Sad on a Tuesday

While it has been announced that many of the bars, clubs, and restaurants inside the gates of Worker's Stadium (Gongti) will be closed down during the Olympics, last night we showed up at Gongti planning on hitting up Kro's Nest for their great "I Hate Tuesdays" free (or RMB5) beer and decent pizzas and then heading over to Mix, trying to finally get rid of some of the thousands of RMB we have on multiple VIP cards, only to find Gongti all locked up and no way to enter the gate. Our guess was that the lockdown had something to do with the Good Luck Beijing Women's soccer event to be played at Gongti over the weekend, but some announcement would have been appreciated.

Instead, we went to Red Rose and had a decent time sitting outside on a lovely night, the menu is very hit and miss, but their yangrou chuanr are large and delicious (as well they should be for RMB6 a chuanr). We followed that by doing a round at some Sanlitun Hou Jie spots including Shooters (dead) and The Tree (hopping), followed by a trip to Suzie Wong's for their Latin night and one of the city's better mojitos.

The lack of announcements about location closings or street congestion is going to be a major problem if it continues, or worse, happens during the Olympics. Some of this information gets printed in Chinese, but often doesn't get to foreigners, others simply isn't announced and instead disappointed people don't find out until they arrive. The torch relay closed down the Tiananmen East subway stop and basically killed a morning for me. I currently am dealing with a client who is constantly complaining about the new visa rules that seem to be changing all the time and I'm starting to feel her pain.

UPDATE: Beijing Boyce explains the situation, oh well, pizza and beer will have to wait a week.