The Big Easy

The jazz bar we went to on Monday evening was the best - and almost only - jazz bar in all of Beijing, and it was really quite good. It's called "The Big Easy" and it's right by where JB's parents live - in a snazzy part of town. There are live bands playing every night, which is pretty cool since that means there's a different show every day. Slight glitch: the drinks are expensive. My delicious chocolate milk with alcohol cost me a whopping 45 RMB (6 RMB = $1 Cdn). I can eat three dinners in a normal Chinese restaurant with that, or eight or nine dinners at the second cafeteria...
There were six of us that evening: Tom (British English teacher drinking beer), Mariana (off the pic to the left; she's Russian but she speaks Chinese and English really very well; she's learning Chinese at Erwai), Guillaume (to the right; he's looking for an internship in order to stay in Beijing next term), Katia (off the pic to the right), Loic and I.

If you look closely you can see the jazz band playing in the background.

Katia and Loic in front of the bottle-infested bar. We had the best seats in the house for the number of people in our group. The bar's pretty small and we had to be imaginative to make a comfortable spot for us where we could all sit and talk and watch the jazz band at the same time. We were very successful and I'm afraid next time we might not be as lucky...

Today I must finish my grading for my first year students. Argh!