Chapter 199

Distance covered: 293 km (total 4526 km)

Up around 6, when the sun turned the tent into a sauna. We had placed it so we’d have a bit of late afternoon shade but now obviously the sun was coming from the other direction. We had a breakfast of whole wheat tortillas with Nutella, lychees, mangosteens and blueberries, washed down with green tea, and got on the road.

A few kilometers down, there was Genghis Khan’s mausoleum. “Weird, I thought they had never found his place of burial”, the girlfriend said. Almost as weird is the fact that such a genocidal maniac is held in such high reverence, especially here, as he killed almost as many Chinese as Mao Zedong did. We practiced one of our favorite activities, which consists of going to the tourist parking but not going to the site. The price was a jaw-dropping 170 yuan, I wonder how hard they were laughing when they decided on that figure. How many tourist sites in Europe charge 20 euro? Not many, and certainly not artificial tourist traps built in the past five years. We peeked through the gate and could see what the fuss is about, a huge statue of the Khan and some huge blue and gold yurt. Barely worth the fucktardedly high price tag, and they were not gonna let the dog in anyway, so fuck them.

We drove south, entering Shaanxi province. We stopped for lunch in the behemoth city of Yulin, which is bigger than the biggest city in 80% of the world’s countries, but in China it barely is in the top 200 of notable urban agglomerations. In Shaanxi, and the north in general, they take their noodles seriously, and the place is home to a whole list of noodle dishes. The most famous has to be the biangbiang mian, some thick, wide noodles resembling lasagna layers, served with a big pile of savoury toppings. We ordered two bowls, and they were positively huge.

We considered briefly staying in Yulin for the night but decided against, as this type of bloated multi-million tier-3 city comes with all the drawbacks of being in a city with none of the advantages. Plus, it was still too early, and we had plenty of time to go closer to tomorrow’s destination, so we kept going for 120 more kilometers, through the beautiful valleys and rolling hills.

In the end, we paid only 80 yuan for a motel room by a country road. As always, I was apprehensive of them either refusing foreigners or dogs, but when I asked the grumpy man at the counter he seemed confused by my questions. As long as one person has a Chinese ID card, he couldn’t give a shit, and he also didn’t ask for health codes or any of that post-pandemic crap. He did ask if we’re vaccinated though, which is a first.

I put our ice packs in their freezer and the girlfriend gathered the laundry from the car to put in the machine they nicely let us use. The shower felt good, and so did sitting around in the AC dicking around on the internet. I downloaded a bunch of albums to listen in the car, the girlfriend doesn’t like metal much and that’s what was making up most of the content of my mp3 player, so the non-metal stuff was getting stale. I also uploaded about 5 or 6 days’ worth of my diary online, after all those days off the grid.

In the evening, while it was still light but not so damn hot, the dog and I went for a run. I’m not much of a runner, I used to be and want to add long jogs and sprints to my fitness routine. I thought I’d be mostly on the dusty country road full of speeding trucks but soon after taking off I turned on a dirt road randomly and it paid off, leading me to a gigantic field with a pond in it. I ran through it, holding on to the dog’s leash in case the little derp decides to chase the sheep or cows, and after a long loop made it back to the hotel. How long did I run, 2 km, maybe 3, not very long but I want to start gradually and it was still a bit of a workout.

The girlfriend and I had dinner in the restaurant downstairs, we ordered only one bowl of noodles and it was the decision to make, the thing was the size of a kiddie pool. Fucken hell. How are the Shaanxiren not all big obese blobs?!

We sat on our twin beds watching YouTube videos on our respective laptops and then went to sleep around 10.

Chapter 198

Distance covered: 219 km (total 4233 km)

Up around 7, after a long night of deep sleep. The girlfriend was already out and gave me some of the green tea she had just made. Breakfast consisted of fruit and leftovers from yesterday, then we got packing. We’re getting into a groove, splitting the tasks and being pretty efficient at setting up and taking down our camp.

We parked the car a bit further, by a cluster of farm houses that had a water hose we could use to refill our bottle of grey water. There were stairs on the hillside leading to the Great Wall, we walked up and then walked on an unrefurbished section of the wall all the way to a big round watch tower. Then we went to another watch tower a few hundred meters away, that one rebuilt in recent years. There was not a single person in the whole site, after a small group of tourist had left, which made it extra nice.

In the newer tower, there was a ladder that led to the top, and obviously our dog couldn’t follow. He ran in circles trying to find a way to get to where we were, and eventually threw himself in an arrowslit, which was really scary since on the other side was a serious drop and the stupid little animal would have fractured something for sure. During the whole visit, it was raining a light mist, which felt good in fact.

We got on the road and soon crossed a bridge over the Yellow River into Inner Mongolia. The road signs were now bilingual, with the vertical squiggles of the Mongolian language (the original Mongolian language; in Mongolia the country, they have adopted the Cyrillic alphabet). I drove for the first segment, and then the girlfriend took the wheel once we got to the highway. We soon arrived in Ordos, the most infamous of the “ghost cities” that made it to the western headlines a few years ago. It was built from scratch in the middle of the steppes a bit over 10 years ago, a dystopian-looking spread of enormous futuristic or Hitlerian looking buildings, four-lane boulevards and squares as big as soccer fields. It’s not quite completely empty, just that you get the sense that there should be way more people and cars around.

First we went to eat, starving like we were. The restaurant was vast but only had a few customers, and it’s not just because it was around 13:30 at that point. The decoration was mostly wood and big posters of Genghis Khan and his blood-thirsty descendents, and the bigger tables were under some kind of yurt. It’s weird to see such a genocidal maniac getting so much admiration, but the cunt really performed some impressive feats of conquerin’ and rapin’ and pillagin’ back in the 1200s, putting Mongolia on the map forever. Now, his country is an insignificant landlocked backwater and a significant portion of its territory has been annexed by China, its population assimilated and its culture either forgotten or turned into folklore, like in this restaurant and its waitresses wearing “traditional Mongolian clothing” despite being Han Chinese. The food was solid though, no complaints there: I ordered a yogurt, thinking it would be just a cup, but a whole pot came. We also had stir-fried broccoli (very traditional, I know), a pound of braised mutton, some thick square cold noodles and some pastries, one of them stuffed with onions and shredded meat called a huushuur that I ate every day on my trip to Mongolia in 2015.

We drove further in the city and parked in an unfenced lot by the huge grey customs building, I climbed the stairs and peeked inside, it was empty except rubble and dust and discarded propaganda posters. We were now just by the huge square and its gigantic statues, the coolest being of two horses standing on their back legs and facing one another, like in that Dothraki city in Game Of Thrones.

The square was empty aside from a group of middle-aged tourists in matching blue polo shirts who just came out of a bus. I really wonder how the trip to Ordos was sold to them, do they think of the place as more bizarre or more grandiose? I know some western tour companies like Young Pioneers (known for its trips to North Korea and other strange places) ran tours of Ordos, showing foreign tourists what overly ambitious urban planning is like, and indeed the place reminds me of Pyongyang and looks like how I imagine Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, to be. I can’t imagine those Chinese tourists are constantly told by their guide “Look! Hahaha! A completely empty five-star hotel! How quirky!” but they must see how odd Ordos in. And thinking about it, is it an example of success of failure to have such a decadently opulent city functioning with 10% of its intended population? Both could be argued.

I’m glad I came, but wasn’t much for sticking around too long. We made a small detour to a coffee shop where the girlfriend sated her addiction to sugary caffeinated stuff, and then we drove west. The empty boulevards looked even more empty and absurd when we were the only vehicle as far as the eye could see, and we also dealt with the clownish situation of waiting at red lights with no incoming traffic anywhere.

“Look! There are mengubaos there”, she said pointing at a cluster of yurts. We turned on a side road to check it out, it was a touristic camp of some sort, where one could rent a yurt for the night. It looked abandoned, but a man came and said that yeah, they’re open, but foreigners can’t stay there. Not that I was that interested, at 200 yuan a night it’s not completely unreasonable but if I’m gonna sleep in a yurt, I’d rather it be in the middle of the grasslands than bundled up in a parking lot like a Mongolian trailer park.

So we drove on and turned on another side road, which was brand new and snaked through cattle grazing grounds and fields. For a while, I thought I was driving through rural Quebec rather than China. Then the path narrowed and was just dirt, going through an alternance of rocky expanse, pine forests, shrubby desert and grassland. Amazing stuff. We parked at a place where I wouldn’t block traffic, and we recced the surroundings, deciding on a spot with a bit of shade but still nice views over a valley below and a ridge on the other side.

I read a bit of Isaac Asimov and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership and then we took a walk over to a stupa over the ridge. Once in a while we could hear a cow moo, and now we crossed paths with a herd walking slowly through the steppe and an old man on a dirt bike rounding them up. He was going in zig-zags, pushing a stray calf back to the herd, like the cowboy he is. We enjoyed an awesome view over the sunset in the west before going back to the camp and making dinner. I heated chick peas in a pan, we didn’t have oil so I improvised a bit and used the oil from a sardine can. The girlfriend ate her peas with ketchup packets, I mixed mine with the leftover yogurt from lunch.

Then I dug a shallow pit, gathered a bunch of wood, lit a fire and opened a bottle of red. The girlfriend commented how much Quebecers like to burn things, and how when we went there in the summer of 2018 we had campfires pretty much everywhere we went. “People there even BUY wood just to burn it!”, she commented, astonished. And... she’s right, it is a bit weird if you think about it for a second and a half. I imagine if a Chinese expatriate in a western country wrote a diary like mine, there would be a lot of observations about the culture being strange.

Chapter 197

Distance covered: 264 km (total 4014 km)

Up at 6:30. We packed after a quick breakfast of baked beans and tortilla bread with Nutella. I had a glug of wine and a can of beer, because why not, I’m on holiday and it’s the girlfriend’s turn to drive.

We headed west, on small country roads. 90% of vehicles were big trucks, and the girlfriend was a bit intimidated. “Plus, they’ve been driving all night, so now they’re tired!” I added, to get her even more on edge. The road eventually got us through the town of Yingxian, where the very worst of the very worst of Chinese drivers got exiled, or at least that would be a plausible theory, because Jesus fuck, some of the maneuvers we witnessed were beyond unbelievable.

Besides that, everything went smooth. We stopped in a sizable city named Shuozhou for a kickass barbecue lunch, a stop at the ATM, and the girlfriend went to a hair salon to wash her hair. She has an adventurous spirit and doesn’t mind roughing it a bit, but also likes comfort. I often poke fun at her for that, but deep down I’m not that different, especially with my addiction to cold craft beers. While she was getting shampooed, I walked the dog, and a young woman stopped me. She asked in English if I speak French, and when I said yes, she switched to that language, that she could speak quite well. I asked where she learned and she said in Beijing. That was unexpected, that deep in the north-central part of the country.

I stopped at a booze shop, of which Shuozhou seems to have hundreds, and got some red wine, perusing the shelves as if I know anything about wine but just looking at the price tags and getting the three cheapest ones. One French, one Australian and one Chinese. I’ve had some Chinese wine in the past that ranged from great value to barely drinkable, but am always willing to give them a chance. Then we got on the road again, after the imposing stone mountains and the corn fields we were entering an area of rolling green hills, it was shockingly beautiful. We stopped a few times to take pictures and to run around, despite the intermittent rain.

At one spot there was a horse tied down in a field, and the dog went crazy, trying to bite him despite the fact that he is outweighed by a factor of 80 at least. Horsey didn’t seem too phased, stomping his back hooves, I had to catch the little retard while staying out of bucking range, as he was retreating between two darting attacks. There were dozens and dozens of enormous windmills on some of the ridges, weird, that sneering balding prick from China Uncensored on YouTube said that all this talk of China adopting renewable energy forms is all a smoke show, I would have imagined that putting a few fake windmills near Beijing for the journalists to see would have been enough, but no, they even put some here in western Shanxi province. That’s some committment.

In the afternoon, we stopped at a restaurant and got a bit of raw pork and an onion, something to cook dinner with. Then at around 17:30, we approached the Yellow River, and saw a spot that would be ideal for camping. We went down on a brand-new tarmac road that branched into a muddy path leading to a grassy embankment, where we hurriedly put up the tent in the light rain. It stopped soon after, and I went with the dog to explore the vast area of eroded sand by the river. Most of it was dry, but I stepped into a patch that had the consistency of glue, and lost my shoe.

There was a section of the Great Wall right above us, some of it rebuilt with perfectly symmetrical bricks and another made from clay. There were also giant statues of rough-looking horse archers, which might be confusing if you think that these were the enemies of settled agrarian China, but let’s not forget that many of the steppe nomads were also living south of the wall and/or employed as mercenaries.

I opened the Australian wine and applied myself to make dinner. I browned the pork in batches, sliced and fried the onion, and added instant couscous and hot water. After adding a bit of hot sauce and the leftover pesto from yesterday, it was a satisfying dinner that filled us up well.

Chapter 196

Distance covered: 300 km (total 3750 km)

Up at 7 to get a good start before it gets too hot. We drove to the Buddhist temple 15 minutes away, nestled in the mountains, up a steep flight of stairs. There are quite a few in the area, some are hidden, some are on mountaintops and look like intimidating fortresses, which I imagine they doubled as, after all we are in a frontier area not so far from those horse-riding savages that were the bane of China for a long, long time. There are also segments of the Great Wall, or should we say Great Walls, as there has been a few incarnations over the millenia, from impassable brick structures with garrison towers to small continuous mounds of dirt meant to slow down and funnel more than stop.

The temple was nice, free to get in, and nobody pestered us about the dog, in fact a middle-aged monk scratched him on the head while muttering his “Amitofu” to us. So he’s a real animal-loving Buddhist then, not a NIMBYist like those at the restaurant in Beijing.

I was the one driving today, so I fixed the girlfriend a stiff 8 AM gin-tonic from our supplies in the trunk. I put on some Hank Williams III and rolled on those snaking mountain roads for a while, until we reached the town of Daixian where we had the region’s typical thickly-cut noodles for lunch. Not bad at all, but I prefer the rich flavor profile of the similar biang-biang noodles from neighboring Shaanxi province. We took a digestion walk around the imposing drum tower and then retreated to the car to escape the intense heat.

We drove to Yanmen Pass, which used to be the de facto border of the Empire, with a fortress on top a stupidly high mountain and segments of Great Wall in places that were passable for the filthy toothless stinky Mongolians and their horses. The place was unfortunately closed after a part of the pedestrian path got flooded by heavy rains, and coincidentally, it started raining just after we walked around the empty parking lot to look and take pictures of the valleys around us.

After going down the mountains, we got on the highway for a long segment of flat corn fields. Eventually more mountains appeared in the mist, and within them was our destination, the “Hanging Temple”. It is a popular tourist site, as we could see from the filled parking lot and crowds of tourists yelling at one another like the recently-moneyed up peasants they are. It felt like my ears were getting raped by a powerdrill. There were also touts walking around peddling plastic raincoats, even harrassing me, who was literally wearing a raincoat. Not pleasant.

The Hanging Temple was built on a cliff side, which was pretty impressive from afar. We didn’t get close, as the place had a firm policy against pets and also the tickets were a laughable 115 yuan. Chinese tourist sites are the most expensive in the world, and oftentimes their value is inversely proportional to the price tag, relying on the sheep mentality of all those obedients cogs in the machine flocking there to get their picture taken and get the bragging rights.

So fuck that shit. It was a much better idea to drive on the first dirt path we saw and find a place to set up camp. It was on a ridge by a corn field, with really cool views of the mountains. I opened an IPA from Lost Coast brewery that I had managed to keep cold with (now long melted) icepacks, sat on a foldable chair and admired the surroundings, before catching up on my diary and making dinner. I cooked pasta with pesto, tuna paste and sauerkraut, it would have been even better with cheese but for now we only have dry or canned food. I opened a bottle of wine that Dancing Davey had gifted me, that he most likely received as a gift himself but being a non-drinker, he had been leaving it to accumulate dust on his shelf. Some French stuff. The girlfriend did the dishes, and we went to bed early, after watching the new Rick and Morty on my laptop and reading a bit.

Chapter 195

Distance covered: 250 km (total 3450 km)

Up fairly early, I stretched a bit and then we packed and went to meet our friends a few blocks down. We dropped the dog at a pet store for a haircut, which also allowed us to not worry about shurgwaydingers at the restaurant where we went for lunch. So far pretty much every meal on this trip, and since I moved to China in fact, has been excellent and making the hipster foodie in me slowly nod in agreement, but I’m afraid this one did not. The oat noodles looked good but were slattered in a mushroom gravy, the crab legs were sickly salty and annoying to eat, the pigeon legs were kinda like chicken but with 20% the moisture, and the typical Hebei rolled pancakes were also so dry it felt like eating wrapping paper. It wasn’t a bad meal like, say, every meal I had in the Philippines, or bad like that piece-of-shit Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich; it was still prepared with effort and with an attention to presentation and service on par with elsewhere in China, just not to my taste. I ate the clams gleefully, my favorite thing on the table, drank my beer, and smiled and nodded when asked how it is. I said I had to go to the toilet and tried to sneak in to the front counter to pay but the architect saw through my ruse and didn’t let me, insisting to treat us.

We picked up the dog, now all clean cut, said our goodbyes and got on the road. The girlfriend was behind the wheel, she initially lamented about how rusty she was after a month not driving but a few small clumsy blunders aside (that paled in comparison to the fucktarded moves that cars around us were doing) she got back in the groove quickly and we headed north. Soon we were in Shanxi province, one of the only two I hadn’t set foot in yet. And I sat there wondering, what the hell had I been waiting for?! We entered mountain territory, with steep rock peaks of all shapes, it really changed from the flat area I’d been in since leaving Jinan. I love mountains, so I was looking forward to exploring this region.

The highway mostly took a direct route, which involved tunnels several kilometers long, the longest we crossed was over 8000 m! That’s a seriously incredible feat of engineering. The girlfriend was in charge and zeroed in on some Buddhist temple in the region, so the GPS got us off the highway and we kept going for 50 km or so on pleasantly winding country roads. We stopped in a town with the amusing name of Doucun (“Bean Village”), a short distance from the temple, that we’ll keep for tomorrow. I went to enquire in an inn, half-expecting to be turned away for being a filthy foreigner, but the lady didn’t even raise an eyebrow. And when I asked if the dog can also stay there she paused and looked at me as if I asked if it’s allowed to breathe oxygen, before saying “...yeah”. Gotta love those no-nonsense honest rural folks. The room didn’t have AC but had a powerful fan, and she said it gets cool at night, something we were already feeling.

There were middle-aged women peeling garlic in the courtyard. One of them asked something that sounded like “Grumble grumble grumble” and I replied “What? Do you speak standard Mandarin Chinese?”, the innkeeper translated from mountain redneck language and said “She’s asking when’s the last time you’ve been out of China”. That’s a question I never really got until a few months ago, but now it’s happening all the time, after all this xenophobic propaganda about foreigners bringing back the virus to a now pandemic-free China. I reassured her.

First order of business, crack open a Russian beer from the cooler, and then, we emptied the car completely in the parking lot. Doing so, we could clean up the sand and garbage and dead insects, but also rearrange all of our gear now that we also have the girlfriend’s bags to carry and that the front passenger seat is not a storage space anymore. Just her makeup bag was taking up significant space that had to be cleared.

We took a walk in the small town, until we reached the end, a superb view of mountains over corn fields. Well she walked with the dog, I rode my longboard, might as well use it now that I decided to bring it along. We sat watching the sunset through the clouds, and then looked for a place to eat dinner. One restaurant was too damn hot, one was too crowded, so we went to one that advertized “Hangzhou-style xiaolongbao” or a totally inauthentic but tasty and heavy northern version of the small soupy dumplings. I got something from the fridge I initially thought was a beer but turned out to be juice made from a local berry, and it was pretty damn refreshing. A great day. I hope your day was great too.

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.

Chapter 193

My favorite travel writer, or dare I say the only travel writer I like, who goes by the pseudonym English Teacher X, has a quote that goes as such:

Considering it, my traveling had never been an expression of an adventurous spirit but rather a deliberate denial of the large part of myself that just wanted to sit around and watch TV and read comic books all day.

I often feel that way as well, wondering why I’m not at home, with my routine, comfort and not having to spend money on gas, highway tolls, traffic violations and other piling travel expenses. But one thing I learned through my years of vagabonding is that I can alleviate this by keeping it balanced and having the occasional lazy day. I was originally planning to go camping somewhere but the endless rain on the forecast made it a perfect excuse to take advantage of Dancing Davey’s apartment.

So I woke up around 9 and did yoga to stretch my sore joints while listening to Clown World news. Having successfully culturally enriched the big cities of England, the globalists are now aiming for the countryside, penning newspaper articles about how “problematic” it is that those places are mostly inhabitated by, well, English people. Shocking, I know. When I’m in the Chinese hinterlands like I am now, I’m also expecting Ghanaians and Fijians and Austrians, so weird to see so many Chinese people here. There was also a video that made waves, the gay choir of San Francisco performing a song called “We’re coming for your children”, which is an ironic quip about how they are in fact aiming to make young people tolerant and open-minded. I still have the damn song stuck in my head, those guys are as good at singing as they are bad at self-awareness and optics, and even a lot of left-wingers commented on how clumsy and of bad taste the whole thing was, and now the video has been taken down.

I wrote my diary, listening to the Metal Minded podcast, with my boys Yolin and Simon interviewing two guys from a Quebec City deathcore band called Observants. Then Dancing Davey came for his lunch break, we walked to his company’s workers’ canteen and I got shrimp, pork in a sweet sauce (very reminiscent of the weird Chinese food we get in the West), a chicken leg and a duck head. He said I’m the first laowai he’s ever seen who likes duck heads, and yeah, there are a few strange Chinese snacks I like unironically. We walked back, he took a nap and I ate my vittles while watching a movie. It is titled Threads, and it was made in the mid-1980s with the theme of nuclear annihilation. It starts slowly, with the normal daily life of various people in Sheffield, who are mostly indifferent about the escalating conflict between the USA and USSR in Iran, as it’s so far from where they are. But then, the superpowers start exchanging nukes, first on military targets and then on industrial areas on home soil and quickly on big population centers. This led to near-total destruction, with the few survivors dealing with radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, outbreak of rat-borne diseases, famin and seizure by the government of whatever small stockpiles are still intact. It was really harrowing, the movie does a great job at showing how a nuclear war would basically mean the end of mankind as we know it and even if you’re far away from the strikes, you wouldn’t be safe.

I watched two documentaries in the afternoon: one about Qanon, and one about the controversial coach of the New England Patriots. Then Dancing Davey came home, we hopped in his car and went downtown. He had to go get a haircut so I walked the dog and did pull-ups in a neighboring park, which was quite nice but had sections that got flooded after the day’s heavy rains. As I got out of the park, two pretty girls caught the corner of my eye, like the red-blooded hetero man I am. One was wearing very short jean shorts, the other had a small top that exposed her midriff, and their long black hair was falling on their thin shoulders. The problem is both of them had fayssah mursks on, one of the negative aspects of the pandemic seldom talked about. They were pulling heavy suitcases and one said audibly that she was tired, I offered to help, since I was walking in that direction, and she thanked me. I replied to their curious small talk questions but didn’t do any creepy shit, I didn’t even say “Oh cool, my ex-girlfriend was also a nurse” when they told me about their line of work. I remember one of my elderly colleagues constantly being an old creep around unprovoking young women and making them feel like they’d rather be several miles away, and told myself I don’t want to be that guy.

It started raining heavily just as we got in the car. We went to a typical local restaurant and he treated me to an amazing meal. Getting a Chinese friend to accept me paying for the meal or even just half would be easier than getting him to put on a shirt that says TAIWAN IS AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY, they’re quite hospitable. He had a few phone calls to make back home so I finished the Qanon documentary and read a bit before bed.

Chapter 192

Distance covered: 130 km (total 2868 km)

The Ukrainian woke me up when she was about to head to work, I went with her to move the car. I considered going back to sleep but I was rested enough so I just sat down, wrote in my diary, and watched the big UFC PPV. Sean O’Malley fought a random last-minute guy named Kris Moutinho and outclassed him completely but couldn’t finish him, Irene Aldana dropped Yuni Kunitskaya with a slick hook and grounded-pounded her, and then I had to go downstairs to let the Ukrainian in so I missed the 30-second slugfest between infamous wife-beating NFL D-linesman and the big fat Aboriginal Australian. Gilbert Burns and Wonderboy had an anticipated top welterweight match-up, and the Brazilian’s pressure fighting and grappling overcame the NMF’s unorthodox karate attack.

Then it was the big one, Poirier and McGregor exchanged brutal strikes and the Irishman fractured his leg from a blocked kick and the following stress he put on it by stepping or rotating. It was petty gruesome, and though Poirier came to shake hands, McNugget went on a tirade of insults and threats, which was doubly pathetic given that he was on the ground with a dozen medics attending his severe wound. One one hand it means we won’t hear of that cunt for a while and Poirier can go fight for the title, but it also means that this “fluke” ending won’t be seen as a satisfying ending to their strange trilogy and it’s possible the division will get jammed again.

The Ukrainian made eggplant with garlic and olives and scrambled eggs with bacon for lunch. Very kind of her. I got on the road, dropping her at the next district so she could do some shopping, and aside from serious rain that slowed down the traffic, the road to Langfang was smooth and took me just over two hours. Langfang is a city an hour away from Beijing, and aside from knowing I have a friend who moved there, that’s where my knowledge of the place ended. I parked in a dingy alley with cheap eateries near the old train station, which reminded me of the China of my old days more than the overbuilt brand new city I expected, being so close to the capital. As I was learning, Langfang still has a lot of industry, and is also a commuting town for a lot of white collar workers who work in Beijing but can’t afford the high real estate prices, so they take the train in and out every day.

My old pal Dancing Davey, bizarrely, does the opposite. He lives in Beijing but works in Langfang, so he goes to the capital to see his wife on the weekends and lives in a furnished apartment on weekdays. I picked him up from the train station and we drove to a duck restaurant, but they didn’t want to let the dog in. So we tried a Russian barbecue place and it was great. The meat, served on huge skewers or individual ones, was succulent, and they had a selection of imported beers from Russia. Our favorite thing was some kind of quesadilla with chunks of mutton in it, the meal was glorious.

We caught up, it had been about 6 or 7 years. He is also one of my oldest Chinese friends, from the Gongyi days in 2008. We kept in touch somewhat but he was headquartered in the north of China and I’ve been in the east for a while now, rarely going north. So when I met him he was just out of his teens, and now he works for a pipeline company.

He likes to talk about politics so he asked me what I think about some current events. I hadn’t been watching the news that much since I started this road trip but I do catch clips on YouTube from time to time, and yeah it’s hard to argue with Dancing Davey’s assessment about the west falling. And he’s not coming in on a Chinese nationalistic, antagonistic “gotcha!” position, he’s a “westophile” who learned English as well as a little French and Japanese and has been traveling for fun ever since he could. He recently traveled to the USA, driving around by rental car, and was astonished at how run-down and dangerous it looked. Meanwhile, he grew up in a dilapidated part of Henan, in a lower middle class family, and studied at some third-string rural college while the chewed bubblegum kids went to Australia or US state universities. Now, he works a decent white collar job that pays enough to afford two nice apartments, a car, trips abroad and modern amenities. Criticize China if you want, but you can’t deny this is upwards mobility.

We went to his apartment, walked the dog around, chatted with his neighbors, and I drank two of the Russian beers. We went to bed early, I got to his guest bedroom and started reading an Isaac Asimov book.

Chapter 191

Distance covered: 205 km (total 2738 km)

More than on previous nights in the tent did I once again contemplate whether I actually like camping or just the concept of camping. There were mosquitoes, likely due to puddles of dormant rain water on the beached ships, and unbeknownst to me they entered in a small hole in my netting, fucking with my sanity all night long. I killed dozens of them, feeling the tiny lump of their smashed body rolling on my skin, but the cunts kept coming, whizzing past my ear every few seconds. Even the dog was getting mad, trying to catch them as if he were a lizard. On top of that, even in periods of calm, the people outside took their place. It was now about 2 AM, and there still were groups on the beach, yelling at one another. The families had left, getting replaced by youngsters, the sing-song giggling of children making way for high-pitched female squeals and loud drunken obscenity strings from the males. What the fuck, don’t these people have anywhere to be?! The Chinese seem to be working in shifts to ensure maximum 24/7 noise pollution.

I’m not even sure if I did actually fall asleep for the rest of the night other than a few minutes of shallow sleep. The sun was up at 4 AM and so was I, the only signs of life were people walking in the shallow water with buckets, looking for crustaceans of some sort (and yelling at one another from 200 meters away of course) and sprawling piles of garbage here and there in the sand, where a particularly fucknuggety family had made its picnic. I took a dip in the water because I felt like I had to, the morning air was cold but the water was at perfect temperature. The dog watched me from the sand, it was his first time at the sea and he was a bit confused by the moving waves of salt water. While I was packing, he rolled around in the wet sand, I assume to scratch his mosquito bites. I didn’t think much of it at first but when we got to the car and he sat in, a horrifying smell of rotten fish filled the whole cab. I had to open the windows.

I listened to a bit of music, and then the Boyscast, Ryan Long was having a chat with former hockey player Sean Avery. After an hour on the early morning quiet roads, I stopped at a service point where dozens of huge trucks were parked, found a spot in the shade and took a nap on the reclined seat for an hour. Then I drank a lot of water, did tai chi and stretched in the filthy parking space to energize myself a bit.

I entered the far outskirts of Tianjin, and there was a bit of construction, squeezing the expressway into two lanes, no shoulder. It still flowed well, both lanes going around 80 km/h, which was the speed limit and also a reasonable speed considering the corrugated metal fences on either side of the road. At some point some fucknugget was sticking to my ass, he was so close his car was the only thing I could see in my rear-view mirror. He abruptly changed lanes a few times, trying to get ahead, but couldn’t. Eventually he floored it and went past me, just to repeat the same game of angrily swerving back and forth with the cars in front. What a display of small peen energy. I sat there thinking, how small must his dick be? It must be the kind where you don’t even round up to the nearest centimeter.

I made it to my destination by 11 or so. I had decided fuck going back to Beijing, and the girlfriend also didn’t want to go meet me there when she starts her vacation three days from now, prefering a less fascist and easier place. So I contacted Spermbank, from the Tianjin Hash House Harriers, asking if there’s a hash run on Saturday the 10^th, and it turned out there was one. And then a hasher named Shape Shifter offered to host me and the dog, which was very nice of her. We met outside her apartment complex, after a blunder that got me to the wrong one and knocking on the wrong door, and I parked the car. It was frustrating at first, there were no spaces outside and they wouldn’t let me in the underground lot unless I pay the 100 yuan monthly fee, but eventually one of the guards just suggested I park in front of the service entrance, as long as I move the car before 9 AM to let the garbage truck in.

I took a needed shower and also washed my filthy rotten-smelling animal, and then sat down for a very Slavic lunch of buckwheat, bread and sausages. Shape Shifter is from Ukraine, and we talked about the messed up situation in her country, low wages, lack of jobs, lawlessness, and the ongoing war with Russia, in which her son is currently serving. Then we got all our stuff and went to meet some other hashers in a nearby district, where we packed a van and headed downtown. It was over an hour away, as they live in a newer part of town that might as well be considered a city of its own.

About 10 people showed up for the walking trail, something that reminded me more of my own city’s hash group than the big turnovers seen in Beijing or Shanghai. We walked around the urban area, following the chalk marks set by the hares, stopping for beers that felt good in the hellish heat. I went to Tianjin over ten years ago and the city hadn’t made much of an impression, not old enough to feel full of history, not new enough to feel futuristic, and without any landmark sites except a TV tower that looked like the one in Toronto. Same thing this time around, but it was fun shooting the shit and making jokes with the multiethnic little group in colorful hash shirts strolling around the city’s streets and alleys.

In the circle, a Nigerian guy got his hash name, christened as MC Dick Juggler. It was a bit tamer than a naming in my hash chapter, which involves a beer shower, all he had to do was to swallow the beer funneled through a rubber chicken. I had to give the thing some of my home hash group flavor by shaking a can and spraying him a bit, like F1 drivers do. Good silly fun was had by all, and then we went to a restaurant. I ate a thick-ass burgers with fried mozzarella sticks in it, and met new friends, everyone wanted to pet the dog, now completely exhausted from the long walk in the heat. There was a big group of French people, and also a British guy with an Iron Maiden shirt who likes Chinese underground metal as much as I do.

Spermbank and Ball Shaker were now very drunk, I hadn’t seen it coming, I just drank a Tiger and a Guinness in the time we were in that restaurant, seems like they just kept on going. We sat in the van and got driven back to TEDA, the new district where they all live. It was a quiet ride, most of them completely passed out. I was ready to crash as well, I just had to locate another bar where Shape Shifter was for one of her friends’ birthday party. They were all dolled up in dresses and heels, sipping girly drinks, listening to two musicians on stage playing some surprisingly cool music. I considered staying for a drink but just made a bit of small talk and then we took a taxi home. I showered and crashed on her couch.

Chapter 190

Distance covered: 227 km (total 2533 km)

I woke up at 9, had the hotel breakfast, and slowly packed my stuff. I got on the road and headed east, eventually making it to Shanhaiguan. There were police checkpoints at the beginning and at the end of my itinerary, I wonder what the hell it is about. Both times I got told to park on the side of the road and hand in my passport, that they perused through with the most clueless expressions on their faces. They were quite friendly, making small talk that I asnwered with grunted monosyllabes, but it took way too long both times and they clearly had no idea what to do with me, prefering to keep me idling there rather than releasing me and find out later that their shurgwaydinger-in-chief wanted more information.

Shanhaiguan is the easternmost section of the Great Wall, and there are two sites that can be visited. One is a bit inland in the mountains, and one is right by the sea. I went to both but didn’t pay to enter, as I knew it would be clownishly overpriced and that the dog wouldn’t be allowed in. I thought that at least at “Old Dragon Head” I could see the Wall extending for a few meters in the sea without having to go in that big tourist circus, but no, the whole thing is fenced in. Ah well.

Then I went south to Qinhuangdao, and from the expressway I saw something I couldn’t identify at first. It was a series of long parallel steep slopes on the side of a tall building, I wondered if they’re water slides, but then I saw a guy wearing a helmet gliding down on skis and catching a jump at the bottom, doing a bunch of flips. Woah! So it’s an acrobatic skiing training center? I took the next exit and tried to find it, I couldn’t really park nearby but saw another guy doing down and landing in a pool.

Qinhuangdao has a huge beach, and I plopped on it in the late hours of the afternoon, watching the world go by. It was a bit cold, and I can’t say I was mad at that, after a month of furnace temperatures. I put up my tent after getting confirmation from a friend of a friend via WeChat that it’s allowed, just that I can’t barbecue on the beach. There were a few tents set up, but eventually they all packed and left, Chinese people don’t do much camping but like to bring a tent to the park or beach just to have a little spot to hang out sheltered from the sun. I started hesitating, and moved the tent near a bunch of large beached boats covered with tarps, where it would be less conspicuous than in the wide open space.

I had beer in the car but it was beyond piss warm, so I went to a store and asked if I could leave a can in their ice cream freezer. They were kind enough to say yes with no hesitation, and to endure the wait I bought a cold one, a black beer brewed locally.

After drinking my beers and eating a dinner of leftover barbecue meat from two days ago in Tangshan that I had kept in the hotel fridge, I went to bed and fell asleep quickly, for once, as the temperature was still pleasant.

Chapter 189

I woke up at 8:30 and had breakfast on the third floor of the hotel. My friend was already there and we discussed my travel plans, I wanted to go to the seaside city of Qinhuangdao today but the weather forecast was saying heavy rain. “You can stay one more day here, no problem. It’s the company’s hotel, we don’t have to pay anything” I pondered for a bit and accepted his generous offer.

I had also decided to not go back to Beijing. I wanted to go back from the north, check out a remote section of the Great Wall, and then attend a hash run, but going to the big joyless capital is too much of a hassle, I’ve already got a parking ticket, a traffic violation and a fine for going there with an out-of-province car. I send messages to the Hutongster and other hashers, and then arranged a visit to Tianjin instead.

My old friend couldn’t hang out today and tonight, as he had business meetings to attend. I kept it easy. I took a walk with the dog, and when I came back, every shurgwaydinger wearing a uniform in the hotel lobby tried to stop me from getting in, even though I had slept there and been in and out with the dog a few times already. They were very very adamant, blocking the elevator’s doors from closing, to the point that I just started wondering where the stairs are. “Talk to manager Zhang, she said I can bring the dog in” seemed to satisfy them or at least give long enough of a pause for me to close the doors and go to my eighth-floor room. You often hear things about guanxi in China, how important it is to know people, especially people more powerful than all the pesky shurgwaydingers constantly up into your shit. I dislike discussions on the topic and gladly leave it to the fresh-off-the-boat Tim Budongs who want to show off how much they know about their new country of residence. I just think it’s the biggest fucking cliché ever and far from exclusive to China, you have the exact same shit everywhere in the world, and the more of a dysfunctional third-world shithole where rule of law is merely a suggestion, the more prevalent it is. That said, it’s undeniable that a bit of “talk to that guy” opens doors and I don’t like playing this game. It’s a rich person’s move, and as a honest middle-class pleb, the way I bend rules is through cunning sneakiness or brute confrontation, not power plays of the sort.

It rained a bit during the day and it was hellishly hot the rest of the time. I read, wrote and also watched a documentary about UFC fighter Diego Sanchez and his disturbing relationship with his manager, trainer and scam artist Joshua Fabia. At around 6, I got out with the dog and got picked up by another old friend. He drove to a restaurant but had to park in an apartment complex half a mile away, just as it started raining. His umbrella was of no use, with the wind that sent the raindrops flying horizontally. Ah well.

He was carrying two half-liter bottles of baijiu, and once in the restaurant, I saw that nearly every table had baijiu on it. In the placid Yangtze River Delta small city I live in now, people don’t drink very much, and baijiu is mostly kept for holidays or special occasions, but here in the north people drink like their life depends on it. The food was amazing once again, the highlight being a plate of pig elbows, they gave us plastic straws to suck the marrow out of the bones. We had a good talk in 80% Chinese, 15% English and 5% Italian, that he can speak to a rusty but decent extent, having studied medicine at a university in Milan. He worked as a doctor for a while and just now graduated from a master’s program about epidemiologic research. That got us taking about Covid.

“Can you believe we’re in that much trouble just because some guy in Hubei wanted to eat a weird animal?”

He frowned. “That’s not true” Like most Chinese people, he’s convinced that the Americans engineered the virus and brought it to China.

At the next table was a big group of people celebrating the end of the school year. The middle school kids, still in their uniform, came to talk to me, foreigners being a rarity in Tangshan and in 99.9999% of China. It was a nice quiet evening, I drank two beers and just two cups of mind-numbingly strong baijiu but was feeling it. My doctor friend had the rest of the bottle and looked like he wanted to open the second one.

Chapter 188

Distance covered: 185 km (total 2306 km)

I woke up around 10, sleeping in an S shape on the Hutongster’s small couch, with both dogs cuddling me. I took them both for a walk, going in a direction I hadn’t been before, and orientating myself with the sun and my general instinct to get out of that maze of narrow slummy alleys. Then I packed my stuff, said goodbye to his dog and started walking towards my car. There were no rent-a-bikes around until I had crossed the expressway, then I rode the rest. The municipality of Beijing left me a parting gift in the form of a 475 yuan parking fine, what could I do at that point but shrug?

I got in the car, put on a Jocko Willink podcast, and got on my way. The GPS was malfunctioning and I got stressed out and very angry, which made me feel dumb. Among the numerous topics he talks about related to self-improvement, control of one’s emotions is one he emphasizes, and this is something I’m very shitty at. On one of his podcasts, he suggested to just imagine that you’re a football player at practice, with the cameras on, and that a coach can just replay the tape at any moment. Would you act that way then? I just pictured how silly I must have looked getting all pissed off at that inanimate smartphone, especially while on the speakers Jocko was reading excerpts from a book written by an Auschwitz and Treblinka survivor. My problems are pretty fucken trivial in comparison.

Even though it was now noon on a Wednesday, parts of the dystopian metropolis were clogged with gridlock. Eventually I got through the endless eastern outskirts and made my way smoothly to Tangshan, yet another city I lived in, part of my pilgrimage tour. I arrived in Tangshan in October of 2010 after a failed repatriation attempt that only got me shitty part-time minimum wage jobs and a perverse case of reverse culture shock, and eventually led me to take the first job I could in China. It turned out to be a shitty English mill with an idiotic frog-faced boss, cliquey colleagues, a pittance for a salary (though I saved more in a week there than in two months in Quebec) and the city of Tangshan was a grey industrial shithole whose only claim to fame was its near destruction by an earthquake in the 1970s. So I wasn’t in the best place mentally. I still made friends, notably one guy with whom I hung out quite a lot and he became probably the best Chinese friend I’ve ever had. A former pro basketball player, he then worked for the local TV station, doing all sorts of work in front of and behind the camera. I visited a few times in the years after I left Tangshan, but now it had been six or seven years so I was stoked to see him and the other pals.

He booked a hotel room for me, giving me the manager’s number in case the zealous shurgwaydingers at the counter give the dog trouble. But no, check-in was a quick formality, and I got shown to my room, a huge luxury pad. I sent him a message, he said he had stuff to do at work and he’d send someone for me an hour later. I gave the dog a shower, caught up on my diary for a bit, and did 50 burpees to get the blood flowing. Then a young lady came to fetch me and we walked to a neighboring building, where my old pal welcomed me.

We talked in his office a bit, then went for a drive in one of his Jeeps. He used to drive this old beater, now he has four of them, seems like he got quite rich since the last time I saw him. He runs some kind of sports company, operating soccer fields and gyms and other facilities, he drove around showing me all the new sports installations that didn’t exist back in tha day and that are now supplying him with a big stream of income. I remember the lake on the south of Tangshan and rode my bicycle there a bunch of times a decade ago, but now the whole area is greatly developed, and it is very pleasant. This positively verdant environment clashes with the old wintery grey image I had of the city, and he confirmed that things had changed quite a lot in recent years.

We got back to the hotel, drank tea for a bit, and then went to have dinner with some of his pals I also knew ten years ago. We had amazing barbecue and crawfish at a rooftop restaurant, and then more beers at an upscale German-style beer hall. It was about one kilometer down by the lake, I’d have been perfectly fine with walking, but they chartered some kind of oversized golf cart to bring us there. The buildings were in the European style, a French one, a British one, a German one, etc. in the same vein as all those bizarre “European towns” you find around China, in places where a developer had a few extra million yuan burning a whole in his pocket.

Chapter 187

I woke up around 11, I’m letting myself go these days. I looked at my messages, the Belarusian and the Amazonian were still in town and they were about to eat at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant with a new friend. It was a bit over 4 km from the Hutongster’s pad, so I leashed the dogs and got on my way, making sure I put on my stupid useless fayssah mursk for the 20 meters or so I had to cover before getting to the street.

After passing the Drum Tower, I got a rent-a-bike. My dog is now used to run as I ride a bike, but the Hutongster’s dog didn’t seem too on board with the plan at first. Her fear of that weird wheeled thing soon got conquered, and she trotted along like a champ.

I was a bit surprised that the shaved heads at the Buddhist restaurant didn’t allow the dogs in. I thought they liked animals?! Who would have known that Buddhists are hypocritical NIMBYists? So on that day, for the first time, I got refused access to a restaurant because I had a dog with me, sometimes, often even, they moan a bit but offer a compromise, like sitting in a corner or outside. No such luck this time. I can’t be too mad though, they were polite and all, it just sucked not to be able to have lunch with my old pals before they take their train back to Jinan. They hung out with me a bit on the restaurant patio (not equiped for dining) and then we said our goodbyes.

I walked home, not wanting to put too much stress on the dogs. They like running but it’s a hot day, and the asphalt is even hotter. We stopped at a small eatery, I was craving something simple, like fried rice smothered in hot peppers. I accompanied that with a beer and a chicken thigh, it was delicious and inexpensive. There was a park on the way with red-faced men working out on calisthenics structures, I did three sets of pull-ups and three sets of dips, I can’t slack off too much.

I then dropped the dogs, got my bag of now clean laundry from the Hutongster’s second floor, and went to drop it at the car so I wouldn’t have too much stuff to carry the following day. There was a paper slipped under my windshield, I feared the worst but it was just a leaflet explaining how to pay for parking on this street, by scanning a code. Hmmm, a warning then? The prices were extortionate, at 2.5 yuan per 15 minutes! I decided to just move the car a bit further down the street and try my luck, hopefully none of those parasites will come back by tomorrow when I leave.

I went back home and relaxed in the AC. I had time to watch a movie before the Hutongster was to come back, I watched a 2018 sci-fi flick called Mute. I then saw it got a lot of negative reviews but I liked the dystopian near future universe and the main character was intriguing.

Then my pal got home, and we went for a walk, ending up at a dog-friendly bar. They had their own dog on the premises, he was quite friendly but also extremely horny, humping air and trying to get our dogs to join his little skin-slapping party. They denied rather aggressively but the little fella kept trying hard. I was a bit hungry so after getting my Great Leap IPA I perused the menu, most of it was Vietnamese but they also had poutine, for some reason. Now, I’m far from a culinary orthodox, but I’ve never had a really satisfying poutine outside of Quebec and Eastern Ontario, without the proper cheese curds it can be an OK substitute, but still not the real thing. I still ordered it, and it was not bad at all, the gravy was flavorful and they used homemade curds that had the consistency of Indian paneer cheese.

Then we bounced to another bar in the area, the original Great Leap Brewery location. I had been a few times to their big flagship brewpub but never to the original über-hipster hutong spot. They had an outdoor seating area and were welcoming to quadrupedes, we downed a few pints talking about the state of the world right now and the historical events that led us here. The Hutongster is a history teacher and is surprisingly well versed in the history of Quebec, we talked about the relationship between French settlers and Native Americans over the centuries and how incredibly complicated and nuanced it is, much more than both sides of the political spectrum would like us to believe. I like such conversations.

We went back to the first bar, where we had learned it was pub quiz night and assembled a team in the meantime. Socratease and Up The Butt joined us, and we competed against two other teams of hipsterish expats over trivia questions. We lost every round except the last one in which we got 10/10, and got six Heinekens and a round of tequila for our efforts. Good times.

Chapter 186

I woke up around 9, refreshed. My shoulder hurt a bit, not sure if it was from sleeping on the couch or from doing a lot of handstands in capoeira sessions or both. I drank a lot of water and then took the dogs for a walk. The Hutongster has a dog too, she’d been very nice to my dog so far, I kept them apart at first in case she’d get territorial and aggressive but she’s a sweetie. We walked all the way to Hou Hai, a small lake I’d been to a bunch of times, one of the cute sites in that area of Beijing, and then back home.

The Hutongster sent me a message saying that one of his neighbors complained about foreigners going to his apartment without a mask, and asked me to wear one when I go in and out of the alley. So aside from shitty insulation, shitty plumbing, shitty electricity, tiny size, high rent and insalubrity, another inconvenience of living in hutong apartments is having xenophobic cunts as neighbors?! If it was my apartment, I’d tell them to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut and mind their own goddamn business, and might even get my dog to shit on their doorstep, but the Hutongster just moved in and wants to keep it harmonious, so from then on I was abiding by this request and fishing out my shitty little fayssah mursk from the depths of my shorts pockets.

I chilled in the apartment for the rest of the day, eating fruit, drinking beer, catching up on this diary and watching YouTube videos. Sometimes a man needs that. Around 5 I got on my way to go have dinner with a friend on the other side of the city, I considered bringing the dogs but eventually decided against and took the subway. My old coworker (not the Zimbabwean; another guy) was waiting for me, we rode rent-a-bikes to a restaurant that serves oat noodles, one of his favorites and something that I’d never tried before. The small doughy cylinders are dipped in either a tomato and scrambled egg sauce or a garlicky mutton stew, and it’s pretty damn delicious and filling. We stayed there for about two hours, having a conversation about a variety of topics, and of course we drifted towards political discussion. We don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of topics, to say the least, but I enjoy our civilized (if at times heated) debates.

It was raining heavily when we came out but I managed to get a taxi. I made it home, relaxed a bit and then The Hutongster walked in, exhausted from his fifteen-hour work day. He cracked a beer, ate cold leftover pizza, took a shower and went to bed. I watched the new Rick And Morty on my laptop and also crashed.

Chapter 185

I woke up at 7 with my alarm, hungover, dehydrated and sverely sleep deprived. The Venezuelan left even earlier to get his Nanjing-bound train, I packed my sweaty clothes and got in the car. I drove about 20 minutes to the district where another friend of mine lives. He had warned me it would be difficult to find parking there and he was completely right, it was a nightmare and a half. The narrow hutong alleys were way too small, and every spot on the street was taken for hundreds of meters in every direction. I looked for parking lots on the GPS and the places it gave me didn’t exist or were parking spots reserved for hotel clients. I eventually parked on a street much, much further, no idea if it was legal or not, and rode a rent-a-bike for 15 minutes to the hutong apartment.

The Hutongster welcomed me with a 9 AM beer, as today is a hash day, the reason for my visit. We met at the Nash Hash two months ago and I thought it would be nice to go on a hash if I happen to be in the big joyless capital. He just moved there, in a rather small apartment at the end of a slummy little alley, it’s tiny and overpriced and the toilet doesn’t flush well, but he likes the location, dead in the middle of a hipster district, close to a lot of entertainment options. This means he has to commute 50-60 minutes to work, but he says he prefers commuting for work than commuting to play. As someone who used to live in the outer districts of a big city, I feel the exact opposite, but to each his own.

We carried two big coolers of beer to a taxi and went to the Olympic Park. Kiddiepoo, the hasher who broke his leg at Nash Hash, was already there, he was one of the hares but his limited mobility just meant he was the one watching the bags and beer coolers. We waited for a bit and then the hashers slowly came pouring in. Some I’d met already at Nash Hash: Socratease, Up The Butt, Super Squirter, Restraining Whoreder, 狗s Down Ruff, Juicy Bla Bla, Shtrupwaffel, Banana Shoes, among others. They were surprised and happy to see me.

Some were carrying water guns, the theme of the day. I borrowed one, a tiny handgun, no match for the huge Super Soakers some had brought, but it will have to do. The trail was quite nice, there were about five million people in the park on this uncharacteristically sunny day, but some bits were more quiet. The nicest part was through a sunflower field, and we also climbed a small hill. Some stragglers came in after we started, among them a dude from Zimbabwe whom I was working with 8 or 9 years ago, we even were roommates for a bit. “Oh shiiiiieeeeet!” he yelled, before embracing me.

Throughout the whole thing, people were shooting at each other with water guns, which felt quite good in fact. And then there was a big circle and an after-party picnic at the park. Good times, Beijingers know how to hash.

I left a bit early to ensure I’d make it back to the city before the pet shop where I’d left the dog closes. The boulevard was clogged with traffic, it took forever for the taxi I’d called to show up and then much longer to get to Dongzhimen. I picked up the dog and both of us were supremely happy to be reunited. The lady said he’d been crying on the first night but had been behaving well since, and got along with the other dogs. Good to hear.

I rode a rent-a-bike with him for 3 km to the car, where I picked up more clothes and then went to the hutong. I took a shower and chilled for a bit, then The Hutongster came in with Up The Butt and another hasher, a Chinese girl. We walked the dogs together and then came home for a game of Settlers Of Catan. I hadn’t played that board game in years, it’s pretty fun. We played on his small mezzanine, where the temperature was seriously 20 degrees hotter than downstairs. Going downstairs to get beer from the fridge was like jumping into a pool.

Chapter 184

Up at 9, the capoeira workshops were scheduled to start at 10:30 but the venue is far away. Some of my compadres had a coffee next door to the hotel, then we piled into taxis and went northeast, all the way to a modern art museum where they had rented a big room. Of course there was a shurgwaydinger posted at the entrance of the complex, and he made the most perfunctory attempt at making us wear fayssah mursks, mumbling without conviction and not doing anything when I just walked past.

We had one practice session taught by a Brazilian who teaches capoeira in Chengdu, then lunch break. The Amazonian and I had Subway, which got us sideways glances and condescending smirks of disdain from those who went to an uppity-looking brunch place. Whatever, my meal cost one third of what they paid, and it was ready in a few minutes.

Then more capoeira, and a roda that lasted two hours. One thing I dislike a bit about capoeira is how everything is centered around the roda, in which only two people are playing, a few are playing music, and everyone else is just sitting around watching. If whenever I go play badminton they’d just have two people on one court and everyone just waiting for their turn, I just wouldn’t go. Yeah, I get it, a big roda can be a lot of fun and a lot of energy, but I end up getting bored after an hour of playing for a short amount of time and then getting bought out just to wait on the sidelines for it to be my turn again.

Then we had an organized dinner in a neighboring restaurant. The whole area is an art district, some buildings are soulless rectangular hunks of metal and glass but there are alleys with old houses covered in graffiti and colorful murals. We were there a bit ahead of time, as the organizers had allowed a block on one hour and a half for people who wanted to go to their hotels and change. A capoeirista named Doutora and I went to a microbrewery around the corner and had a nice craft brew. Some capoeira nicknames are funny or mildly insulting or just descriptive, she got hers because she is a neurologist.

The microbrewery was frequented by Chinese hipsters, two guys were fighting with practtice swords outside. I was curious, and when I walked closer they asked me if I want to try. So I put on the helmet and the gloves and grabbed my sword. It was padded but it still hurt quite a bit when you’d get clipped. I tried a bit but then it was time to go.

Dinner was pretty spectacular, it was in a Yunnanese restaurant and the food was served in small piles on banana leaves. We ate with our hands, rolling balls of sticky rice and dipping it or wrapping it around the meat, tofu or other weird mixtures. The method and flavor profile reminded me a bit of Thailand. Then we went to the after-party bar, which was the same microbrewery we had just been to. Beers were downed, samba and salsa were danced, asses were slapped, and we had a nice percussion jam going, that ended up in a drunken roda. The Amazonian and I had developed some kind of inside joke in which we just produce the most nonsensical sentences but keep on carrying the conversation, to confuse everyone. “This shirt really fits a nice day” “Well it is Saturday after all, you know broccoli is a plant, right? And so is Billie Eilish.” “Flanel is worn by hipsters, who also like PBR” Doutora was listening to us, trying to make any sense out of it, but at that point she was rather inebriated. One Brazilian guy asked me to help her type in Chinese on her phone because she was too drunk, and now she was panicking because her mother was imploring her to come home. Yes, she’s a doctor, highly educated, having lived in Germany and traveling a bunch, but she’s still treated like a child by her helicopter mom.

The Venezuelan, meanwhile, was still on his mission. On the way to the toilet I saw him in an isolated corner of the bar with a hot capoeirista from Chengdu he had his eyes on (and, well, every hetero male would also have his eyes on her if she walks in any room), lying on a carpet, having a romantic talk. Later he emerged, I assumed the position of a baseball pitcher and asked if he’d made it to first base. “Strike out” was the answer, and we had to explain the baseball metaphors to the guys there from non-baseball countries.

I was falling asleep, so the Uzbek-Korean and I took a cab back. I took a quick shower and fell into a coma.