'Tchhh,' the foot masseuse clucked at me when I flinched my foot away from her roughly 10,000 pounds worth of pressure concentrated on my toe joint, like it was weird that this would cause me to flinch, and turned to Julian. 'If she slept more, maybe she wouldn't be so sensitive to pain,' she said in Chinese.

This was an off the cuff statement if I'd ever heard one, since I do have tons of problems, I'm sure, but none of them involve sleeping. And nobody has ever accused me of being sensitive to pain.

As she beat up my feet, she and the other masseur gossiped about Americans.

'Americans like to drive big cars,' they said.

'Americans want to invade Iraq,' they said.

'Americans always are coming in here wanting to know how to get to the Drum Tower,' they said.

'You should be careful what you say about Americans because Americans are listening,' cut in Julian, and luckily, even though China is the least sarcastic society on the planet, they took it as a joke instead of a threat.

Flinch by flinch, whimper by whimper, she also diagnosed me with heart and intestine problems before briskly punching me in the heels and sending me on my way.

Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom. In the back, there was a small bunk, a hot plate, and a squat toilet in about a 4x10 space - I was for some reason surprised to find they lived there, in the back of a five seat foot spa, even though almost every bathroom I've asked to use, restaurants and all, has revealed a similar setup.

In the body massage place today, for example, an off-duty masseur snored gently on the bed next to mine as a child ran between the beds and the owner's cell phone exploded into Disney knockoffs. My neck and lower back had clearly offended the girl massaging me in a past life because she elbowed and wrenched them into submission. I learned my lesson; I didn't fight her or yell even when she started trying to pry my skull off like a baseball cap from the nape of my neck or when she took her fists and aggressively knuckled my forehead from eyebrows to ears along the hairline until my face skin felt detached from my skeleton.

That said, when I was face down in the circular head pillow, I was also powerless to stop a torrent of snot (or some kind of miscellaneous head fluid) from flooding out of my nose onto the floor after all her kneading suddenly released something in my sinuses, as my arms were being pinned by her thighs, so I guess I got my twisted revenge in a way.

There is a lot to like about Chinese massage places, not the least being the price: if an hourlong massage cost between $4 and $10 in the States, I would certainly get one more often. But beyond that, I actually like the frenetic atmosphere. It's convivial. I don't need to be ensconced in some velvet-curtained shakuhachi den. It's not that serious. I feel a lot less... catered to when everyone's just massaging and chatting away the day together rather than me having to feel like I'm enslaving someone in my relaxation enforcing cave. That's all I'm saying.

Before the massage today, we all found some pool tables just hanging out in an alley along with a bunch of noodle stands, a dumpster, and someone's laundry. We had to go for a little bit of a search to discover who the keepers of the cues were (the phone store proprietors, of course, who else?) but at a comfortable dollar an hour, we played away the hottest part of the day. The sight of three foreigners playing pool in a residential alley was way too crazy for passersby to ignore, so we had a silent but swelling audience for all four games. I won some favors when I found that there was a tree in the way of my pool cue for a particular shot, but I tilted the cue near-vertically and made it anyway. The sweat pooling in my thumb crook in the 95 degree heat made all my shots smooth. Clearly I've been missing out on the secret to being a pool shark all these years: extreme heat.