You can find me in da club.

I've come to detest our school co-worker outings. Only very rarely do they turn out to be amusing. And when that happens, it is in the form of something weird like this, which happened a while ago.



But most of the time, dinner is uneventful, followed by pressure to come with the group to a norebang. This is more widely known as a karaoke room, and as you might imagine, is extremely painful to enjoy if you've had no drinks beforehand. Unfortunately, this is pretty common when we go out with my boss. Every time I finally weasel my way out of the gathering after several hours, I make a promise to myself not to go to them anymore. But I always get suckered into them again somehow. I consider it my own personal groundhog day.

Last Friday, when I was suckered in, the evening turned out to be an exception. After a work dinner, the decision was made to bypass the norebang for a night club called Arabian Nights. We took taxis part of the way across town and stopped in front of a gaudy, bright Las Vegas-style building. There were men with suits and ear pieces everywhere.

Those men shepherded us to a private room, and we were told that the dance floor was below us. The first time we ventured down to it, there was some sort of dance show in progress on the stage in from of the dance floor. Before I realized it, everyone onstage disappeared except for one man who stripped down to some tiny black hot pants with a glittery Adidas emblem on his ass. Next thing I knew, there were fountains of water spraying up behind him. And then he was down to a neon yellow thong. This whole transition happened in about 30 seconds, so you can just picture me standing there frozen with a gaping mouth and terrified look in my eyes.

After the show, we regrouped and recapped this little surprise striptease. My boss said, "I am so happy I'm still alive. I'm so happy I put my contacts in." Mara said that one of our other Korean bosses "was so excited she actually jumped on my back." So that was definitely the highlight of the evening. But it was also fun watching the other shows onstage - my personal favorite was a fake band pretending to play dance music with 3 electric guitars and one of those keyboard guitars. We danced a lot amongst all the Koreans and had to fend off old men. Any time a slow dance came on, they made everyone go back into their private rooms if they weren't dancing. No loitering. We were herded away from certain areas of the club when we tried to walk around a little. I'm not sure what kind of shady stuff was really happening there, but they sure didn't want us to see it. Man I wish I had my camera that night.