Semester 4 Chapter XII: Your Local Popstars

Sorry for the wait again. The blog is still running, we are all good in Shanghai, sun is shining, weather is beautiful, I just got back from the stadium, did some running, some working out, played some badminton with this Chinese grandpa, I’m fresh off the shower, new Pusha T is bumping out my headphones (it’s still fuck Kanye tho)... The important thing is that we are live, we are back on and we intend to keep it that way until I wrap it up in about a month...

Let me start with some logistics. I finally managed to book my ticket back to Europe so all of you motherfuckers who cannot wait to see me, know that I’ll be back there July 4^th. So get the drinks ready, get all that dope shit ready, it is officially going down.

Now, back to this motherfucker. I had one of my dawgs from the Czech Republic visiting for about 10 days which is the reason why I skipped a week with the blog. I’m sure I did some shit before he arrived but since we consumed excessive amount of alcohol over the past two weeks, my memories are all blurred up (even more than usual) and I’m not even gonna try to recollect everything. I remember a hangout with one of my friends at her place which turned into an all-nighter... That’s about it...

Aight, so May 17^th, I picked up my bro at the Jingan metro station which started our broliday. We managed to do so much shit, it’s hard to believe. We hung out at all my favorite places, I introduced him to my favorite people, we went to All to check a Genome show, we ate all the amazing food I’m aware of in this town (and trust me, it is a lot), we drank shitload of beer, lotta whisky, we went to Shengsi island for two nights, we went to Powerstation... We hit Arkham to see Boys Noize for his last night... It was just too much good shit. Thank god we managed to squeeze some workouts and runs into all of that... I’m detoxing like a motherfucker now.

Now, let me give you some brief overview of the Shengsi trip. Shengsi is a small island located south-east from Shanghai. You have to take a bus from Nanpu Bridge which takes you all the way to the ferry station which is about two hours away, and it passes this 30km bridge over the sea. Pretty impressive. Then you hop on the ferry which takes another hour and voila – you are at the island. You gotta take a bus to the center of the only city over there. Nobody speaks English and there are barely any tourists (we haven’t run into any international ones). If you are lucky enough, you find a small bus station and take another minibus to this tiny fishing village. We got there, got ourselves a hotel room for 300 RMB per night with a view at this sandy beach in the bay and that was that. Two days of chilling, walking around, discovering scenic spots, eating amazing food, drinking beer, talking shit... We didn’t swim tho – although the water didn’t look totally unacceptable, it didn’t look super appealing neither, so we passed on that....

Another highlight was arcades. I discovered this spot a while ago but I didn’t really go in to play any games up until now. Located close to West Nanjing road on the 4^th floor of this building at Jiangning Lu, this place offers dozens of old-school SEGA and other old timer 80s and 90s machines. You can race, you can shoot zombies, you can shoot machine guns... It’s super cheap, super loud, super colorful, super fun... We ended up spending two nights over there. Fucking awesome.

Overall, this whole thing was dope. I guess it’s always cool catching up with your squad, especially if your life decisions got you to the other end of the world. I’m really looking forward to catching up with the rest of my people in July. It’s still one!

 

Highlights:

• Pusha’s & Asap Rocky’s albums.
• The current exhibition in Powerstation. If you’re around, go check it out. Worth every penny.
• Trying out some new exercises on the bars at the stadium. Feeling that!