St. Patrick's Day in China Part 1

Okle, I've been promising this story for awhile and since I'm in a frisky mood, I'm finally going to write about our St. Patty's Day experience. So to begin, there are not alot of Irish people in Beijing and St. Patrick's Day last year fell on a Saturday, so we kinda wanted to make a weekend of it. COmpounding matters, it was also the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament, and Holy Cross, by virtue of beating Bucknell's ass, had qualified and was playing Southern Illinois in Columbus Ohio on March 16th back in the States (which was the 17th in Beijing. Before I continue, a quick diversion. When applying to colleges, one of my criteria was that I wanted to go to a school that had a shot at qualifying for the tourny, so I could be in the front row, shirtless, with my chest painted in school colors. I first went to Villanova, which was a great basketball school. However things didn't work out for me there. In my three March Madnesses at HC, they only made the tournament once, and of course it was the year I was in China, unable to go. I definitely would've skipped the two days of classes to watch that game in person. I'm still kinda bummed about it now that I think about it).
So the night before St. Patty's after dinner, we tried to look for an Irish pub where we could relax with some beers. We wound at a place called Molly's (note: that may not be the name, I can't remember). It looked like a decent enough bar from the outside, and it was in the embassy district. Once inside, things got weird. Beers cost 30 kuai (about $4.25), which is freaking expensive in China. Also, when we tried to tak a group picture a 'bouncer' (i.e. a large man with a headset in his ear) rudely told us pictures were not allowed. The clientele was also creepy. A bunch of middle-aged to old westerners paired with YOUNG Chinese girls. Like our age young (only other place I saw this was in Chongching with Alex and Nate, also really creepy). After a beer in there, we decided to call it a night since the place seemed too much like a brothel, and we decided to reconvene in the morning for the festivities.
Of course on the morning of St. Patrick's Day, CET organized a voluntary scavenger hunt in Houhai which was to begin at 8am. We woke up at the same time as those scavengers, but it was to head off to Lush because we had spotted that they had 10kuai Guiness all day on St. Patrick's Day PLUS they had free internet, so we could hook up to CBS Sportsline to watch the HC game. So we arrived at the bar at about 9am, just in time for tip-off, ordered some Guinesses and breakfast, and tried to set up the internet. Only problem: we were in China and of course it wasn't fucking working. Finally the internet works, but the connection was too slow to load up the CBS feed, so I had my laptop on ESPN Gamecast, getting updates, but seeing no video. So this conintues throughout the first half until one of our friends, in his infinite wisdom, manages to start a video chat with his friends back home in CT, and they turn their web cam towards the tv, so we could watch their televsion. When we first did that, the Kentucky game was on, which was bullshit. However, within a few minutes, they switched to the end of the HC game, which was close until the end, though Southern Illinois wound up pulling out the win, dashing our dreams. After the game ended, we decided to wander around Wudaokou for the afternoon, enjoying the sunny March day, and being slightly tipsy. However, there was a problem with the bill, despite the ads for the cheap Guiness all day on St. Patty's Day, they tried to claim the promotion only applied after noon on Saturday, which was absolutely bullshit. The friend who got us the video chat in CT came up huge again, arguing with the waiters and managers for around 30 mins before they finally relented and sold us the beer at the proper price. Freaking China sometimes. Anyway, we'd never really walked around Wudaokou, so we went to a corner store, bought some beer (no brown bagging for us! open container laws don't exist in China, we even drank in taxis!) and wandered for the next few hours, before we got hungry again and returned to Lush to eat lunch and devise our plan for the evening. We decided to try and find a pub/restaurant called Dirty Nellie's because 1) (numbers!) one of our friends was obsessed with the place since her name happened to be Nell and 2) it seemed like the best bet for an authentic Irish experience in Beijing, so we headed back to CET to get ready for the evening.
This is part 1, I'm going to go through the second half of the day at some point soon, maybe later tonight if I get bored.