Bowling in China

I like bowling. Bowling is fun. My love for bowling came just over ten years ago and I was in Taiwan on a mission. I found out that at some places there, bowling was very cheap. Naturally when I came to China, I was hoping to find something similar. Here is what I found:

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a bowling alley anywhere close by, so we decided to make a day trip of the event and check it out. It was about a 45 minute bus ride. When we got there we found at that the cost of bowling was 75 RMB. Initially, I was a bit disappointed because that was a bit more than I was hoping to pay. I found out however that not only did that fee include 5 games of bowling, but it also allowed free access to everything else at the bowling alley. 75 RMB is about $12 so for 5 games, that is roughly $2.40. Not much cheaper in America; all the other stuff made it worth it though.

The bowling alley brought me back to the 90's. It was really old and I was a bit surprised that they actually had (barely functioning) computers to keep the score. I had to get  a bit of help from the workers. No exciting graphics when you get a strike either. Yeah... there goes my motivation for getting strikes. I also could not find my 16 pound balls. Heaviest ones I found were 14 pounders.

When we got there the place was almost completely empty. After a while though, many people started showing up. It was quite entertaining to watch some of these Chinese people bowl. I don't think the Chinese bowl quite as often as Americans.

I didn't bowl that well. The lanes were not that great, and the ball not too heavy. I did have a great time though!

Aside from bowling, they had pool (billiards... if you are Chinese, you might say table tennis for some reason, or snooker). The pool tables were actually quite nice. This was my first time playing pool in China.

In addition to pool, they also had some nice ping pong tables. They had tons of arcade games as well that were all free to play with the entrance fee. Most of the games were super old school and boring but it was fun to try out a bunch of different games without having to worry about money. They did have a fun drumming arcade game. They also had the mini basketball arcade games as well as a baseball throwing game that was quite fun. They had a couple Microsoft Xbox Kinect thingies. Those were fun to try.

In addition to all of that, they had the stuffed animal claw game that you could play for about 3 times for free (I won!) and had a photo picture booth where you could take cheesy photos and they would print them out for you.

Pretty good and fun for $12.

This game sadly was at another arcade, and was not cheap. Very fun though.

This picture has nothing to do with bowling or arcades, This is at the place where you get your visa renewed. I think some places need to do a better job of coordinating time.