It was my friend Florie's birthday today, and so I'd promised to come to her birthday party. I knew Florie from rowing at Balliol, although it startles me at times when I think about the age range of my friends, as this was only Florie's 24th birthday.
I got to the club where the party was being held, and shortly after getting myself a Guinness, was surprised to see that Zhan was there!! I berated him for not telling me that he was coming, but then of course when we sat down to dinner, made sure that I was sitting next to him so we could catch up.
The weird thing about this club (The Drunken Monkey) was that it was literally like we were having dinner on the dance floor of a nightclub. The music was incredibly loud, and conversations were had by shouting directly into the ear of the person sitting next to you. Totally a bizarre way to have dinner.
The food was good though, as we just had this feast of Chinese food and dumplings, where everyone passed around dishes, family style. Sitting next to Zhan was funny though, as I forget occasionally that he's actually Chinese. So he had MUCH more skill with the chopsticks than I do, and I was constantly struggling to keep ahold of my food!
At some point after dinner, we all started getting up and wandering around to talk to each other, when as I was briefly sitting alone, some random guy came over and sat down to talk to me. I was suspicious of this at first (as I always am when a random man approaches me in a bar), but it turned out that he was the boyfriend of one of the guests, and when he saw me sitting by myself he just wanted to make sure I had someone to talk to. How randomly nice, eh? I guess shows you that I shouldn't always be so suspicious of young men wanting to come up and talk to me!
While we were at the bar getting drinks after dinner, Zhan kept commenting on how the male-to-female ratio was somewhat skewed at this place, with about five guys for every girl. I just commented that perhaps he should take this as an indication of the types of people it catered to. After all, not every gay bar is located in SoHo, and not every bar that is "gay-friendly" is exclusively a gay bar. Zhan seemed to have trouble with this concept, until as we were leaving, some guy grabbed his hand and introduced him to another guy, at which point the guy grabbed Zhan's hand and kept kissing it! Oh my gosh, the whole thing was hilarious, because Zhan being Zhan, wasn't freaked out but just laughed hysterically at the whole thing. As he told me later, "Okay, I'm not into that, but at least the guy who hit on me was rather good-looking!"
At midnight, Florie was still raging, and wanted to go out dancing. Zhan was originally supposed to stay with her, but looked at me plaintively and asked, "Can I come home with you?" Ah yes, perhaps we are a bit older than we'd like to admit!
Unfortunately I'd forgotten to bring my phone out with me, so I couldn't call Emily and warn her that I was bringing Zhan home, but I did leave a note out for her so that she wouldn't be surprised if she got up in the middle of the night and found someone sleeping on the couch in the living room. Overall a fun night, but I think we were both beat and definitely ready for bed!
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