Chapter 142

I put on my alarm for 8:10, but in my hungover stupor, I pressed Off instead of Snooze For Another Ten Minutes Pleez. When I opened my eyes again, it was 8:46, and I told my dad I’d be online at 8:30 for our Skype call. Oopsy. I apologized for my tardiness and we had a nice chat about life and finances and whatever.

The girlfriend, the dog and I walked the half-hour distance to the bar, which was packed with hashers in colorful breathable t-shirts. Most had a beer or bloody mary in hand, in many cases not their first one, though it was barely past 10 AM. We ordered cocktails and English breakfast and got ready for the beautiful day ahead.

The buses couldn’t come directly in front of the bar, located on a narrow one-way street, so we had to carry the dozens and dozens of beer crates around the corner. They couldn’t all fit in the luggage compartment, so we put some in the aisles, which could be a safety hazard but also means we have enough beer on hand for the one-hour ride to the trailhead. It passed by like a breeze, everyone had hilarious stories to share.

The trail was 18 km for runners and 8 km for walkers and started right at the Yangtze River before going into steep forested hills. One elderly uniformed shurgwaydinger tried to stop the dog from going on one of the paths but I gaijinsmashed my way through, like God intends us to do when a pesky shurgwaydinger tries to enforce such a nonsensical rule. The dog was having a jolly good time running around, we leashed him when we went through sections with a lot of people and carried him in our arms when a shurgwaydinger would be posted there sneering at us and looking to flex the little speck of authority he has.

There was a beer stop halfway, we reached into basins of icy water to retrieve cold bottles of Qingdao beer and enjoyed a break. There were also games involving riddles or bananas, to fit the “Kink-Oh De Mayo” theme.

The trail got us deeper in the woods, and we stumbled upon artillery pieces from WW2 and concrete tunnels leading to bunkers. The area is still a military zone and some hashers got told by soldiers to take a different path, but the people I was walking with didn’t experience that. At some point I got separated from the group, as the dog tried to make a detour to avoid going through a tunnel, and later I thought I got lost, unable to find any of the chalk marks. I thought I’d arrive at the ON IN late, but in fact got there a bit ahead of the pack and helped people unload the beer from the buses. Maybe I took an inadvertent shortcut.

The post-trail debriefing was done in a circle, and people who committed crimes (arriving late, wasting beer, marking a shitty trail) were punished by having to sit on blocks of ice or getting their asses whipped or both. Two hashers got baptized and were showered with beer. Then we got on the buses and went back to the city, where we had dinner in the restaurant we had booked. The food was generic eastern Chinese, not my favorite of all the Chinese cuisines but some dishes were excellent, and I gorged myself. Apparently some people bitched but I didn’t hear them not would have cared, sucks to be them, if they are picky eaters they should bring a packed lunch or shut their pie holes. At any rate it was pretty much the only restaurant that fit our criteria. Then we went to the bar for more drinking and games, but the enthusiasm and energy wasn’t quite as the night before, a lot of people were pretty tired from their day-drinking and hiking.

Some guys were going to the fight bar and I tagged along, as it was halfway home. We watched a few fights, the first one ended quickly, the guys were not wearing shin guards and one stocky muscular guy from Anhui province threw a combo ending with a vicious leg kick that floored his overmatched opponent. Ten minutes later he came out the back in his street clothes with his backpack, an easy paycheck. The next fight had a local guy in it and an American girl I know was rooting for him, as he is her personal trainer. He lost pretty badly but showed toughness, getting pieced up all the way to a third-round TKO in a rather sloppy affair. A guy with a guitar played a few songs to kill time and then there was another kickboxing fight of pretty high level, followed by a pro wrestling match. The “bad guy” was an Irish bloke and he came to high-five us at our table, getting some heat as the evil foreigner. The guys threw each other around, spilling out in the crowd and scaring some of the bar patrons under cheers from our table. The evil foreigner got the pin and asked for a chair, I gave him one over the cage wall and he stomped his downed opponent for a bit. It had been ages since I saw live pro wrestling and it was awesome.