The last time I saw the Scratch Perverts (3 DJs who move their gramophone recordings back and forth to make young people dance) at Bonbon was in April. They were mint, the club was packed to the gills, and a smashing time was had by all.

They came back again on Saturday, this time with half-naked dancing girls, MC Jin from the states (who I’ve wanted to see for a long, long time) and free t-shirts for the punters. Predictably the club was packed, repacked, and packed thrice more- if you wanted a swig of your drink you had to ask the guy next to you to breathe in.

Scratch Perverts

Once I got used to people shoving me like I was trying to carry a canoe onto the subway at 8:30 am, and the fact that Bonbon smells like the stairwell of a Glasgow multi-storey car park, it was a good laugh. I danced as much as my 8 inches of personal space would allow, had the inside of my mouth rinsed out with other people’s sweat, and went to bed happy. It wasn’t, however, as good as the first time I saw them, last week’s “Bananas” night, or getting raging drunk on alcoholic beer (4 more booze-free days left).

In the morning I went to pick up a suit at the fabric market. I’d specified a slim fitting number along the lines of Michael Caine in “Alfie”, but something got lost in translation and the guy gave me a baggy sack of cloth that I’d have needed to tie a piece of string round to see my hands. I gave it him back, took the ready-made one off the dummy as a compromise, and headed to the Insect & Bird Market.

Bird prison
Birds

This is a place that the enigmatic Emma had spotted in the Lonely Planet. 30 odd stalls selling turtles, kittens, Minah birds and hundreds and hundreds of Crickets in tiny cages.

Cricket in a cage
Insects

I’m told that Chinese people like to buy these, hang them up in their house and listen to the gentle chirp-chirp of an insect starving to death inside a grisly wicker cage.
Odd? Yeah, I’d say that was odd.

Actually though, that can’t be the whole story because there were also stalls selling tiny paintbrushes to clean (or maybe tickle) insects, ceramic water dishes the size of a Leprechaun’s contact lens, men comparing row after row of tiny insects in specimen dishes like farmers at a bloodstock auction, and trays of cocoons hatching in front of watchful (/bored) sales clerks. It seems like bugs are big business here, but whether trained to fight to the death, kept as tiny pets for kids in small apartments, or ground up for medicine I couldn’t say.

Bored of bugs
Market