DJ KING OF SNOOP DOG @ Muse

We really should have been suspicious about Muse. Sure, it’s a trendy, classy place…popular Chinese and foreigners alike…sure it has cocktail waiters juggling with flaming bottles…but when the DJ is billed as ‘The King of Snoop Dog’, you know something’s up.

Inside it was packed packed packed full of people…with just enough room to squeeze past (Hey! Don’t hate me just because I have to brush up next to some hot chicks just to get to the cloakroom!) on the way to the bar. We decided to explore, and there is a huge metal staircase which leads to a smaller, upstairs room which had a different DJ but a similar level of good looking people, minus the crowds at the bar. Good stuff!

We made our way to the dancefloor to the sounds of some great rap/hip-hop…but then suddenly and abruptly it went off, and a girl walked out from the DJ booth with a microphone. There must have been a band hidden somewhere because they started playing some stuff…and it was really bad. Not necessarily bad music, but that dancefloor cleared so fast you might have expected to have seen the police in there checking for Tibetan passports. We made our way with the crowd (sometimes you just have to go with the flow when there are a billion people moving in one direction) and headed back downstairs…where the trouble really began!

After about 25 minutes of hanging around downstairs, the DJ (who as previously mentioned is THE KING OF SNOOP DOG) was preparing to start his set. As we had been present upstairs on the changing of the last DJ -> band, we were prepared for a ‘rusty’ transition…what we weren’t prepared for was…

…all of the lights to go out and the music to stop.

One too many rice cookers in the kitchen and BANG! Powercut. Now I’m sure you’ve been in a club when something breaks before…they rush to fix it, the people shout and boo, it’s back up and running again in five minutes. Not in China baby! People stood in relative quiet, not hostile, chatting with their friends. Everyone finished their drinks and then some, again quite quietly, started to leave.

It was a bit like people leaving a funeral…calm, slow and drawn-out.

We, on the other hand, had realised that since all the rich mofos had left their comfy couches…we’d take advantage! Not only that, but in their rush to go home they also left plenty of Hennessey and some lovely ice-tea! Thanks guys (wherever you are)!

Matrix and Futurebound @ Club Bonbon

So we’d been planning all night how great Friday night was going to be. A world-supreme-master-champion DJ from Japan (DJ CoMa) was coming to a club called The Shelter (which we had never visited before), so we decided to splash out on a few beers at our place first. 3 each (and a lot of classic mp3s) later we were ready to go…

The doors opened at 10pm, and we’d been advised to arrive pretty early as the place wasn’t huge and people had been known to be turned away. Well, we arrived at about 11pm to this:

Ok, I’m sort of lying (I stole that photo from their Smart Shanghai page) but still…it was pretty empty. We were in no rush, so we got a beer. Corona was 20rmb (9 ) and I think TsingTao was even cheaper (or maybe it was the other way round…anyway…) and it tasted good (although I was a little perturbed by the fact that the bargirl put the lime into it with tweezers)…but it didn’t really make the atmosphere much better.

It started filling up at around 12am…but the scene was a bit like going to a uni bar in England…like a Mojo or Pressure. It didn’t feel quite…right. So, since time is money…we went to Bonbon :D

Bonbon is a big club and on a Friday night has ‘international DJs’. It claims to have had more than 200 fly in to do sets…and it’s a really great venue for it. Pretty big main dancefloor, nice ‘sideroom’ (although they were playing house music in it which suprised me since it was D+B (Matrix and Futurebound) in the main room) and lots of small booths and rooms to get lost in (and play the drinking dice game).

What we hadn’t really thought through was doing pre-drinking, then drinking followed by going to an ‘open bar’ club. As my friends know, I’m an alcoholic not a big drinker, and this was just a recipe for disaster! Anyway, 2am -> 4am is a bit of a blur…but I am 70% sure we ended up in City Diner, eating bacon burgers (sooooo goooood) and talking about David Beckham to some Korean students (who must have thought that we were retarded or worse…Welsh).

Overall, a great night out…and 10 hours of partying for around £20…expensive night :D Oh, and the toilets at Bonbon deserve a special mention for being so cyber: