160.

I was in Shanghai when I learned the valuable lesson of never assuming anything while travelling. I made some friends and was partying with them in Shanghai, one of them (a Hungarian guy) said he came to Shanghai from Shenzhen (another Chinese city) and he seemed fairly comfortable dealing with the locals so I assumed he had lived in China for a while and knew what was going on.

After leaving the club (the club was lame), I saw him with these two girls and he says to me, "Hey, I met these two girls and we're gonna go to an afterparty". Now, I was a bit skeptical, but I figured he's a local, he knows whats going on. So after a 20 minutes cab ride, we end up at some random dark street and I'm thinking in my head that this is pretty sketchy, but went with it anyways.

We walk up this stair case into what looks like an apartment complex (I figured it was a house party). We get taken to this room with our two other friends and it looks like a karaoke room. I though karaoke was a bit lame (he hyped some afterparty), but I just went with it as I'd already paid for the cab might as well.

About 30 seconds after we get into the room, the main door closes and the screen on the side opens and about a dozen scantily dressed girls walk out. At this point, alarm bells are full on blaring on in my head, I've heard horror stories about unsuspecting foreigners being dragged into prostitution dens. So I grab my friends and we book it out the door (had to literally push the rather hefty madame out of the way to get to the stairs). We walk into the elevator and book it to the streets. After, we're a good distance away, I take a look back and see a big red light over the door of the entrance to the place we walked into.

I look at my Hungarian friend and I ask him, "What was that, I thought you said you knew where you were going." His response was to tell me he literally got into the country 48 hours ago. I'm pretty lucky I only lost the cab fare and not the entire contents of my bank account (as have happened to people before). I basically learned to never assume (while travelling) that anyone knows particularly better than you what's going on haha.