little trouble in big china

I forgot that I had promised an answer to the bar-club-lounge quiz upon finishing the Yunnan portion of the blog. Are you ready?

There were no acrobats, at least none performing while I was there. The panda was partially explained by the Movie Night theme -- if you came in costume, you got a free trinket -- and the panda was the bar's contribution (Kung Fu Panda is in theatres here). It kept disappearing behind a door, so we think the employees were taking turns inside the big head. Though you can't tell from the photo, this one was dancing suggestively, hence the mildly surprised looks on the faces behind.

As for the other answers: one of the barmen also got up on the club's stage to do some magic tricks, mostly successfully; there were two white guy-Asian woman couples (sitting together); the staggeringly drunk blonde was a bit of a stretch, as she was most definitely drunk and most definitely staggering, but actually only blonde for about 10 minutes while she borrowed a wig from what appeared to be the only customer in attendance to have followed the theme. The dice games were taking place at two of the bottle-service tables, and reminded me of the game that Bootstrap Bill plays in Pirates of the Caribbean.  I asked a woman at one of the tables how to play, but she didn't know and referred me to the bartender standing next to her.

Of course, he seemed to have his hands full administering to something called a Flaming Lamborghini (yep, that blue stream is fire). And once one table had one, all of the other tables had to have them, so he was a little busy. I wasn't familiar with the drink, but it's apparently all the rage on the interwebs. I had thought the bartender told me that it was Kahlua and cognac, but it was loud, and my Chinese liquor vocabulary is mainly limited to the more generic bottles (vodka, whiskey, and the "local"ish maotai jiu), so who knows what they were using here. They like to pile up the pint glasses, though, so it makes for a bigger flame, and there are 4 martini glasses at the bottom so that you can have multiple drinkers leaning in to set their hair on fire, I mean, partake. Frankly, I think it sounds like an awful drink (not being into either coffee or cream, per the online recipes), but it does have quite the visual effect.

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