Chapter 119

Getting up at 6 on the dot wasn’t hard as I thought it’d be, after a shortened night like that. I drank tea, browsed Facebook, and while I was taking a dump, I looked for the bus schedule to go to the airport tomorrow, and made a long throaty gasp, like GNNNNNUUUUUUUHHHH.

“What are you doing?”, the girlfriend asked me, while putting on her makeup.

“That’s the sound Baidu is making when I ask a question”

Baidu is the Chinese search engine/creepy omnipotent tech giant, the poor man’s copycat version of Google. It’s a useless piece of shit. I typed “bus schedule from [city] to [airport name]” and the results were a link to some bloatware crock-of-shit app, bus schedules with other starting points or destinations, things about our city but fuckall to do with transportation, and links to the Chinese equivalent of Quora or Yahoo Answers, that were at least relevant if not nearly useless:

rainy19890526: hello, does anyone know the bus schedule from [city] to [airport]?

chounong69: I don’t know

xijinpinglover01: find it yourself

rutabaga-wetwang: there’s no bus

aiguo888: DIAOYU ISLANDS BELONG TO CHINA

rockyliu15632190751: why the bus? take a taxi

se_lang_420: add me on QQ

And then you look at the date, the thread is from 2009. Fucking Baidu. Not sure if it’s the nature of the Chinese language that makes it difficult for search engines or if it’s piss-poor engineering, but I eventually just called the bus station and got my answer within seconds.

We walked the dog, then parted ways at the car, as the girlfriend drove to work. I did a bit of tai chi in the square, with the moves I remembered without having them in front of me on YouTube. Tai chi is meant to be practiced outside, and the weather is great these days. Walking back to the apartment building, the dog saw a white car leaving the parking, and excitedly ran to it, probably thinking it’s the girlfriend. I panicked and ran after him, thankfully the lady stopped the car. We’ll have to be careful in the future.

I got to work, went to the lab, and then the grade 12 classroom. I read and wrote and occasionally answered questions from students, there were quite a few, as the final exam is coming. I didn’t go home for lunch, we had a meeting starting at 12, so I ate the contents of my lunch box: lentils curry, tortilla bread, carrot sticks, and strawberries. I also had three vegetable samosas from the Indian restaurant, ate one and gave the others to my two coworkers from Sri Lanka. They were very happy with that taste from home.

Speaking of homesickness, one topic from the staff meeting was the summer holiday. Some of my colleagues have families with young kids back home and haven’t seen them for a year, they’re dying for updates. As it is now, there’s still a mandatory quarantine for anyone entering the country, two weeks in a government-mandated hotel at the user’s expense, and because of that, we’re granted an extra two weeks of holiday. Excuse me, say what?! I nudged my neighbor and asked him to confirm, perhaps I should start listening in those meetings. But yeah, rather than a late June/early July start, we’re off before the midpoint of June. Oh. Hell. Yeah.

I wasn’t planning on leaving China, so this is a superb unexpected bonus. I still feel bad for my coworkers who are still considering or even dead set on doing the quarantine. It’s a harsh measure but it’s clear it’s the main reason China has been mostly virus-free for a year now, I’d rather have that than country-wide lockdowns.

I had a free afternoon chillin’ in the office. I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, they reviewed four albums rather lukewarmly, including Spectral Wound’s A Diabolic Thirst, which is my favorite metal album of 2021 thus far, in fact it’s the only one that really made a big impression on me. I browsed the news, Quebec’s prime minister is criticized for saying that the cost of an apartment in Montreal starts at 500-600 dollars a month, a three-second Google search shows that it’s a massive misquote and that he continued his sentence with “...and it quickly climbs to over 1000 dollars” but still it’s enough for his opponents to make some political capital on his back. What did you expect?

That sparked a lot of discussion on the housing crisis on Facebook, Montreal used to be one of the most affordable large cities in North America (and likely still is, but just because the others are more overpriced) but the housing prices have skyrocketed, leading to homelessness, financial stress on the working and lower-middle-class, urban spreading, increased pollution, among other ills. Sometimes people wonder why I live in China, I have to say that paying a few hundred dollars a year in rent for a large modern two-bedroom a short distance from everything is definitely one of the top 5 reasons.

(This is what is coming out of my pocket, with the housing allowance I get from my employer. Still, it’s part and parcel of my job here so I count it as such)

I admit I don’t know much about current Quebec politics and the prime minister Legault, I’ve been away for too long and the circus pales in comparison to US and Euro-Peon politics. For instance, I read the news and watched YouTube videos, one piece that caught my interest is an open letter to the French Republic written by retired generals, listing societal problems the country is experiencing and warning of a possible civil war coming up. Are we heading to a “reject Macron, embrace Napoléon” scenario?

I was starting to get bored and restless sitting in the office, with the sun peeking at me through the window. As soon as I got home I put the leash on the dog, grabbed a Holiday witbier from northern China’s Urbrew, and sat on a park bench doing my afternoon drinking. The girlfriend called, she had just arrived home and proposed we walk to a restaurant by her workplace, where she forgot a package. Buzzed by the beer, exhausted by my short night and a bit sore after the calisthenics workout, I was looking forward to an evening of doing absolutely fuckall but sure, let’s go for it.

I told her about my extended summer holiday, and she wasn’t happy, hers is the opposite, it got shortened because of the staff cuts. Covid affects different people very differently. We went to the small snack bar after a detour to a Lawson where I knew I’d get beer above piss-temperature, and ordered fried rice, a flatbread filled with beef and onions, won tons, and cold noodles. The boss is an old grandpa, he and his wife are always yelling at one another in a mysterious incomprehensible language, as they come from the city of Wenzhou.

We got back home, put the finishing touches to the Chinese translation, folded the laundry, and then I kicked back with a negroni, watching some Wrasslemania. It’s pretty cool to see that Kevin Owens made it that big, he’s from Quebec and more than 15 years ago I saw him wrestle in small local promotions (under the name Kevin Steen). Sami Zayn was also a wrestler in the Montreal indie scene back then, though I’ve never seen him live, and he used to wear a Mexican luchador mask and go by the hilarious name of “El Generico”. They kinda came up together, and now the angle for this Wrestlemania clash was that Sami Zayn was a crazy paranoid conspiracy theorist who thought the world was against him, including his former best friend. Logan Paul was also there, for some reason, damn those two Paul clowns are everywhere. Then it was another singles match, between Seamus and Matt Riddle. Riddle was a middling but promising young UFC welterweight who got suspended twice after testing positive for weed, and that led to him getting fired from the organization. UFC president and scumbag Dana White went on a rant during a press conference, calling Riddle a “dummy”, saying that he’s too dumb to just stop smoking weed in the lead-up to a fight, and telling him “good luck finding something that pays as well”. Well, I don’t know for sure, but I’d imagine he makes at least a teeny bit more now in the WWE than as a UFC mid-carder. And he’s pretty damn good too, I like his style very much, with memorable antics and badass athletic moves.