Chapter 217

I woke up stupid late, but whatevah, I’m a strong independent black woman who don’t need no man. Most of our luggage from the trip was strewn all over the living room floor, the only stuff we took care of upon coming home was the food in the icebox. I did laundry and unpacked, and did the calisthenics routine.

Our storage space in the basement is full of garbage and has been since we moved here. I’ve been wanting to ask the landlord to clean it up and the girlfriend disagreed, because “Chinese harmony” or whatever. She finally caved in, and it was no big deal at all, the old lady and her son came, removed all the dusty hoarded crap they had left there, and now we had much more space. Yay. It was extremely hot, I feel like I’ll be taking a cold shower after every time I go outdoors in the upcoming months.

I ate a plate of scrambled eggs and then the girlfriend and I drove to a hospital to get the nucleic acid testing. It sucked shit. I’d give it a 7/10 on the scale of shit sucking, knowing how high the ceiling is. In fact, I’d dock a point since we were a bit lucky and got in line at the right time, only a few minutes later the queue behind us was a hundred meters long.

After a bit more tidying up and sitting around at home, the dog and I rode the longboard to the bar. I had beers with some British pals, then the girlfriend met me at the sushi place, and then I went back to the bar. More of my British pals were there, but the bar was very quiet. The owner said they might be forced to close in the next few days, or stop serving food.

They closed early, just as some more of my old pals came in. They all packed a cab to go to another bar, and I jumped in, why not? The other bar, for whatever reason, was packed, and didn’t seem to be subjected to the covid limited hours of operation. We made a beeline for the pool table upstairs, and since there were five of us, we played a game of protect your balls, that I miraculously won. A Chinese middle aged man, who looked like an art teacher with his shoulder length grey hair, challenged me to a game of 8-ball with 100 yuan on the line. I was dumb enough to accept, and though I played much better than I usually do, he got me. Then he played another one of my homies, and pocketed another red Mao Zedong bill.

One of my buddies who was there is Portuguese, and so is his friend who came over from Macau. I happen to speak Portuguese. They disagree. In their minds, I speak “Brazilian”, and at a very low level, since I can’t understand every single slangy mambo-jambo thing that comes out of their mouths, when they don’t just flat-out refuse to speak to me in their language and reply in English instead. It grated me more than a bit, but not to the point of starting an argument other than pointing out that of course foreigners are more likely to learn Brazilian Portuguese rather than the old country version, since Brazil is a massive country that exports tons of culture while Portugal is a little insignificant corner of Europe.

Still, a good time was had. I made it to bed at 3 AM.