When Conspicuous Consumption Goes Physically Overboard
The author has seen drunk people at nightclubs in his various partying experiences in previous years, but never thought that a nightclub's entrance can come to look like entrance to the emergency department of a local hospital. It is three o'clock in the morning, and the true casualties of the night was starting to appear at the 5th floor mega-club. It is no longer a steady stream of excited but still conscious and stumbling happy faces streaming out...it was, instead, the fully unconscious, being brought out the establishment, literally, in wheelchairs, assisted by the club's suited, poker-faced, and potentially highly annoyed resident staff.
One example of a girl in wheelchair is enough to illustrate the severity. As the staff tried to put her naked feet on the wheelchair to prevent them getting run over, her body was completely slumped diagonally, no longer sitting but barely slopping onto the physical device. Her facial expression was absolutely priceless. Head cocked to one side, the face resembled exactly that of a vegetative state after a car accident, that of a victim who seemed to suffer permanent damage to the spine and can no longer feel or speak. She was not asleep but fully conscious, but struggled to make a sound, put on a real expression, or close her gaping mouth.
And the victims of excess alcohol was disproportionately female. Clinging onto the tired staff as they are dragged out of the dance floor, the girls unintentionally and quite an ugly way, showed off the curves of their meticulously planned sexiness of their elegant "gowns" for the night to an initially surprised but increasingly desensitized group of bystanders. Their friends seemed worried but did their best to maintain composure so as to ensure that, above all, they still kept up with the overall quality of female beauty that is, in the author and his friends' opinions, admirably high by any standard.
So what is driving a group of females in a nightclub to become so drunk that they literally do not stop until they pass out in the middle of the dance floor? The physical layout of the mega-club in question hold some clues. surrounding the central dance floor are dozens of lounge-style sofa benches with small drinking tables in the middle. Each were being occupied by a group of stylish girls and guys and piled with bottles after bottles of hard liquor chilled in ice. Glasses seem to be constantly filled, and their crews happily obliged to what seems to be endless binge-drinking.
The same structures are also found in the more quiet side rooms of the clubs as well as a refreshing balcony area with a clear view of Taipei 101. There, the author was told, each of the tables can easily cost up to 700-1300 USD per night of rental, a figure equivalent to half to one-and-a-half months of an average Taiwanese's salary when s/he joins an average company for the first time as a new grad. Obviously, the people at these sofas are not normal, and it seems the girls, for the most part, are making the best use of the occasion to show how much they fit into "high society."
People drink til they pass out simply because they can afford to do so. The brutally simple and condescending logic is made even more hurtful for the commoners present on the dance floor by the ridiculously expensive drinks. Highly diluted mixed drinks with little alcohol content comes at a minimum price tag of roughly 7 USD, equivalent to about 1% of the previously mentioned new grad's monthly salary. The mega-club is hauling in massive amount of cash as people vainly show off their wealth, equating their drunken stupor with the depth of their wallets.
The German organizer of the author's group of clubbers remarked how much alcohol was inevitably tied to "having fun" in a Taiwanese nightclub. "Germans love to dance in clubs," he explained, "but they don't get trashed at them." Right, this is because the definition of "having fun" is different in the Taiwanese (or broadly speaking, the East Asian) and the European contexts. Over here, dancing is not the origin of fun but the act of drinking. The dancing is just the by-product of drunkenness, a valve to release the alcohol-infused euphoria that is bound to come with downing glass after glass of hard liquor.
Ultimately, just like in any other place, the concept of "face" overwhelms the Asian. Having social status and wealth, they much demonstrate it openly. If alcohol and the accompaniment of beautiful girls/guys can be bought, they must be bought in public so everyone knows that the rich is indeed rich. In this collective conspicuous consumption, people gladly toss out their common sense, pushing their bodies (just like their wallets) to the limit. As much as the author disagree, he has no doubt that many girls, after waking up from their night of getting carried out unconscious in a wheelchair, still feel that their night at the club was definitely worth every penny and every kind of long-term health damage.
One example of a girl in wheelchair is enough to illustrate the severity. As the staff tried to put her naked feet on the wheelchair to prevent them getting run over, her body was completely slumped diagonally, no longer sitting but barely slopping onto the physical device. Her facial expression was absolutely priceless. Head cocked to one side, the face resembled exactly that of a vegetative state after a car accident, that of a victim who seemed to suffer permanent damage to the spine and can no longer feel or speak. She was not asleep but fully conscious, but struggled to make a sound, put on a real expression, or close her gaping mouth.
And the victims of excess alcohol was disproportionately female. Clinging onto the tired staff as they are dragged out of the dance floor, the girls unintentionally and quite an ugly way, showed off the curves of their meticulously planned sexiness of their elegant "gowns" for the night to an initially surprised but increasingly desensitized group of bystanders. Their friends seemed worried but did their best to maintain composure so as to ensure that, above all, they still kept up with the overall quality of female beauty that is, in the author and his friends' opinions, admirably high by any standard.
So what is driving a group of females in a nightclub to become so drunk that they literally do not stop until they pass out in the middle of the dance floor? The physical layout of the mega-club in question hold some clues. surrounding the central dance floor are dozens of lounge-style sofa benches with small drinking tables in the middle. Each were being occupied by a group of stylish girls and guys and piled with bottles after bottles of hard liquor chilled in ice. Glasses seem to be constantly filled, and their crews happily obliged to what seems to be endless binge-drinking.
The same structures are also found in the more quiet side rooms of the clubs as well as a refreshing balcony area with a clear view of Taipei 101. There, the author was told, each of the tables can easily cost up to 700-1300 USD per night of rental, a figure equivalent to half to one-and-a-half months of an average Taiwanese's salary when s/he joins an average company for the first time as a new grad. Obviously, the people at these sofas are not normal, and it seems the girls, for the most part, are making the best use of the occasion to show how much they fit into "high society."
People drink til they pass out simply because they can afford to do so. The brutally simple and condescending logic is made even more hurtful for the commoners present on the dance floor by the ridiculously expensive drinks. Highly diluted mixed drinks with little alcohol content comes at a minimum price tag of roughly 7 USD, equivalent to about 1% of the previously mentioned new grad's monthly salary. The mega-club is hauling in massive amount of cash as people vainly show off their wealth, equating their drunken stupor with the depth of their wallets.
The German organizer of the author's group of clubbers remarked how much alcohol was inevitably tied to "having fun" in a Taiwanese nightclub. "Germans love to dance in clubs," he explained, "but they don't get trashed at them." Right, this is because the definition of "having fun" is different in the Taiwanese (or broadly speaking, the East Asian) and the European contexts. Over here, dancing is not the origin of fun but the act of drinking. The dancing is just the by-product of drunkenness, a valve to release the alcohol-infused euphoria that is bound to come with downing glass after glass of hard liquor.
Ultimately, just like in any other place, the concept of "face" overwhelms the Asian. Having social status and wealth, they much demonstrate it openly. If alcohol and the accompaniment of beautiful girls/guys can be bought, they must be bought in public so everyone knows that the rich is indeed rich. In this collective conspicuous consumption, people gladly toss out their common sense, pushing their bodies (just like their wallets) to the limit. As much as the author disagree, he has no doubt that many girls, after waking up from their night of getting carried out unconscious in a wheelchair, still feel that their night at the club was definitely worth every penny and every kind of long-term health damage.
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