Chapter 17

I got up at 10 and messed around a little bit on the computer, exchanging messages with friends and looking at memes. The girlfriend had just eaten dumplings for breakfast and there were five left, she gave them to me.

Today was bottling day, so I filled up a pot halfway with disinfecting solution, I washed bottles and caps, I made a priming solution by mixing sugar and water, and I brought the fermentor to the kitchen. With the tap and a valve-equiped tube, I filled the bottles. The whole thing, with prepping and cleaning afterwards, took me about two hours. During that time, I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, Yolin and Tai were reviewing four albums of various subgenres with their usual banter and humor. I had listened to Triumvirate before, a black-thrash one-man project by a promising teenager, and they really ignited my curiosity with their discussion of Konquest from Italy, who plays cheesy traditional heavy metal, and Death Kommander from the UK, a mid-tempo death metal band in the vein of fellow Brits Bolt Thrower. So I played both albums back-to-back afterwards and they were pretty good.

In the afternoon, I watched one more Japanese pro wrestling match, one with Will Ospreay, a British wrestler I had seen before a few times. He and his Japanese opponents battled for 30 minutes, flipping each other in the air and getting thrown into metal barriers. At some point there was a pretty gnarly suplex through the timekeeper’s table, those guys really put their bodies on the line for our entertainment.

We took the dog for a little walk, and then drove to Metro, the giant supermarket with all the imported products. Though there weren’t that many customers, the inside was an absolute cacophony, with all the small speakers scattered everywhere blaring advertisements and discounts. I always make a point of locating all of them and turning them off. The only item we really needed was sour cream, and they ran out, so we bought whipping cream instead. Still, we filled our cart with booze, baguettes, cold cuts of meat, and vegetables we can’t get at our neighborhood market. It’s physically impossible to go to Metro and not buy tons of stuff.

Then we went to the shopping mall on the southern edge of the city, where the rock climbing wall is. The girlfriend was suprprisingly adept at climbing, and got pretty high on the beginner and intermediate routes. I managed to get to the top of the number 3 twice, last time I couldn’t. I tried to repeat it a bit later but my forearms and fingers were spaghetti-like at that point. Two Mexican-American buddies came as well, one of them got to the top of the hardest one, which earned him a 100-yuan prize.

We ate some biang biang noodles at a cheap eatery just outside the mall. They’re flat chewy noodles with a bunch of toppings, a signature dish from Shaanxi province, and one of our go-to quick meals. Then we got home, poured ourselves glasses of Japanese plum liquor, and I wrote this diary while listening to a DJ set playing some old-school Detroit techno and house music. Now I’ll watch a few fights from yesterday’s UFC card and call it a night.