Chapter 133

I got up at 6:20. My disciplined routine is falling apart, slowly but surely. I need more sleep since I exercise quite a lot, perhaps I should go to bed earlier and drink less booze so that my sleep is used to repair my muscles rather than spending a significant amount of time metabolizing the delicious poison I pour down my gullet every day. Ha.

I still did a 15-minute yoga routine, with the dog bugging me for about 14 minutes and 47 seconds throughout. I took him out for a quick stroll around the block and then made my way to work.

I mostly sat around and wrote my diary. There are still some chemistry exams, but they’re on the distant horizon, I’ll do review sessions when we inch closer, until then I let the students prepapre for their other exams. The twelfth-graders are nearly done, I walked around and made small talk, asking them about the universities they’re about to attend. “I’m going to British”, one of them said. That’s something I noticed, Chinese people often mistakenly use the adjective instead of the country name, even when their English level is otherwise quite high. My girlfriend does it all the time, saying German instead of Germany, among others. No idea where it’s from, as an amateur linguist I sometimes try to break it down and find out if it can be explained with a phonetic or grammatical particularity in their native language that creep its way into their English, but regarding that one, I’m not sure what it’s about.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, with four album reviews. None of them especially interested me. Gojira released a new album and it’s pretty hyped, but I’ve always found them incredibly boring. I then listened to an album by a young Quebec City band named Hatalom, who very competently play technical death metal. It’s a style I’m really not a fan of, especially when it’s more tech than death, but nothing on their album made me go “Naaah fuck that” and press stop. If anything it helped drown the ambient noise.

I got a proof of tax payment from the government app, and one from the school. The secretary printed it, but of course in Bureaucracy World it’s not valid without the precious red stamp, jealously guarded in an office on the other side of the campus. I went there, the building was mostly empty as the office drones had left for an early lunch break to beat the hordes of students rushing to the dining hall. There were two women in the photocopy room, I asked where the financial affairs office is, and one replied in intelligible English. But instead of rewarding her efforts (and giving her face in front of her friend) I just kept speaking in Chinese, saying “I just went there, but it’s locked, I need a stamp”. I alphaed her, and that wasn’t nice, I regretted it afterwards. I hate when people do that to me. Multilingual people know how sometimes choosing which language to use can feel like a tug-of-war of sorts. Anyway she didn’t seem mad, complimented me on my ching-chongs, and brought me to an office where she put the stamp on my paper.

I got home, ate a big bowl of spaghetti, and fell asleep for two hours. I had the afternoon off to go do banking duties, there was a bit of a fuck-up at first because the guy behind the counter kept inputing the wrong amount. I told him to change 65 000 yuan into CAD, but he gave me a form to sign that showed an amount in yuan being changed to 15 000 CAD, and then, after a few minutes correcting the mistake, he wrote 15 000 yuan on the tax form. I lost my cool and raised my voice “NO! 65 000 I SAID!” and grabbed a pen, condescendingly writing 65 000 in huge blocky digits on the back of an A4 sheet. Of course my Chinese is not 100% perfect but goddamn it, it was more than clear enough, I’ve done number transactions thousands of times in the past decade and 65 doesn’t even sound like 15, I don’t know why he kept hearing that.

They photocopied all my documents. Passport, tax record from the government, tax record from my work place (with the red stamp).

“Did you bring your contract?”

“Of course not”

He turned to the supervisor standing behind him with her arms crossed. I felt a shiver going down my spine. In Chinese banks there’s always a sour-faced senior employee pacing around behind the clerks, you’d think it’s to keep an eye on their mostly inept subordinates and make sure they don’t eat paste or whatever, but more often than not what they end up doing is pull out a shurgwayding out of their asses and stop the process you want done dead in its tracks. So many times in the past I was almost done with a money exchange or transfer or other tedious procedure when some cunty manager came out of nowhere and stopped it, telling me about some dogshit new policy or requirement in place, and I’ve theorized that the reason they’re behind thick panes of glass is not to stop armed robbery, but to prevent angry customers from reaching over the counter and bashing their brains on the marble.

“We need a copy of your contract”

“No you don’t”

“Yes”

“No”

“Ah, OK then”

They admitted defeat and I got the foreign currency exchange form I wanted. Then I went to another room and proceeded with the remittance. Again, it sounds a bit bitchy, but it’s because I have a lot of time of my hands and elaborate on what turned out to be non-stories. I’m mostly satisfied with the service at that bank branch, especially compared with some harrowing experiences in the past, and I’m especially happy that they stay open despite the heavy refurbishing going on in their building and also that nobody bugged me to put on a fayssah mursk.

I got home and drew a label for my homebrew, using a black pen and the girlfriend’s color markers. She came home as I was halfway through, I asked her for help choosing suitable colors. Being colorblind sucks a bit but hey, no use bitching about it. It could always be worse, for instance, I could have been born in Djibouti.

The girlfriend proposed we go eat frog meat, so we made our way there with the dog. Frog is one of my favorites, they chop the amphibians and cook the pieces in spicy oil with a bunch of add-ons we choose from the menu, we ticked corn, tofu, crab, rice cakes (and cheese-filled rice cakes!), cauliflower and potato slices.

“When we go hike the Appalachian Trail in American, can we catch frogs and make niuwaganguo?”, she asked.

“I don’t know, I can’t imagine the frogs and toads there will be big enough or even edible. Also we won’t have the seasonings”

“Can we eat chicken wings on the trail? I like chicken wings”

“I’m pretty sure we’ll eat mostly dried food, meat is too heavy to carry. We’ll eat all the chicken wings we want when we go through towns on the trail.”

“Maybe when we resupply we can get wings and barbecue them on the first night? We can light camp fires there, right?”

“At campsites and shelters, yes. Not sure about wild camping, it probably depends on the season and rules given by fire marshalls.”

Yeah, we got a bit of wanderlust I guess, and talk about travel often. After dinner, she went home, as she had work stuff to prepare, the dog and I went to the bar. I stopped at the craft beer trailer and had a triple-hopped IPA, it was good but a bit flat, and their location next to a stinky tofu trailer was funny at first but now it’s getting a bit oppressive. The stench emanating from there is enough to gag a maggot. Then I went to the main expat haunt, there was a pub quiz scheduled tonight. One of my teammates from last time was to be the quizmaster, which means our defending champions team dissolved and the other guys got drafted by other teams. I ended up partnering with another dude, the principal at my girlfriend’s school who hates his job. Being a team of two rather than a team of four wasn’t a disadvantage at first, as we slayed it in the opening rounds, even getting a perfect score in one of the general knowledge sections with a lot of obscure history questions. We were lining up to win the cash prize and only having to split it two ways, but then the last round had questions about Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter and I saw the panic in my friend’s eyes, as he saw mine. I think I only saw on Harry Potter movie, and don’t remember anything about it. In the end we placed second, by a small margin.

The quizmaster bought us shots of whiskey for our ballsy effort of going in there as a duet, not as if we had a choice, but thanks.

I pointed at the dog on my lap:

“If there were questions themed around dog buttholes scents and flavors, we would have aced it and left the other teams in the dirt”

“Speak for yourself!”, an Irish dude on a rival team interjected, to general laughter.

“Also I call bullshit on the question about how many countries have a presence on the Iberian peninsula. We said five, because if you count Andorra, you have to count a bit of France as well, no?!”

All in all a good time was had by all. Some of the local muslim expats were also chilling at the bar, celebrating the end of Ramadan, I hung out for a bit then rode home.