Alleycats and Black Might

On Saturday night we went out for supper and drinks to celebrate Christine Junior's anonymously-numbered birthday. It was a frigid night so we couldn't have been happier when we got off the bus and saw several Santa Claus's randomly serving free cups of hot coffee on the street. Thank you for the warm drink, sudden Santas!

We made reservations at a restaurant called Alleycats. We'd been there before and it was a nice place. However, when we arrived at the address we realized that there are 8 Alleycats restaurants in Taipei and the place where we had reserved a table was just a wall-less outdoor patio with maybe a dozen seats total at the whole place. As tempting as eating pizza with mittens on while sitting in the freezing cold sounded, Kris called and got the reservation changed to a different Alleycats.

Yay, pizza and wine!

About halfway through our meal, Mother Nature decided to shake things up a bit with a 7.0 earthquake! Definitely the longest and shakiest earthquake I've felt so far. After the shaking ended I took a video of the lights moving over our heads... I'm sure that's perfectly safe...

The best part about Alleycats? There were REAL CATS hanging out in the restaurant. One cat slept right by our table, which allowed many opportunities for us to poke at him. I miss having a cat!

After our meal Samuel asked the band to play "Happy Birthday" for Christine so we moved to another table closer to the stage. After we sat down we noticed one of the waitresses was shaking the shit out of a little KITTEN to the beat of the music. When she saw the hearts in our eyes she brought the KITTEN over to Mel and we got to take turns holding her. Her name was Margarita and she was so purry.

Blowing out candles and wishing for a date with Godfrey.

After using the women's washroom, I rejoined my friends and we took a taxi to the Living Mall, where we were going to a club for some drinks. The Living Mall is definitely the coolest looking mall with a ball bursting out of it that I have ever visited. Unfortunately, this amazing ball-busting mall didn't have the club I'd read about online. Someone who worked there told Kris that it closed quite a while ago. Screw you, outdated internet websites!

Plan B: Mark had heard about a place called the Black Might nightclub in Ximending that he was curious to visit, so we took a quick bus ride there. This was the safest, most secure club I've ever been to because we had to go through three security checks where they used security scanners like they have at airports, they went through everyone's bags, and there must have been at least a dozen security guards just at the entrance. I was expecting to find a pretty rough place when I got into the club, but it was just your typical Taiwanese dance bar (with 90% horrible generic rap music and 10% Poker Face/Sorry Sorry).

How to build a Taiwanese dance bar:
#1- The bar should be all-you-can-drink (yay!) and it should be way more expensive for the men than the women (hissss!)
#2- There should be lots of seats but you keep kicking me and my friends out of them because they're "reserved" even though no one ever arrives to sit in them
#3- The bar staff should put on a fire/juggling act around 1am
#4- Bring out the tramps to dance on stage as soon as the juggling is finished
#5- Pull some bar stars up on stage and encourage them to strip. Make sure that you choose people who have clearly already planned to climb up on the stage and wore a leather bra accordingly.
#6- Play "Poker Face" and "Sorry Sorry"
#7- Be so smokey that our eyes burn and our clothes never lose the aroma of Marlboros

#8- Tell my friend (even though it's her birthday) that she can't sit on the stripper pole platform, even though nobody's using it and even though she just cleaned it off with her own wet nap.