Chapter 194

Distance covered: 332 km (total 3200 km)

I got awakened by the dog growling by my side, spooked out by Dancing Davey staring at me through the ajar door at 7 AM. We embraced, said our goodbyes, he went to his accounting job, I drifted back to sleep for a bit. I packed and got on the road by 10.

The drive was smooth as a baby’s ass, on the brand-new Chinese highways empty of traffic on this Tuesday. I listened to metal radio shows I downloaded, an episode of Jocko Willink’s podcast, and a sweet death metal album I’d been revisiting recently, by Lithuanian band Crypts Of Despair. By mid-afternoon I was in Shijiazhuang, capital city of Hebei province. I’d never been there before, and its reputation used to be an uninteresting, grey, smog-choked metropolis, and now it seemed to be a bustling city of tree-lined boulevards and glitzy shopping malls like thirty others in the country, and thus still uninteresting aside from a huge Russian church seen next to the elevated expressway. But the girlfriend’s friends live there. We had attended their wedding in Sanya three years ago, the first and last time I’d met them, and after parking my car in their complex’s underground garage, I got in their giant boat of an SUV. It’s fully electric, all decked in futuristic shit and luxury, it felt weird to sit in its adjustable leather seats with massage function after spending so much time in our old beat-up little Nissan. There was even some kind of robot answering to vocal commands, like “Hi Nomi, turn up the AC for the backseat by 20%”, “Hi Nomi, play the song Hurt by Johnny Cash” or “Hi Nomi, which country owns the Diaoyu Islands?”, to which the robotic voice would read the Baike entry (a shitty, harmonized Chinese Wikipedia). It was pretty amusing but also a bit creepy, but Mao knows Big Brother doesn’t need it to spy on its citizens.

We went to the train station just in time to pick up the girlfriend, who finally started her vacation. She was pretty stoked to see the dog and her university classmate, and me too, I guess. They had some errands to run so we went to their workplace, an architect’s office, and I made a beeline for a huge box of Legos, where my inner child played around for a bit. The bottom floor had been turned into some kind of hipster café, with a weird but cohesive mix of styles, bare concrete floors and unfinished walls mixing with furniture made from two by fours and presswood sheets, and groups of rich snotty twenty-somethings were sprawled around drinking coffees and cocktails. I got a martini and then another sparkling cocktail on the house, before we went to eat dinner in the shopping mall. We had a shared plate of suancaiyu, the classic dish of white fish fillets in a spicy and sour soup, as big as a car tire. A good time was all.

We went back to their apartment and drank beer, before we got shown to our sleeping quarters. The girlfriend’s old classmate’s parents live in the same complex but are gone for the week and are nice enough to let us sleep there. We opened the door, and just like with the Legos at the office I ran to the massage chair as soon as I saw it in the corner and did a 15-minute session while the girls changed the sheets on the bed. The apartment was huge and quite luxurious, full of expensive-looking vases and kickknacks and old people furniture. The only condition is that we couldn’t let the dog sleep on the bed, but he was happy to sleep on the cool ground.