Dancing 4/18/08

18 April 2008
Second day of acupuncture, rather boring again. It’s interesting though how many people come in for insomnia, especially men, it seems. I didn’t have acupuncture on my knee today either. The doctor asked me if it hurt, I said yes and that was the end of it. No treatment, today, I suppose. I left at 3:30 to go to the library to check email and for some reason, they kept Trish until almost 5pm.
Tonight we went dancing with Cat, one of the acupuncture students at the student center at Zhejiang University. This was a very different experience from going dancing in America, where there’s usually too much alcohol and groping involved. Rather this was much more akin to a middle school dance, except people can actually dance and the boys really do ask the girls to dance. The amusing part is the great distance left between partners, at least 3 feet if it’s a freestyle dance and only marginally closer for couples dances . There were many waltzes and one older (~40) guy kept trying to teach me, it was funny as I wasn’t picking it up so well. However, I needed saving from my friends as then he decided he wanted to talk about his job, teaching computer programming and how good he was at programming. Thank goodness, Shannon walked by looking for me and I had an out. I also learned a line version of cha-cha, which was fun and the feel of their salsa is much more graceful and fluid than what I’ve experienced in Syracuse. I had a hard time following the lead. Trish wasn’t feeling so well and left early, but Shannon and I stuck it out and decided we’d like to go again and also maybe take ballroom dance lessons back home.
Afterward, we walked to the bar, “HOD,” that’s just down the block. We had a couple beers, listened to the Chinese band and had some magic tricks from the bartenders. Also, it’s funny that just because we’re not Chinese, the men bought us food – peanuts, fruit and popcorn. It was a nice relaxing evening after trying to be so pleasant and accepting through a rather low-activity week.