Chapter 16

We woke up at 8 AM, as today is a hash day and the girlfriend and I are the hares. We have been in the Hash House Harriers, the “drinking club with a running problem”, for about a year now. There’s a chapter in our city, and once a month there’s a trail, sometimes in the country, sometimes in the city. The way it works is that the hares mark the trail, using chalk or another non-pollutant substance to put arrows on the ground, and the hashers have to find the trail and follow it. It started in Malaysia when it was in the British empire, officers from the colonial army would meet up every Sunday to do a trail run, with a different guy marking it each time, to alleviate their hangovers. There is a beer stop in the middle, and at the end, some kind of debriefing alongside more beer drinking. It’s good silly fun.

So we rode our bikes around, marking the ground with chalk, planning where the intermediate beer stop will be, all that. That took about three hours, then, famished, we went to eat muslim noodles. We had about an hour to rest at home, during which I listened to music, I got back into African music recently, thinking about Bobi Wine’s bid to get elected as president of Uganda. So I listened to a few of his tracks, and then an album by a Senegalese band called Étoile De Dakar. The girlfriend and the dog had fallen asleep on the couch, I woke them up when it was time to go to the starting point.

Only six guys showed up, usually we have about twenty hashers, but the cold weather is keeping a lot of people at home. Pussies. In fact it got significantly warmer in the past few days, to the point that there’s a few times I didn’t even wear my coat to work, but today the temperature dropped again and it was also damn windy. We waited a bit for latecomers, and then we started walking, following the arrows the girlfriend and I put a few hours prior, sometimes in obvious places, sometimes hidden a bit. After about 5 km of crosscrossing parks, residential areas, main roads and small alleys along canals, we got to the beer stop. I went to a small shop in the morning and dropped a bag with a hot plate, a pot, a mix of spices and a bottle of wine, so we could make mulled wine and drink it in paper cups. That hit the spot and was in line with those winter vibes. We also had one bottle of beer each. We kept walking, and after an hour of so we got to a quiet gazebo in a park where we did the circle, the post-trail debriefing in which virgins (newcomers) get hazed a bit, and people get punished for infractions to the hash etiquette, like pissing on the trail, spilling beer, shortcutting, coming late, all that. The penalty? Chug a cup of beer.

Hashers get a trail name, usually something really dumb and/or vulgar. You obtain your name after you’ve hared a trail, and today was the girlfriend’s first time. So she got baptized, which implied dropping on her knees and getting showered with beer. Thankfully I brought a raincoat for her. Normally that is unacceptable and you have to take the spraying full on, but with the weather hovering a few degrees above zero, she was excused.

The end point was next to a pizza restaurant, so we all went to eat. The local guy who runs it went to a pizza school in Naples, I’ve been to Naples myself and had three pizzas in three days, and his stuff is just as good. Our small Chinese city clearly doesn’t have as many foreign food options as Shanghai or Beijing, for instance we don’t have a single Indian restaurant, but we’re lucky enough to have damn good pizza. Though I was already bloated from all the beer I drank at the circle, I had another one, a Paulaner Münchner hell, and a little glass of limoncello as a digestif.

We walked home, another 20 minutes. The girlfriend has one of those fancy smart watches, she says we walked 13 km since the beginning of the hash, on top of the morning spent marking the trail.

We took a hot bath, then I wrote this while listening to a sludge metal band called Haggratha, and some weird noise rock outfit from Japan called Zeni Geva, that reminded me of Swans a lot. These days I listen to a lot of sludge metal, bands who slow down the tempo a bit but increase the heaviness. I then plopped on the couch and watched a few short history documentaries and YouTube videos about geographical oddities.