Chapter 41

The next album in the Top 500 was Barrio Fino by Daddy Yankee. Reggaeton is one of the most repetitive and formulaic genres out there but it’s got great energy.

I ate the last portion of pasta while watching various YouTube videos about MMA or US politics. The new press secretary seems pretty damn useless, they could have saved the money by just having a cardboard cutout with the cartoon bubble “Great question, I’ll circle back to you” behind the podium.

Exceptionally, we played soccer during the day, with a fancy dress theme. I put on a shirt and tie and a carnival mask, and the boys also put on a variety of weird costumes. There was a shark, a dinosaur, a Roman general, and quite a lot of dresses and wigs. It was great silly fun.

Then we went home to regroup and clean up, and met up at a barbecue restaurant for an early dinner. I got there a bit before 5, the Uyghur employees were sitting around tables stringing the pieces of mutton or beef on skewers, listening to catchy Turkish music and chattering away in their weird harsh language, sneering at me. “Five minutes”, one of them said in heavily-accented Chinese. Most of them don’t speak the language much and aren’t the definition of gregarious and friendly, but they make an excellent barbecue so I like them. A poster on the wall caught my attention, with Xi Jinping receiving an ornate cylindrical hat from some prominently big-nosed Uyghurs at a ceremony. I cracked open a liter-sized can of a Xinjiang brewery and soon after the boys turned up, all decked in soccer gear from various teams, jerseys, shorts and socks. We had Liverpool, Arsenal, the local bar’s team, the Nigerian national team, and I was repping Henan Jianye, a team from the Chinese Superleague I used to support when I lived near Zhengzhou and could go attend games.

We consumed a mountain of meat and a torrent of beer, and the conversation went from one disgusting topic to another, every guy trying to up the other with first- or second-hand stories about bodily fluids. A good lads’ night, like they say.

We migrated to the first stop of our pub crawl, a bar with a large selection of craft beers. They also stock FourLoko, one of the foulest concoctions known to man, a sickly sweet chemical energy drink with a 12% alcohol content, that those guys like unironically. I picked a beer from a Scottish brewery, a spiced Christmas ale, it was delicious.

I almost broke my hand in the bathroom. After peeing and washing my hands, I opened the door to the washroom (which opened inwards), at the exact same time the guy in the toilet stall opened his door. The bar has some kind of fake rustic decor, so those were heavy wooden doors, and my hand got crushed at the intersection. That fucking hurt, but I thankfully didn’t break anything.

I got a second beer, a stout by Eviltwin Brewing clocking in at 11.5%, which turned out to be a terrible idea because soon after we started a game of threeman. The rules they were using for that drinking game were very different, and in my opinion inferior, to the ruleset my old friends and I were using back in my college days, but I went along.

We walked 15 minutes to the next spot, a string of bars that are nearly always empty and totally seem like money laundering operations. There was a rule in place for every bar, in the second one the rule was no English, Chinese only, so we sat around the table drunkenly yelling Chinese phrases that made sense only 50% of the time. The third bar had a stage and a computer linked to a karaoke machine, I asked the DJ to put on a song by Xie Tianxiao, China’s coolest rock musician and I sang it energetically. I had also queued Wonderwall and Somebody Told Me, great tracks for drunken singalongs.

By the time we made it to the final bar, I was pretty intoxicated and only remember bits and pieces. Some old and new friends were there, and it was a good time. I got home and passed out on the bed with my clothes on.