When Jenny, Jonas and I first moved to Suzhou we were immediately keen in the early days to make some friends. In any new place it is important to find the people who you can connect with, and when you’re surrounded by a totally new and alien culture I think that it is only natural that you seek out those who are similar to you.
So we were looking for the expats.
It turns out the expats aren’t so easy to find!
But we reasoned that if we could find the bar area then we would also find the foreigners – Westerners like to drink right?!
We had a couple unsuccessful evenings of dead bars without a foreigner in sight, but eventually we tracked down the name of a bar street that looked to be promising.
So one evening we got a taxi and were dropped off at the bottom of the bar street.
We had no idea where to start, and to be honest everything looked pretty dead (in hindsight we may have been a little early in the evening), so we just decided to go into the first bar on the street.
We went into the bar and it seemed like a good start, there were definitely foreigners here! We sat at the bar and got a couple cocktails and people watched to try and scope out if any of these people could be our new friends.
After we had been there a little while one of us commented how all the foreigners were middle aged men, and how they all had at least one Chinese girl hanging all over them – they seemed like a very friendly bunch!
It didn’t strike us as that strange at first that all these girls were wearing short skirts and a lot more makeup than we had seen on any other women in China so far. It’s just dressing up for a night out right?
Wrong.
Eventually the bar lady took pity on us and came over for a chat. She was a Chinese lady and was asking us about why we were in China, if we were working there, if we worked full time or were looking for any part time work…
As the conversation progressed it very suddenly dawned on me that we were in a real life brothel and were talking to the Madame! And not only that…was she offering us a job?! Was this going to be a great way for us (including Jonas) to make some cash one the side?
It most definitely was not. Now, that would be a very different story!
After that we very quickly finished our drinks and left in fits of laughter and lots of “Oh my god”ing.
Looking back it was fairly obvious that we were in a brothel. If the scantily clad Chinese girls weren’t a give away (Chinese women tend to be more reserved and demure in their dress), then the way the occasionally took the men by the hand definitely should have been!
It’s safe to say that that particular bar was not where we found our expat friends. As it turns out the bar street had a very definite split to it, to one side of the crossroads were the expat bars filled with other TEFL teachers, to the other side were the seedy prostitute bars. We just got dropped at the wrong end of the street!
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