visit to China 18 years ago. And I have found no signs whatsoever of getting over the distaste for it.]

The 'lads' are preparing my 'Welcome home!' already...

Goodbyes

The 'Leaving Party' is probably a somewhat overdone genre in expat communities. Particularly so in Beijing, I would venture.

There is a peculiarly high degree of impermanence and uncertainty about our tenure here. Every time someone takes a holiday, we sense there's a chance they won't be coming back, that some bolt-from-the-blue - an unexpected job offer, a new love affair, or just the sudden, stunning realisation/recollection that pretty much everywhere else in the world is nicer than here - will abruptly deflect their lives into a new path.

Hence, we tend to have leaving parties every time we go away for more than a couple of weeks. I once had three leaving parties prior to my departure on my summer holidays.

Sometimes the rupture seems more definite, more violent, more likely to be permanent. Visas occasionally get cancelled for the most trivial infractions, or for none at all; or they simply expire, and, with the winds of official xenophobia momentarily blowing more strongly against us, we decide that it would be too much hassle or expense to try to renew them again. After a few weeks or months, we may relent, re-apply for a visa, and return once more. The new jobs and new love affairs, or the hopes of finding such, often fail to pan out as well. Even people who've gone through a definitive moment of China Meltdown, and swear that they can't take the pollution, the corruption, the homicidal driving, etc. any more, and that they will never, NEVER return... often change their minds and find themselves coming back for more within six months or so. My friend KP threw a rather extravagant leaving party a few years ago - band, buffet, kiddies' entertainer (well, er, me) - and then realised the very next day that she wasn't quite ready to quit the place after all.

Hence, we tend not to take 'Leaving Parties' all that seriously. We usually suspect that, however much someone insists they're done with China for good, they might very possibly be coming back in a little while.

This is rather where I am at the moment. I have little worthwhile work in China any more; and the prospects there seem to be drying up for me. My visa has expired, and I'm going to face a few hurdles in trying to get another one. When I left at the end of May, I wasn't at all sure if or when I would be coming back. Part of me, at least, has been hoping that I could find a way to avoid coming back (although there are certain logistical problems to be taken care of: books to pack, bank accounts to be cleared out, scores to be settled...); I really feel now that I am done with China.

Thus, my leaving party this year - just under 8 weeks ago - was the biggest, best, and most emotional that I've had, because it did seem as if it might be the last, that there was at least some possibility that this time I really was leaving for good.

I had wanted to write about that party, perhaps compile a Top Five list of the best leaving parties I've had here (there have been quite a few of those summer holiday ones by now). I may get around to that one day. But I can't do it at the moment.

The trouble with such gatherings is that occasionally there's a finality about them that you do not suspect. 

One of my dearest friends during my time in China, one of those who came out to wish me well on that night and helped to make it such a moving and memorable occasion, is no longer with us; he died, suddenly, tragically, just over a week ago. Though I could not have imagined it at the time, that party was the last time I would see him. I am very grateful to have been able to enjoy such a happy last memory of him, but unutterably sad that there will be no more such memories to be added to the history of our friendship.

A funeral service for him should be under way round about now. I am sorry I cannot be there. Here in New York, it is the early hours of the morning, but I am intending to stay up, to share a few silent thoughts with his family and friends, at the funeral and scattered around the world, as we say goodbye to a unique human being, one of the warmest and kindest and most vivacious I have known.  So long, dear friend. You shouldn't have left us so soon.

A decade of change (Part III)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.

This is the final part of a three-part series begun last Tuesday and Thursday.

The burgeoning of the music scene (and the bursting of the bubble?)

Back in the day.... we had Get Lucky bar (which was awful), Nameless Highland (which was rather good, but remote and difficult to find), River Bar (which was a bit small), and What Bar (which was - is - tiny). That was about it for live music venues. All except What had succumbed to the chai by the mid-Noughties. Yugong Yishan forerunner Loupe Chante was great, but lasted barely a year from its 2003 opening. But then, in fairly quick succession, we got the first Yugong Yishan appearing in the Gongti car park, 13 Club and the (recently demised) D-22 opening up almost side by side near Tsinghua University, and the Tango/Star Live club next to Ditan Park becoming the city's first purpose-built 'medium size' venue (early summer 2005; Yugong and Star might have been a bit earlier). The following year, music came to the hutongs, with Jiangjinjiu opening on Bell Tower Square and Jianghu off Nanluoguxiang; perhaps the greatest of all Beijing's cosy, divey music bars, 2 Kolegas, first opened its doors that year too, and the city's best music venue (at least for its sound) Mao Live House came shortly afterwards.

Unfortunately, this brief flowering of the scene got squelched by the approach of the Beijing Olympics: all music festivals in the capital, and very nearly all outdoor performances of any kind, were blocked for nearly two years; foreign acts found it hard to get visas and permits; music bars suffered a lot of harassment about their licences. Not surprisingly, no-one else wanted to try and open a new music bar for a while. However, after three years or more of arrested development, 2010 saw another wave of expansion, with small venues like Zui Yuefang, VA Bar, Hot Cat Club, Tushuguan, and Gulou 121 suddenly appearing, as well as new mid-size event venues Mako Live and The One. And now we've got Temple and (D-22 offspring) XP as well, establishing the Gulou area as the centre of Beijing's music scene (despite rather than because of the proximity of the new Yugong Yishan, which has completely dominated the scene for visiting foreign acts for over 4 years now, but is - I'm sorry to say - a truly terrible venue).

Perhaps, though, as with the proliferation of music festivals in the last few years, Beijing's and China's rock scene isn't yet strong enough to warrant this many outlets: most of the newer openings have failed to establish themselves very convincingly. I worry that this profusion of venues may actually be counter-productive, tending to foster ennui as we see the same rosters of bands appearing again and again all over the city.

The sudden escalation of cover charges (almost completely unknown 7 years ago, and rarely more than 30rmb until about 4 years ago, but now rarely less than 50rmb and often 80rmb or 100rmb) is also harming attendances (many of the visiting foreign acts at Yugong are now failing to attract any Chinese punters - not because they haven't heard of the acts, but because they can't afford the tickets); and I'm not convinced that it's for the good of the bands either (anything that diminishes attendance is ultimately bad for the bands; they ought to be cannier about making money for themselves off merchandise sales, rather than demanding a  percentage of the door take).

The slow development of a service ethic
Back in the early Noughties The Den was the only bar that had a consistently good level of service and English-language skills among its waitresses (though less so with its barmen or doormen). In most of the other foreigner-targeted bars, many of the staff spoke no English at all, few spoke more than a handful of stumbling phrases, and service standards were... pretty wayward. Amazingly, The Den is still leading the field 10 or 12 years on, but the rest of the scene has been catching up, particularly in the last 5 years: you can expect a functional level of English from almost all customer-facing staff in Western bars and restaurants now. The service standards, though, are still decidedly iffy. Staff training may have improved, staff motivation (and, hopefully, remuneration) may have improved; the available talent pool has expanded enormously (an awful lot of college graduates are now willing to start off in low-level F&B jobs; but the migrant workers with little education who study English for hours in their spare time to get a better job are the ones who really impress me); but a service ethic is still largely absent, I fear. It takes a very long time to develop that kind of culture.

The decline of the taxi service

The number of subway stations has gone up four- or five-fold... but there's still very little coverage across the city centre, and the service starts grinding to a halt around 10.30pm. The buses run an hour or so later at night than they used to, but that still means there's nothing after 11pm. Late-night public transport in this city is non-existent: revellers who've strayed too far from home are utterly dependent on the taxi fleet. This was not a problem at all when there were 80,000 taxis and only 20,000 expats (and hardly any local Chinese who wanted to use cabs late at night). Now the cab fleet has shrunk to about 65,000 (last unofficial estimate I heard), while the number of expats is probably close to or above 100,000 (and huge numbers of young Chinese are now using the new subway lines to venture in from the far suburbs for a night out at the weekends). On top of this, taxi rates have been frozen by the government for the last six years (largely in order to manipulate the official cost-of-living index), with the result that drivers are now struggling to make a living - and hence ill-tempered, misanthropic, and, at busy times, frequently inclined to turn down rides, go 'off meter' to demand exorbitant ad hoc fares, or simply vent their latent xenophobia by spurning (or attempting to run over) any foreigners who try to flag them down. In the past year or two, it has become extraordinarily difficult to get a taxi at peak periods (5pm-7pm or 11pm-1am), and it is often pretty nigh impossible (for a foreigner) to get a taxi from the Sanlitun area at almost any time of the day. I sympathise with the cabbies' plight: bumping up the fares by 20% or 30% (and perhaps introducing tipping??) would be a fair and reasonable solution to the problem.

Oh my, this is far cry from the good old days. Until a few years ago, I'd almost never had to wait more than 15 seconds for a cab, at any time of day, in any part of the city (though, admittedly, I was never trying to get out of the CBD in the rush hour). Recent arrivals find that impossible to credit, but I assure you it is quite true.

I fear the current situation will exacerbate the Balkanization of the Beijing nightlife scene. It's just becoming way too much mafan to travel across town for a night out, with severe uncertainties about how you might get back. People are starting to restrict themselves to bars they can walk home from.

Fragmentation

Several new bar/restaurant areas have grown up across the city during the past 10 years: in Wudaokou, for the student crowd; in the Lido area, catering to the wealthier expats who live in the north-east, or venture in from Shunyi at the weekends on shopping expeditions; in Shuangjing, suddenly a favoured ghetto for the less well-off expat; in the heart of the city around Nanluoguxiang and Houhai (and now rapidly expanding north through the Gulou area and eastwards along the Fangjia and Wudaoying hutongs). People still talk about 'Sanlitun' as the city's nightlife centre, but it's shrunk to the single cramped thoroughfare of 'Back Street' - Sanlitun Houjie and the Tongli Building. And that's overrun with raucous youngsters, and starting to get a very bad reputation for fights and street crime. The Beijing bar scene today is much broader than that; as a whole, it is arguably much classier than it was 10 years ago, and certainly a lot more expensive; it's also become far more differentiated and geographically spread out. There has never again been - and probably never will be - a great mixing pot like the old Sanlitun South Street, which could bring together the entire expat population into one narrow space (if not all into exactly the same bars), regardless of age, income, or nationality. I rather miss that sometimes. But not as much as I miss a 10-kuai gin & tonic.

A decade of change (Part II)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.

This is the second part of a series I began on Tuesday. The final part will appear next Tuesday.

The loss of 'Off-Sanlitun' and 'Sanlitun South Street'... and 'The Car Park'

The area off to the west of the main Sanlitun trip - now occupied by malls like The Village and Nali Patio and 3.3 - used to be a rabbit-warren of dingy 1960s apartment buildings. In amongst its dusty backstreets there were a few worthwhile bars and restaurants - like the original incarnation of Le Petit Gourmand (one of the venues to host The Bookworm's lending library and speaker meetings, before it acquired a space of its own back in 2005) and a short-lived lounge bar called Cloud Nine. That all got bulldozed around about 2004. At much the same time, the same fate befell the main - only! - enclave of foreigner-friendly bars of those days (on nearby Dongdaqiao Xiejie, invariably referred to as Sanlitun Nanjie). The best of its bars - Nashville, Huxley's, Hidden Tree, Durty Nellie's, Black Sun and Reef - would find new homes elsewhere, but all in different parts of the city. There has never again been such a concentration of worthwhile bars in a small area.

Well, for a couple of years one new foreigner hotspot sprang up in a mysteriously unused car park across the street from the North Gate of the Workers' Stadium, but that was just four bars: the wonderfully skanky Bus Bar (an unofficial drugs supermarket) relocated from outside The Den, the first incarnation of the Yugong Yishan music club (much smaller, but incomparably better than the current one), Huxley's most successful dive bar, Nanjie (managed by Xiao Ming, now of Revolution), and the Red Ball football club. That marvellous little node of sleazerie got chai'd to make way for yet another pointless mall in 2007 (a project that took nearly 4 years to complete, and is still largely empty of tenants).

The keynote of this past decade in Beijing has been the rapid turnover of businesses; whether due to redevelopment projects, harassment by the authorities, rent-gouging landlords, or treacherous business partners... worthwhile bars and restaurants usually get swept away within a year or three.
(I think The Den is the ONLY 10-year survivor that's still holding on in its original location.)

The failure of central planning

The city government has from time to time attempted to create replacement 'bar zones'.... perhaps with the idea that these designated new entertainment destinations would be "out of harm's way". Yuan Dynasty Bar Street, Lady Street, Lucky Street - how we laughed! Actually, Lady Street - just over the road from the new US Embassy - wasn't all that bad; but it was always obvious it would get redeveloped into something grander as soon as the Embassy was complete.

The long march upmarket

Once upon a time, there was apparently only one Japanese whisky bar in town (somewhere near Sanyuanqiao; the memory fades), but almost no-one (non-Japanese) knew where it was, or even what it was called. Then came Ichikura, which at least got its name known but was even harder to find. But now there are four or five of these places, maybe even more; and more seem to be opening all the time. Since the Japanese have a fondness for elaborate cocktails as well as for neat whisky, I suspect Ichikura and its ilk may have helped pave the way for the appearance of proper cocktail bars in Beijing, another big trend of the last half-dozen years (you used not to be able to get a 'fancy' cocktail anywhere other than in a handful of the swankier Western hotel bars; and they were fiendishly expensive and not usually very good). Most of the credit (or blame), though, should probably go to George Zhou and Echo Sun, who created the capital's first affordable cocktail joints in First Café and Midnight... although, alas, they would soon move on to create the more commercially viable but much less appealing Q Bar - overpriced, overrated, and very overcrowded. Affordable cocktail bars are now popping up in the hutongs (Mai, MaoMaoChong - we love you), but Sanlitun and the CBD have been taken over by the wallet-busting pretension of places like Apothecary and Xiu.

The increase in the last few years in the number of importers and distributors of beers, wines, and spirits has also been something of a mixed blessing. Variety is all very well up to a point, but the plethora of different drinks on offer in many places now simply baffles the comprehension and makes your choice almost impossible. Moreover, most of these newer distributors are fairly small operators, with no economies of scale to offer, even on their bigger selling items. It's nice that foreign draught beers like Guinness and Stella (and, if you must, Vedett and Hoegaarden - although I can't stand them myself) are becoming more widely available; but they are painfully, prohibitively expensive for most of us to drink as anything other than an occasional treat. Ditto most of the several hundreds of different brands of bottled beer that you can now find in the capital. I would far rather have just five or six affordable beers to choose from than 150 bank-breakers.

The emergence of locally brewed craft beers from Great Leap and Slow Boat in the past year or so is potentially a major watershed as well. However, I'm afraid I'm not sold on the quality of the beer so far (too much novelty fruit-flavour crap rather than real ale), nor am I all that sanguine about these breweries' prospects for survival and expansion beyond the short term. I suspect this exciting moment in the evolution of the Beijing bar scene might prove to have been just a short-lived watershed in pretentiously marketed, overrated, overpriced beers. If these guys produced an unfussy brown ale or a properly hoppy bitter for 25 kuai a pint, they'd win me over. But that doesn't look likely to happen.

As all these fancy-dan almost-like-a-bar-back-home-but-much-more-expensive places have gradually become the new norm, the kind of barebones drinking dens - no-nonsense dive bars - that I much prefer have been disappearing. I find it very sad.

A decade of change (Part I)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.


This had ended up being rather long, so I'll divide it into a three part series; the further instalments will be posted this Thursday and next Tuesday.

A new city rises

It seems incredible now, but even the Wangfujing shopping street - long the city's tourism hub! - was only created in the late '90s. Most of the city's modernization programmes didn't kick in until after it had won the  Olympic bid in 2001. When I arrived in 2002, the 5th Ringroad and the Line 13 elevated commuter railway were still under construction; development was in places a bit patchy even between the 3rd and 4th Ringroads, and - except in the university district to the north-west - there was scarcely anything yet built outside the 4th Ring, it was still open countryside; Gui Jie was nearing the end of a major road-widening project, and the original Russian Market in Yabaolu (a semi-open air affair in corrugated steel hangars) was just about to be demolished to make way for the risibly named Aliens Street mini-mall. Most of the mega-malls and grandiose office buildings that now define central Beijing have only been completed in the last few years; hardly any of them date back further than 2006.

The scouring of the hutongs

While much of the new architecture is undoubtedly impressive, I can't help feeling that most of it was thrown up without any real plan or purpose - other than to satisfy the greed of fly-by-night property developers and corrupt government officials. The wholesale destruction of great swathes of the old city - the labyrinth of narrow lanes and ramshackle single-storey houses that are the heart and history of this place - to make way for all these (still massively underused) new buildings has been has been one of the saddest stories of Beijing in the Noughties. Balanced development, planned development, reconstruction that shows some respect for community spirit and historical heritage - this has been almost unknown in Beijing.

Commercialization, even worse than the bulldozer

The few hutong districts that remain are being remorselessly colonized by insanely optimistic entrepreneurs who seem to think that the city can't possibly have too many coffee shops or quirky boutiques. Nanluoguxiang led the way, the process starting round about 2004 and accelerating dramatically in the last year or two before the Olympics. What was once a quaint little alleyway lined with traditional shops and cheap restaurants has become a seething tourist trap that targets only Chinese punters rather than foreigners. Sadly, the whole of the Gulou area is now starting to go the same way.

The expat population grows... ever younger and more American

When I first came here, I'd guess the 'Western' expat population was only a few tens of thousands; and most of them were Shunyi-ites who'd rarely venture into the city. The number of foreigners you might ever actually meet was only a few thousands, and those who frequented the bar areas might only have been in the hundreds. It was a very cosy little community back then: you did have the sense that you basically knew everyone, at least by sight. Americans seemed relatively under-represented; Canadians and Kiwis and Aussies and Brits (and the French, funnily enough) appeared to be far more numerous, and were certainly far more conspicuous on the bar scene. Numbers studying Mandarin were far lower, and a good many of them were mature students. But most of the folks you'd meet out in bars were professionals of one sort or another; a lot of them might be English teachers, and fairly fresh out of university, but they were 'grown-ups'. There's probably been a ten-fold growth in the number of Mandarin students since the early Noughties, and, in particular, a huge increase in American high school and college students coming here just in the last three or four years. This has transformed the Wudaokou and Sanlitun scenes, and (for a middle-aged fuddy-duddy like me) not in a good way.

Inflation takes off, the slow dying out of the budget scene

Bars in Beijing have always tended to be a bit overpriced, compared to the generally low cost of living here. But back in the early Noughties prices were tethered to some extent by the thriving budget sector at the bottom end of the market: few places charged more than 10rmb for a Tsingtao, and almost none dared to ask for more than 15rmb, because there were so many places selling it for 5rmb (although at this price it was often of dubious provenance) - alongside 10 or 15rmb mixed drinks. Ah, those were the days! Spiralling rents caused by the property boom, a larger and more affluent customer base, and a sudden surge in the general level of inflation (it started getting bad back in 2007, and took a huge leap after the government's spendthrift stimulus programmes to ward off recession in 2009; supermarket prices have doubled in the last 10 years; restaurant prices have gone up by almost that much in only 5 or 6 years - with the majority of that increase happening just in the last 3 years) have led to a steady rise in bar prices, to the point where most Beijing bars are now no cheaper than their counterparts in the US or the UK. It's still not as upmarket as Shanghai, but it has been closing the gap rapidly. I don't regard that as a good thing, either.

Does Nanluoguxiang have a future?

I think not.

Most of the bars and restaurants down there have now been forced out by insanely greedy landlords, and it seems inevitable that the few decent survivors - Reef, Salud, 12 Square Metres - will suffer the same fate sooner or later.

It has become unviable to run anything other than an upmarket restaurant or a poncey boutique on that strip now. 

Well, such, at least, is the perception of Chinese entrepreneurs. I think they are mistaken. Nanluoguxiang is too small and narrow, and too remote from the main commercial hubs of the city to function effectively as a tourist magnet/upmarket shopping district. Most visitors to the street are not free-spending out-of-towners or the affluent upper middle class; they are young Beijingers who think it's a cool place to go promenading with their boyfriend/girlfriend or their mates. It's strictly about hanging out and window-shopping; hardly anybody actually buys anything from the fancy shops. The only people making money on that street are the blanket vendors and the snack-food stalls. (But they only make money because the quaint boutiques attract so many window-shoppers. Canny businessmen would run one or two small boutiques as a loss-making promotion [convenient for avoiding paying any tax!], while surreptitiously pulling in big bucks from an unassuming little snack shop. But I doubt if anybody operating down there is at all canny. The boutique owners obstinately soldier on, convinced that they will start making money one day. The snack food vendors make the most of the current bonanza, oblivious of how fragile their trade is, how dependent it is on the presence of all those shops that are making no money.)

The popularity of the area has quickly become counter-productive. The sheer volume of foot traffic clogs the street, often renders it almost impassable, and so makes it much less attractive. The Chinese seem to be much more tolerant of suffocating crowds, but Westerners are increasingly approaching their destination bar or restaurant down one of the side streets - or giving up on Nanluoguxiang altogether. When the new subway station opens at the south end of the street (supposedly at the end of the year, but the work is running well behind schedule) the crowds will get even worse - to the point, I would imagine, where the street will be completely killed for Western punters, and even some of the Chinese will start getting discouraged.

My advice to anybody with a bar or restaurant - or a shop or anything - on NLGX would be to get out NOW, because in a year or two almost every warm day is going to be like the craziest days (such as the 'street festival' days) we've seen in the past, with the crowds so thick that it's almost impossible to move.

That will make it even harder for businesses down there to make any money. But landlords will see only the numbers of people passing, not the actual level of custom, and will crank their rents up even higher. And there will be a catastrophic collapse of the economy. In three years, most of the sites on NLGX will be empty, and there'll be tumbleweed rolling down the nearly deserted street.

If landlords refuse to yield to common sense (likely in Beijing!)... well, the street might perhaps start to entice in the big-money foreign chains like Starbucks, McDonald's and The Disney Store. I think this has always been the dream of the local government's 'planners'. But without a strong community of shops, and some flavour of traditional Chinese culture, where will the custom come from? I can't see people visiting the area just for Starbucks and Disney.

A more hopeful scenario would be that landlords slash their rents to more realistic levels, and we gradually return to the vibrant mix of diverse bars, restaurants, and shops that we used to have on that street a few years ago when its splurge of development first got going. But I'm not sanguine about that happening.

It's a horribly fascinating socio-economic experiment, a microcosm of China's economy as a whole. Nanluoguxiang is a bubble fuelled by delusion and greed; and it's now facing imminent crisis and collapse. How will it come through this crisis, what will we see afterwards? 

[I wouldn't like to speculate! But I'm glad I'm now watching it from a safe distance away.]

Generic expat bars - and why I hate them

Just before I quit Beijing, I found myself out on the east side of town a couple of times on shopping expeditions and so looked in on a newly-opened bar near the Lido Hotel.

It's called Little Britain - and it left me very, very unimpressed (although it doesn't quite make it on to my 'Hate List', since I find it inept and uninspired rather than utterly DIRE).

A couple of months back I produced a particularly withering review of a new bar in the Gulou area called Eje Beer Club, which seemed to me to epitomise the things that are almost invariably CRAP about Chinese bars. Little Britain, I feel, epitomises what is CRAP about most laowai bars.

Remote location

Most foreigner-targeted bars are way out over on the east side, which is no good for those of us who live in the city centre. And even if they're sort of OK, they're never impressive enough to justify a special expedition: I used to go to the original Goose & Duck once in a while when it was at the west gate of Chaoyang Park, but now it's moved two or three miles further east, out beyond the 4th Ringroad, it's off the map for me; I quite like Nashville, and used to go a lot when it was on the old Sanlitun Nanjie, but its new incarnation can't inspire me to venture as far away as Lucky Street.

Naff (or inappropriate) name

Foreign-owned bars never plumb the depths of ludicrousness of Chinese bar naming, but they do tend to be still pretty bad. The now defunct (at last) Danger Doyle's was a piece of unmotivated alliteration. The Goose & Duck was not a bad name, but misleading, since the place was not at all like an English pub. The Stumble Inn and BeerMania are trying too hard to be amusing. Paddy O'Shea's has no connection with anyone called Patrick O'Shea. Little Britain appears to have no connection either to Britain (the owner, I gather, is a Kiwi, although he wasn't around on either of my visits) or to the cult BBC sketch comedy of that name (if you try dropping one of the show's catchphrases like "Computer says no" or "I am the only gay in the village!" on them, you will be met with blank incomprehension, I'm sure); it's just trying to be a cutesy way of proclaiming "We are a foreigner bar." Groan - I HATE cutesy.

'Theme'

As I observed in my touchstone post on What Makes A Great Bar?, any kind of 'theme' is usually anathema to me. Yet in Beijing no-one seems to think that a bar can just be a bar; it's always got to be an "Irish Bar" (or a "Belgian bar" or a "New Orleans bar" or...) or a sports bar or something. It's particularly annoying where your 'theme' is apparently 'English pub': the English pub does not have a 'theme', it just IS.

Half-arsed execution of the 'theme'

Little Britain has fish'n'chips and bangers'n'mash on its menu. That is the beginning and end of its 'Britishness'. It doesn't have ANY British beers - not even in bottles.

Unclear and/or stingy 'happy hour'

It's amazing - appalling! - how foreign-run bars tend to be much worse about this than Chinese ones. Little Britain only offers a paltry 20% off for 'happy hour', and only on selected items - a fact which is not advertised (not prominently, anyway) and not brought to your attention by the staff. If I say, "Well, if it's 'happy hour', I'll have a Guinness", I do not expect to get charged full price!

Limited draught beer options

Little Britain has only three beers on draught, the 'unholy trinity' that seems to be becoming ubiquitous: Guinness (much too expensive in China for regular drinking), Hoegaarden (who the hell likes this cloudy, fruity-tasting muck? in preference to a straightforward premium lager like Stella or Kronenbourg or, if you're going to be slightly fancy, Leffe??), and Carlsberg (SHITE - why not just have a local Chinese beer, or maybe Asahi or Tiger as your budget draught?).

Chinese characteristics

One of the things that irritates me most in a bar (and again, it tends to happen more often in foreign-run than in Chinese bars) is playing to the local obsession with numerology by having prices end in a 'lucky 8'. Little Britain does this with its entire food menu, and it BUGS THE CRAP OUT OF ME!

Too sodding expensive

The Guinness at this place is 50rmb for a smaller-than-a-pint glass. I think the Hoegaarden is 40 or 45, and even the crappy Carlsberg is 35 (MORE than I am paying for premium brews back home in England!!). Most food items are 68 or 78rmb. Who can afford to pay these sorts of prices???

That was the awards, that was

There's nothing like A FREE PISS-UP as a last hurrah for a condemned man, so it was fortuitous timing indeed that The Beijinger Bar & Club Awards junket should fall this year on the weekend before I leave China.

Though I have railed often against the organization of this event, and raised doubts about the legitimacy of its polling (half the votes seem never to get counted because of glitches with the survey widget or failure of the second round of e-mail "voting confirmation"), but on this occasion... the results seemed fairly credible... rational.... well-deserved (even if arrived at by dubious methods). Migas seems like an appropriate winner of the 'Best Bar' award: it's not the kind of place that I would ever go to, but it appears to be well-run, and it has certainly made a splash this year, garnered a lot of good press. It's nice also to see a more European-oriented venue being honoured in these awards; in the past, they have tended to be dominated by places popular with the Anglophone, and more specifically with the American crowd.

And I was pleased to see friends do well: Stephanie Rocard was 'Bar Personality of the Year', and she and Stephen won a clutch of other awards for their hutong haven MaoMaoChong, the biggest haul of the day (they've immediately gone on holiday to celebrate; but I gather they have some distinguished guest barmen holding the fort for them this week); the lads from new music bar Temple won a couple of gongs; and Jeff from Mai picked up one of the Editor's Picks as 'Best New Bar'.

The venue (the sunken 'amphitheatre' at the south end of the Sanlitun SOHO mall) didn't work out too badly either - although an open-air event was taking a big chance on the weather staying fine. Things did get uncomfortably humid for a while in the mid-afternoon, and it began spotting with rain in the evening - but nothing too serious. It was also quite a democratic choice, in that non-ticket-holders could watch the show for free from the surrounding galleries (although there never seemed to be more than a couple of dozen such onlookers, all Chinese - most of them probably plain-clothes policemen, or citizen vigilantes hoping to get footage of riotous debauch on their camera-phones for uploading to the new 'Shame foreigners!' Weibo thread).

Much credit is also due to the team from Vandergeeten beer distributors who kept draught Stella, Hoegaarden, and Chimay flowing freely throughout, and managed to remain remarkably good-natured while doing so, even though increasing numbers of their consumers were not behaving so decorously. They even managed to get hold of some additional kegs after they'd appeared to run out more than an hour before the end - which was an especially impressive achievement. At just about every event of this nature I've been to before, the booze has run out prematurely.

The security and cleaning staff from the mall were also exceptionally friendly and efficient - another major plus.

Other aspects of the event were less successful, though. The ticketing was even more chaotic than usual. The PA wasn't loud enough to hear the presenters very clearly. The food options were few in number (THREE?) and very, very limited in quantity - ran out in no time. The venue was a bit small (just right, as it happened, for the numbers who showed up; but the turnout was quite a bit smaller than in the last two or three years). The stage show wasn't up to much (I had thought the flair bartending and exotic dancers from Chocolate had become a fixture for this event?!): a bunch of Jamaican rappers whose songs/sets seemed to go on interminably, and engendered boredom/irritation in just about everyone (not just rap-averse old fuddy-duddies like me). And the choice of a Saturday seemed extraordinarily inconsiderate towards the F&B professionals for whom the event was principally staged: most of them had to moderate their drinking and/or scoot off early. (City Weekend is arguably even more cock-eyed this year; they're holding their Bar Awards this Wednesday!) I hope the organisers will see sense and hold this awards show on a Monday or a Tuesday next year.

[I'm still in a grump about the ticketing cock-up. I heard a lot of people only got their tickets at the last minute, or didn't get them at all, or didn't get the number they'd requested. As a 'nominator', I believe I was supposed to be entitled to a ticket of my own (but the folks at The Beijinger always FORGET to do anything about this; last year I was only offered a ticket a matter of hours before the event, when there was obviously no time to arrange collection of it, nor even to confirm my desire to attend). I'd also been invited along by some bar owner friends, but they didn't receive the extra tickets they'd been promised. So, I had not one but TWO legitimate grounds for requesting a ticket on the door. Unfortunately, there was no "door list" - neither of individuals entitled to attend, nor of participating bars (and the number of tickets allocated to each). Thus, there was no straightforward procedure for claiming a ticket. I suppose I could have blagged or bullied my way past the girls at the check-in, but I didn't want to be so forceful about it (I hear a lot of other people later weren't so restrained). Luckily, a pal who works for one of the other True Run Media titles offered me a spare ticket. 

It shouldn't be like this, people. It's not that hard to arrange to distribute tickets well in advance. It's not that hard to keep a comprehensive list of who's supposed to be coming. It's not that hard to set up contingency arrangements for allowing admission to people who show up without their tickets. Please try to get on top of this next year.]

Scheduling

After a rather 'heavy' day yesterday, I was gratified to learn that StarSports Asia was to be screening a full 'as live' re-run of yesterday's Champions League Final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich at 9am the next day. This was a far more practical option than trying to stay up all night or trying to grab a few hours' sleep while hoping the alarm clock would go off properly at 2am.

Of course, I had to avoid checking my phone for messages which might give away the result or the major incidents of the match. And refrain from going online. And tiptoe my way through the minefield of Chinese news and sports channels while locating StarSports on my TV (Chinese coverage fairly regularly displays the final score continuously during highlights!).

But I made it. I was out of bed and feeling nicely refreshed an hour before "kick-off", all set for the game.

And the bastards started EARLY. 

In fact, I initially ignored the coverage. I'd begun trying to locate the station just after 8.30pm (I have about 90 channels on my TV, in no kind of logical order, and with no 'quick jump' facility), but when I found the game already being shown, I assumed that this was just a news roundup, and hastily looked away, changed channels again. Giving away the result of a major event immediately prior to showing it in full I had thought to be a uniquely Chinese piece of TV stupidity, but perhaps this vice is more widely prevalent in Asia.

Daft scheduling I had thought to be a uniquely Chinese piece of TV stupidity, but perhaps this vice too is more widely prevalent in Asia - although I had hoped for better from Mr Murdoch's Star empire.

You have to be aware that a major sporting event can overrun, and make allowance for that by having easily cancellable items in the schedule immediately following. It's not just football. You can never tell if the Men's Final at Wimbledon is going to last 2 hours or 4. You don't know if the US Masters at Augusta is going to go to a sudden-death playoff. (I've seen China's execrable CCTV5 sports channel cut off matches half-way through, to honour the scheduling of some routine magazine programme.) Allowing for overrun shouldn't have been too challenging for StarSports Asia, since their schedule is woefully thin (ESPN has all the good stuff; StarSports just a little of their overspill); this was about the only major sporting event they have on all week.

You should also keep in mind that - for such a big event - the start time is pretty f***ing important. Particularly for the first re-run, only hours after the event, at a time when most viewers in your region are likely to be hoping to enjoy the game 'as live'.

Changing to an earlier start time not only guarantees that fans are going to miss the first twenty or thirty minutes, it also signals pretty clearly that the game must have gone to extra time and penalties.

Congratulations, StarSports! Way to ruin the experience for everyone!