Chapter 9

I woke up at 9:25, to the sound of people chanting some kind of funeral orations outside my apartment building. Once in a while this was accompanied by the ugliest, most dissonant sounding flute or whatever this is, similar to the music that’s played during muay thai fights. I’m grateful they only started a few hours in the morning rather than at 6 o’clock, and also that (so far) they haven’t used fireworks.

This weekend should be a pretty idle one, I completed my driving practice for the first practical exam, and I am scheduled for Tuesday. Nothing wrong with that, a nice dose of rest and lounging around the house is needed at times. On the weekends, I tone down the metal and other aggressive sounds, as the girlfriend is not nearly as much of a fan as I am of blast beats, grunted vocals, shredding guitars and Satan. I put on several playlists of East Coast 90s hip-hop, there’s a YouTube channel called Nicola Armellin that makes some great ones, full of underground gems.

So yeah, it was a pretty lazy Saturday, I read blogs and books and watched some videos about criminal psychology. I have Steam installed on my computer but I’m not much of a gamer, I browsed a bit and installed Hitman, since it was free, but I only played about 20 minutes and deleted it, it was too laggy on my old PC.

I used to do Chinese-English and Chinese-French translation and proofreading on a part-time, freelance basis. I currently don’t have any active jobs going on, but I still have a profile on some translation job websites, and once in a while I’ll get an email. It’s usually bottom-of-the-barrel stuff and I ignore it, but now that the winter vacation is coming soon and I most likely won’t go anywhere, I told myself I’d be open to make a bit of extra money, if the right offer comes through. An India-based agency (never a really good sign) asked me for my rates, I told them, and then got a reply saying that they offer 0.02 USD per character. I laughed a monosyllabic HA! and ignored them.

At around 3:30, we went for a long walk with the dog, along canals and into a really cool park not far from our home. It was a bit cold but also nice and sunny, and when the Italian restaurant opened at 5, we went in and ordered cocktails. While we were playing pool on their beat-up but sturdy table, two coworkers from Australia and the US walked in with their wives and their 4-year-old boys. The kids wanted to play, and we had to tell them more than once not to touch the balls, but eventually I pocketed the 8-ball and let them have their fun. I like children, but in small doses. 

All in all, I drank a porto flip, a bitter liqueur called Amaro Montenegro, and a glass of Sauvignon white, with a ham pizza. The girlfriend had some sparkling cocktail and the lasagna. A good time was had by all.

She wants me to make a marinara sauce, so we went to the small market to get tomatoes, celery, onions and other non-related fruit and vegetables. When we got to the gate of the complex, there was a small table with baskets of strawberries and cherries, but the farmers were nowhere in sight. We helped ourselves with a basket of each, and paid by scanning the printed QR code with my phone. China never stops surprising me with its numerous paradoxes: on one hand, scamming and cheating and counterfeit are rampant, and so is petty theft in some areas and contexts, but there’s also a strange sense of trust. Another example of this would be by the mailboxes, packages that are too large just get left on the curb unattended, and yeah there’s a camera, but anyone could just wear a black hoodie or other non-descript clothing and pick up the whole pile.

We got home and mixed more cocktails. We had a bottle of sparkling wine so I popped it and looked up recipes. I made a Mexican 55 for myself, with tequila, lemon juice, sugar syrup topped with the wine, and a kir royale for her, one dash of crème de cassis in a chilled glass of wine. Miammiammiam.