first, a shout out to my new home away from home, The Roadhouse Macau. i only had classes monday-wednesday, so i went out exploring by myself wednesday night. what i found was a hole-in-the-wall blues shack. i arrived for happy hour (every day 5-9, buy 1 get 1 free. BOOM!) and proceeded to mingle with the bartenders and other common folk. most everybody in there also spoke english, either ex-pats, australians, or chinese that spoke english well. i immediately started requesting songs that i haven't heard in a while that would only be acceptable in a blues joint, so not your umST umST umST dance music the kids are listening to these days. anyway, i made my way back there friday night, where they had a kick ass blues band wailing. (they played me a 7 minute jam version of sweet home chicago for my birthday at midnight) a dude i met the last time was also there and bought me a midnight cigar. it's not america, so i could smoke inside the bar. then i went home for saturday mornings are the aforementioned club activities.
anyway, the actual birthday festivities. after dinner with my two new teaching friends, we went back to the roadhouse to catch the end of happy hour. (seriously, buy 1 get 1 free. duh?) then we ventured out and about, because as much as i love the blues, the ladies, ehh, not so much. so a fun little tidbit i learned is that this time of year in macau, on saturdays for the next couple weeks at 9 & 10 pm, the international firework competition commences. so we went to another bar that had a view of the fireworks, which were pretty freakin awesome, as you can imagine an international firework competition being around the birthplace of fireworks. This bar had a pretty decent band (can you believe a cover band didn't know a single bon jovi song though? i thought that was low hanging fruit? they went and totally redeemed themselves with highway to hell and sweet child o' mine back to back, which are way better tunes, but still...you're a mediocre bar cover band, PLEASE!). anyway, this is the bar where the night really takes off. my compadres hit the drinking brakes a little, but that didn't stop them from piling shots on me before we left. (ooo, other digression...if you order chicken wings in a macau bar, ask for a picture first, or else you may get a plate full of the little scrappy ends of the wings. you know the things most people throw out when they make chicken wings, because there's practically no meat? yeah, a full plate of those).
anyway, then we made our way to the lion's bar at the mgm grand. i'm at the point of no return (no not parlor...inside joke), so i head to the bar and order "the lion's iced tea," because i thought it was a long island. BAD assumption on my part. if a long island impregnated a mojito and it was aborted after 6 months and dumped into a glass, that's what they gave me. (are cocktail abortions too graphic? sorry) anyway, every other nasty sip was accompanied by a shredded chunk of mint leaf. not what you want late into a birthday: minty leaf chunks in a drink you expect to be chunkless. but i finished it, the champion that i am. right around then, the live band calls me and these two other girls who share the same birthday as me on stage, where we had a 42 oz glass filled with an orange drink. we were assigned a straw and i think they said "Go." - now in the past, i've shared some large drinks with people (X!), but everybody carried their weight in those events; not so much this time - the drink was delicious; it wasn't there long (no thanks to those 2 birthday girls). taxi drive home shortly thereafter, and that was my birthday!
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