Bellydancers and snakes

First thing in the morning Alex and I went to join the gym she used to belong to. On our way there we saw a group of old Chinese people dancing in a wide area of the sidewalk. I will have to go back and take photos of them, they were too cute. Unfortunately when we go to the gym, we had to deal with a truly incompetent woman who would not budge on the membership price. Apparently for three months I have to pay $194 + $225 (initiation fee). There is no way I am paying more for an initiation fee than for a membership and it ends up being over $100 a month and I am not cool with that. So I guess what I am going to try tomorrow is to use a card of an old roommate of Alex's. There is a photo on the card and she looks nothing like me and somehow I need to renew the card. Eek! I hope it works, Alex and Carrie seem to think it will.

In the afternoon we went bowling with some of Alex's friends. This one guy has four lanes in the basement of his apartment building and although I probably had more experience bowling than anyone else, I didn't do that great.

Another market opened up across the street and Alex and I went to check it out. There were more clothes and less food this time. We found this one booth with a massive pile of clothes that I actually liked. They had some really cool shirts but as I am coming to realize in China, I am too big. Most of the XL shirts were still too small. So that was a little annoying going through all of these shirts I liked, and none of them fit.

We met up with Empi and Mikael (Empi is the daughter of one of my mother's friends back in VA) for dinner at Red Rose, a Xinjiang restaurant. Xinjiang is in the west of China and has many minorities. It is more like Central Asia than East Asia, the language is totally different and I believe that Islam is more dominant than Buddhism, but I could be wrong. Anyway, this restaurant had a band and two belly dancers. It was great! One of the belly dancers had a snake and she brought some guy up on stage to dance with. I felt bad for the snake though, she kept swinging it around. I was sort of expecting the band to play Arabic sounding music, which they did at times, but then they would play Gypsy Kings and at one point I swear they were playing country. There were also these two Greek-looking guys in the audience we got up on stage and started dancing without even being invited up there, it was great. The food was delicious, lots of meats and a massive full leg of lamb (I think).

Not sure what's going on today yet, I know a bunch of the "girls" are coming over for brunch as one of Alex's friends is probably moving to Xi'an this week.