Living La Vida Loca

To the list of ways in which China continues to surprise, I can now add this: the Macarena.

Foreigners are a relatively rare sight on the streets of Beijing, unless those streets happen to be in Sanlitun, a bar district which I'm sure means something in Chinese. In English, it means "expat heaven." It's where you'll find restaurants serving hand-tossed pizzas, bars crammed with pin-striped Scandinavians and bearded hippies and clubs where a woman in a red dress and black leotards clambers up onto the bar counter and gyrates drunkenly, unopposed by the bartenders trying to serve drinks through her leotarded legs.

And yes, you'll also find the Macarena. And Offspring. And any other number of songs that went out of circulation in North America long ago, all blaring into the throngs. Whether the expat crowd happened to all arrive a decade ago -- and brought their music with them -- or whether some numbers just never get old, it doesn't seem to matter: the '90s are alive and well in Sanlitun, and no one's complaining. Because, after all, the music is familiar and so are the faces: a sea of Caucasians lapping at the shores of the Far East, all of us here because no matter how hard you try to discover and uncover and adapt to a new land, you never really succeed.

Are ex-pat hangouts ghettos or refuges? I don't know. I do know that I haven't been in China long enough to reasonably feel homesick, but I have still welcomed the past few days, when I have met up with a few old acquaintances at a Canadian-owned sports bar -- burgers, juicy and delicious, on the menu! -- and, last night, Sanlitun. Because who wouldn't enjoy a place where the people know the latest Canucks score, but the beer costs $2?