Chapter 164

I woke up at 9. The girlfriend and the in-laws were having a breakfast of green tea, fruit and zongzi, little pyramids of sticky rice steamed in banana leaves, traditionally eaten at this time of the year. I ate a little but drank a lot of green tea, discussing summer plans. Mama-in-law still had her forearm in a cast after the hiking accident in April (see Chapter 94) but she’ll be good to go soon, and it seems like we’ll travel together a bit in western China starting in late July.

An American friend of mine invited me to go swimming with his wife and young kid, I looked at my options. The subway goes there conveniently, but I felt like driving so I got the car and headed there. Hefei is an enormous city, a sprawling mess of over 10 million, and though I like it and have fond memories of the two years I lived here, I also must say that a huge proportion of its population are absolute peasants. If I give the drivers in my current city a B minus, and China a barely passing grade of D, Hefei’s drivers deserve a F and navigating its streets with my bicycle or on foot back in the day I’ve kicked dozens of bumpers, partly out of violent retaliatory rage but also to attract the attention of the fucknuggets about to run me over as they’re swerving brusquely or turning without looking or using their phones while driving. So I was a teeny bit apprehensive but with my defensive driving skills turned all the way up, the thirty-minute drive ended up being fun and smooth. Along the way I listened to Sodom’s M-16 album, from the period when the great German thrash band slowed it down a bit and embraced a more heavy metal/hard rock sound, Sodom has been around for 40 years now and only released quality, that’s rare if not unheard of.

I parked and got in the hotel lobby. The level of opulence was off the charts. I’m always a bit uncomfortable around extreme luxury, sure I like nice things and abundance but gaudy marble and expensive crap always feels like it’s too much, I’m a middle-class person and will likely keep this mindset. My pal came down to meet me and with his wife and 10-month-old mixed-race kid in tow we went to the pool. Even though they live in Hefei, they got a hotel room for the night to have access to the pool and make it a little “staycation”.

After an hour or so we dressed and walked across the street to one of the dozens of dying shopping malls in the city and ate at a restaurant. Most of the stores were empty or piles of rubble but some cheap restaurants manage to still stay in business, like that spicy seafood place we picked randomly from the banner outside the mall. We gorged ourselves with oily shrimp and crab and tofu and rice cakes, a good time was had by all. Back at the hotel, they got the people at the counter to waive my parking fee, and I drove back home.

We took the dog out for a little walk, there’s a big park right by the in-laws’ apartment. Then I watched some UFC. I have been watching tens of thousands of fights at this point and it takes quite a lot to make me jump of the couch and go OH SHIT!!! but Nate Fucking Diaz managed to do just that. After 24 minutes of getting outclassed and beaten to a pulp by Leon Edwards, the cult hero threw a slap-cross-taunt combo that got the British likely next title contender doing the fish dance. He didn’t have time to capitalize and finish and ended up losing the decision, if he managed to get the KO it would have been the upset of the century.

Then we went to a restaurant around the corner for a dinner with the MIL side of the family. Her elderly father, her two sisters and their husbands were there, and also the daughters who just entered university. Eleven people total including me, that counts as a pretty big family gathering in China. They’re pretty rich I think, though they don’t really look or act rich. I still don’t know if that’s an aspect I like or dislike about Chinese culture. The girlfriend’s aunts are nice enough but can also be a bit condescending, let’s not forget that most Chinese people have never met foreigners and don’t know anything about what’s outside China except clichés that are not always true, and also they have no filter at all. The food spread on the spinning lazy Susan table was incredible, nearly everything on there was excellent. Five million baijiu toasts were made and a birthday cake was served for my birthday and the girlfriend’s, that are coming soon two weeks apart.

I went to meet my friends at the main expat bar, a good 8 km away. I rode a rent-a-bike to sober up a bit and get some exercise, and made it to the bar I’d spent many, many nights back in the day. The girl at the bar gave me the narrow-eyed “Hey don’t I know you from somewhere?!” look when I ordered my Carlsberg, she tattooed me a few years ago.

Some of my old pals joined me, guys I hadn’t seen in a year or more, in fact some of them I thought were still stuck out of China but did sneak back in in the past months, doing the two-week quarantine. We downed  pint after pint and caught up. The bar has a small stage, which is cool if you come to enjoy a live show, but now there was just a solo guy with an emo haircut playing an out-of-tune guitar and singing sappy shitty ballads, I would have proposed to bounce to a neighboring bar that doesn’t do this stupid shit but a couple of my friends had already ordered a plate of fish n’ chips. Small annoyance, we just had to lean in closer as we talked about what’s been happening recently and reminisced about the good ol’ days and the litany of bizarre characters we interacted with along the way.

One of my former coworkers has two kids now, and was ranting about the two-year-old. He doesn’t get to go out that often so he was relishing the bro-time, and he suggested we go check out a new bar he saw on the way. We walked about 10 minutes and got in, it was very quiet, with only three Africans sitting around watching a soccer game.

I extended my hand. “Habari za mchana”, I said, which got me confused looks in return.

“Oh you guys don’t speak Swahili?”

“We’re from Cameroon, and the boss here is from Benin”

“Ah, vous parlez français alors?”

We stayed for a bit, chatting with our new friends, in English when the American guys were involved in the conversation, and in our common colonial language when it was one on one. The bar had a decent selection of craft beers, I got an IPA and a raspberry sour. A good time was had by all and at around 3 AM I took a taxi home.