Eye of Modok

The Hidden Tree on the eve of its demise

Back in 2005, the demise of the Hidden Tree marked the end of South Bar Street in Sanlitun. Most of the other bars and restaurants had either found a new home in North Sanlitun, or had just quietly faded away. The previous summer, South Bar Street was a lively gathering place for young people looking for cheap drinks, people who enjoy listening to loud music played through crappy speakers, a host of nefarious characters offering you just about anything under the sun, and people who enjoyed soaking it all up. However seedy and unkempt the environment may have been, it was a genuine scene… at least for the few years it lasted.

South Bar Street on its last legs

There is little room in Beijing for nostalgia. Just when you feel you’ve found a comfortable place to hang out, you find out it’s getting chaied - a coined expression combining the Chinese character for destruction ? chai with English conjugation. Unless, of course, your favorite hangout is safely snuggled in a brand new glass tower. The Hidden Tree re-emerged as The Tree in North Sanlitun, finding a home close by the uberchic 3.3 shopping center, as did a few of the bars like Pure Girl, still offering 10 kuai cocktails to the same crowd looking to get liquored up before heading across the street to dance at Bar Blu, with its modern interior, decent sound system and 50 kuai cocktails.

So, two years later, what has become of South Bar Street? Absolutely nothing. The whole area was razed, and has since become a big vacant lot.

South Bar Street now

When you are dealing with the re-engineering of a city the size of Beijing, you have to think on a massive scale. And two years is not that long when attempting to untangle the mess of who actually has the right to build, versus those who are offering a better deal now. There is no shortage of half-completed building projects in a state of limbo throughout the capital, so what’s two years in the grand scheme of things?

Strolling down the road that used to draw such crowds, but is now strewn with garbage, I passed into an older developed area and was suddenly struck by the sight of the Black Sun Bar, which used to mark the end of the South Bar Street. I had no idea it was even still around, and was momentarily caught off guard as the memories came rushing back.

In the end, the demise of South Street will not go down as a major loss. The scene moves on.

[tags] Sanlitun, South Bar Street, Beijing, Bar, development [/tags]

A delightfully morbid site to make your Boxing Day bright… How many cups of coffee would it take to kill you? I know that on days I make an extra dose of my favorite french press coffee, I really feel a buzz that can even keep me up all night. Much as I love coffee, and strong coffee at that, I couldn’t even image having more than a liter’s worth in a day, so I suppose I’m safe from the 72 cups it would take to kill me. The Energy Fiend site is fun to explore, and in addition to caffeine dosage, you can learn a lot about how much sugar goes into your favorite energy drinks as well.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed is meeting a refridgerator full of words. Usually, there will be one or two attempts at something pithy but more often than not, the words just fill the fridge, beckoning me to leave some small token of a poem behind to inspire those who follow along to do the same. Needless-to-say, I don’t encounter such fridges often anymore and was quite pleasantly surprised to encounter one last week, which reminded me that I miss it. Fortunately, there are online versions now, such as Magnetic Poetry. I selected the Shakespeare kit and came up with the poem above in a relatively stream of consciousness type fashion.

Fun!

[tags] poem, poetry, magnetic, magnetic poetry [/tags]