I’ve met a lot of people in Yue Qing.

Today is my day off, and I leave tomorrow for Taizhou.

Last night I hung out with Brook, Yo Yo, and Ping Ping. And one other girl whos name I can’t remember.

Brook speaks some English. She’s a cute short girl with blonde hair who is going through some kind of period of personal inner conflict. She’s very sweet and comforting, but prematurely clingly (not that clingy is ever good). She wrote me a note last night in terribly broken English which is the absolute quintessential Chinese love note. It closes with “I will miss you in my life”. I’ve known her for 3 days.

Yo Yo is the star dancer at one of the clubs. Not one of the regular dancers, but the one who gets announced and only dances for 5 minutes while there are spotlights on her. I sent a text message to Sacha regarding this earlier, but this has to be said here: Yo Yo fucking drops science (if that’s possible) on the stripper pole like no one else I’ve ever seen, here or in America. I think she could be a gymnast, but watching a dancer like that you can really almost see the art in pole dancing, if there is one. I picture her watching videos of other dancers in her free time and critiquing them or writing a book on this or something. She’s antisocial and likes to play games on her cell phone in a remote corner of the club when she isn’t dancing.

Ping Ping is a singer at another club. She doesn’t really speak much English, but enough to say hello and ask how I was last night. She has two fake tattoos, I think both of them temporary. One on her left arm and another above her right breast. I don’t know why. She’s tall and very beautiful and has a lot of friends.¬†She said she wanted a Coors shirt and I said I’d get her one. I’m supposed to call her today.

I’m set up to play at Zung in Shanghai on August 12th (if I remember correctly; the second friday of the month). Looking forward to drum & bass gigs, I’m getting fucking sick of playing house and techno actually. Can’t wait to get home and just cut and introduce some more diversity into my DJ life. Also, Angelzero is on Myspace. This is an odd coincidence, because I’ve been all about all of his tunes that I’ve heard on Thermal, BBS, and Replicant Audio. Really feeling some new ASC stuff as well, I hope to acquire from both of these guys in the near future. I recently acquired some 320 MP3’s from Beatport; a bit of J-Laze, stuff on Invader, and various dancefloor drum & bass. I wish Inperspective and BBS were on there.

I got a package from Sacha today with two of my passports, a small sack of bud concealed in a bag of tea, and a new Moleskine which arrived just in time as I made the final entry in my previous one just this afternoon.

Today being our day off, the Kim’s and I decided to go hiking. Kim had found a path to a nearby mountain which was where we headed, toward¬†a pagoda at the peak of the mountain. We counted the steps on the way up (1,234) and made it to the top to enjoy the view. As hot as it was, we continued up the path along the side of the mountain, going pretty far away from the trail. We hiked for a total of 5 hours and made it to some temples which were really hidden away. We found some kind of agricultural reservoir which Kim jumped into to cool off in, but it looked pretty dirty to me. We didn’t go back the way we came, deciding instead to make our own path through 4-foot high grass. The landscape of the parts of the mountain that we saw were absolutely unbelievable; more color and texture than I can really describe. When we finally made it out, we were in a middle class residential area unlike one that I’ve seen in China. There were no streets, just alleys in between all of the tenements. Basically the densely populated Chinese suburb. We got more than a few stares in there, and also ice cream.

I’m so exhausted now I can barely sit up. Tomorrow we leave for a new city; Taizhou.

The girl next to me has a tattoo on her right arm which says Bad Girl. Except the writing is particularly bad. It looks like it says Bao Girl. She’s yapping on her cell phone while simultaneously talking to someone over webcam.