Its 2004…so where is my personal flying car?

New Years Eve on a boat party on the HuangPu river between PuXi and PuDong. Frigging cold. We are drunk. We are not drunk on Champaign (not yet anyway). We drank Saki at an all-you-can-eat/drink dinner party we attended 2 hours earlier. Haga is talking to family (or maybe friends…I don’t know) on here cell phone. We are having a great time. There is something about boat cruises in cold industrial harbors that I find appealing. Later we met up with some of Haga’s friends and went to a dance bar. Documentation is in the gallery.

The fireworks was not spectacular, but it was cool. Individual contributors were lighting skyrockets along the Bund. There was also fireworks that shot off from the top of the boat.

The dinner party before hand was attended by my Russian friend, a new Jewish-American friend from Philadelphia, Haga, and myself. There were some 30 other people at the table, but they were younger and not as cool, and the saki had blurred my vision. So effectively there were four of us at the table. I remember my Russian friend saying “so…Jews in America don’t all know how to play music?” This was in response to the information that I never learned how to read music…something Russians – and especially Russian Jews – consider to be a part of basic education.

The dance clubs were packed. As usual, I bumped into many people I have met before, including Chinese friends. It was very fun.

Saki can really creep up on you. And make you feel sick for a long time afterwards. I didn’t feel that drunk at dinner. Just happy. Excited. Maybe it was the combination of Champaign (Haga and I split a bottle), and assorted alcoholic cola drinks. At about 4:30 AM, I had to call it quits for the night. The next day was spent in recovery. My egg-omelet breakfast in the morning helped in that recovery.

Days before, at my Toastmasters meeting, I gave a speech titled “Why Christmas sucks and should not be promoted in China”. The audience liked the speech a lot. My three main points were 1) Christmas, as practiced in the Western World, lacks spirituality; 2) Christmas causes stress for many people; and 3) Christmas music is the most insipid form of psychological manipulation and causes me to think of killing myself. Quote: “If Christmas music could be described as a physical object, I would describe it as a bowl of sugar cubes toped with artificially sweetened syrup. It is too sweet to enjoy and will give you diabetes.”

Haga’s parents are arriving tomorrow. I need to clean the house.