Slowly and Loudly

Monday morning is hereby cancelled by order of hangover. We struggled down to the restaurant for lunch, thought a laksa might bring me to life but hotel version not the greatest. Back upstairs for a nap and a massage: I got the wonderful gentle one, L got tortured. Boarded a metro train to the next stop, a weird busy mix of shopping and food. We headed for a hot pot restaurant, a place where everyone sits around big pots of boiling soup, plonking skewer after skewer in, eating lots and lots. Chicken, pork, vegetables, tripe, tofu, eggs, pigs blood, sheep brains. The 10 of us had two pots, one full…

Rose early for the big fat Chinese wedding. The plan was for the boys to be on the road to the bride’s house by 9, but some things are cross cultural: when the bride’s hair and make-up isn’t ready, everyone waits. The cars for the groom’s party arrived and we piled in, briefed for our roles but still not prepared for all that comes with a wedding. We knewthat we’d be trailed by a camera crew, but didn’t realise they’d be driving alongside the entourage, hanging out of windows and sun roof, filming as we weaved through the traffic. Arriving at the bride’s house, no one told us we’d be…

I think it was the Pabst that gave me the crappy head, as I only had three very small measures of baijo. The hotel breakfast took most of this away, with all the staples plus some chicken noodle broth and some loal cardamom-flavoured doughnuts. The breakfast buffet does offer a wide selection, including broccolli/cauliflower, taro cakes, pumpkin balls, black rice congee (it’s purple), spring rolls, cold meats and cheeses, all sorts really. And tepid coffee. While I haven’t ventured to try a local coffee around the town, the hotel coffee is about the worst I’ve tasted, worse than anything the English have ever served me. Then a bunch of the…

China is a magnificent, ancient, land of culture. I am, if nothing else, maybe slightly above the average base grade western barbarian tourist. I don’t speak the local lingo, save for a handful of words (thank you, hello, pork dumplings, fire water/Chinese ‘Whisky’) and can read nothing in Chinese script. So I’m obviously prepared. The good news is that L and I are going to Wuhan, one of the older and more civilised Chinese cities, proudly promoting a long history of Chinese defiance (gave the Japanese as good as they got, and were a KMT stronghold for a number of years). It’s also not really a tourist town and boasts…

This trip takes L and I behind the great firewall of China, and then across the alleged land of the free, the USA. Kind of in Nixon’s footsteps, so to speak, especially given the final stop of my itinerary is the World Fantasy Convention in Washington D.C., and I figure if anyone had world fantasies in D.C., ol’ Dickie Milhous fits the bill. I’ll update more tonight or tomorrow of the adventures the last 3 days have presented, from dodgy taxi drivers to happy hello children to purple washing machines and ballerinas in plastic spheres. But suffice to say L and I are both well, though doing it rough —…