China is the land of temptation.
Much of the food is good and cheap. You can eat
in restaurants here for less than US $5 per day; you can eat at home for a lot less.
The ladies are pretty, and enough are willing. And many of them are also cheap.
(Sorry, expat ladies, you maybe kinda came out on the short end here. But you always have us.
)
Booze is
dangerously cheap. A bigass bottle of good beer costs less than 40 cents US. A big bottle of surprisingly good brandy costs US $1.50. An average night at the bar might run US $25; you can go drink like James Joyce on his birthday for less than $50...MUCH less if a special is on. Drinking at home is cheap, but the bar is where all the other expats are...
Other mood-adjusting agents are readily available at reasonable prices if one knows the right persons and keeps one's eyes open.
As a result, I think many of us are kind of living a sort of continuation or return to our college days here. Yes, I know a lot of us are good clean hard-working stable folks too, but I've known a LOT of people who are either a) in a classroom or b) in a bar. A lot of people are at the bar, drinking hard,
every night.
I suspect some of us got off the plane tanked and just stayed that way. I for one was NOT a big drinker when I came here. I slowly turned into one...at least much bigger than I had been. Coping mechanism? Maybe. This place is plenty weird. Boredom? Good guess...there's not a helluva lot else for many expats to DO on a day-to-day basis. Social pressure? Could well be...as mentioned above, for many of us the bars are about the only social network we have.
A lot of us are having a lot of FUN here.
But I'm starting to piece together another side.
I recently learned that I had adult-onset diabetes. Since then, I'm meeting a number of other expats saying the same thing. Unlike most of them, sadly, I'm largely retired from drinking. I'm in the early days but I can already tell you...diabetes
sucks.
I'm seeing a high amount of diabetes. I'm seeing a lot of chronic stomach disorders. I'm seeing a lot of nice quiet people turning into mouthy aggressive flaming assholes every night. I'm seeing a few cases of people drinking themselves to death. I'm finally seeing alcohol as the dangerous, powerful drug people say it is. I'm seeing it do bad things to people I like a lot.
I don't know where I'm going with all this. Not trying to say you shouldn't drink or hit the bars. Maybe just trying to say that I suspect there may be some monsters of our own making lurking along the path; please be aware they're there and stay out of their clutches.
Maybe the fact that we CAN go nuts every night doesn't mean we necessarily SHOULD.
Sure would like a nightcap.
Thank God I'm stoned.