Red wine and black car

Bugger. Woke up to no electricity again. I dressed into my swimming shorts and a tee-shirt and went to go for a shower and a few minutes after Tan did the same. The kids had slept with Jiuma again so they were ok. As I was passing the lifts I noticed that their lights were on, suggesting electricity. But on re-entering the house there was nowt. After my shower around 11am I got a call from A Wu who said we were going to have lunch together. I thought 11am was a little early, and I was right as he picked me up from Er Jie's house and we first went to drink tea at the place opposite our building. Luckily it was just tea as I'd been told we were going to drink red wine. Boss Hu was also in the car, and when we'd had our tea he was presented with two bottles of French red wine. I realised I was hardly dressed for a lunch with a boss, so I nipped home to put on some long trousers and a shirt first.

Apparently today is "Zhong Yuan Jie", or "Gui Jie", depending on who you talk to. Maybe one is today and the other tomorrow, hence the school being closed for two days. But that was the reason for going out for a meal. And I guess it was the reason that as soon as we got there - the place that does great goose - we opened the bottles straight away. I had been hoping for a normal day in the office, and then not have to attend the 11pm meeting, but this was looking unlikely as A Wu poured us each half a beer glass of wine. Quite restrained, I thought. For about ten seconds anyway until he filled up the glasses with the contents of the other bottle. It didn't take long for me to work out that one bottle was room temperature and the other cold so we would have a cool drink. So far French people would have turned in their graves at least twice; once for the beer glasses and again for the used of cold red wine. Worse was to come. The first ten minutes of the meal were quite civil; Leilei and A Da had turned up, together with A Ni and a couple of her friends. We had been sipping the wine slowly, always touching glasses before each sip as is the way, until the glass was half empty, when Boss Hu said "gan bei!". So the three of us (the others weren't drinkers) had to down the rest of the contents in one. Now the wine was one of the better ones I'd had here, and it appeared to be genuinely French, but downing a large mouthful of the stuff wasn't a pleasurable experience at all. However, it transpired that eventually it was palatable. I'd chosen to only have the room-temperature bottle, and as soon as both had been finished A Wu magicked one up from somewhere (probably his new car). Luckily there were no more after that, and after having drunk around a whole bottle I fairly easily fell into a siesta till half four.

Cold French red wine

It got better after a couple of glasses

Ah yes, this was the first time I'd seen A Wu's new car. He needed one if he wanted to impress bosses, as his clapped out Nissan Cefiro was not giving the right impression. So now he has another large black saloon car. Unimaginatively, it is a Toyota Camry. Maybe they're made here but they do seem the de facto boss-car here until one is able to afford a German one. Anyway, it's streets ahead of our 406 estate in the UK and has a rear camera and monitor so you can see who you're reversing into. But the car alarms here are all like they were in the 90s in the UK; whenever you turn it on from the remote control it makes a high-pitched squeek to let you know you've done so.

Due to my luncheon, the rest of the day was spent working diligently until gone midnight when I said "sod it" and took myself out for a bit of bbq, on the auspices of getting Tan five duck feet. I met some mates and had a little beer with them until they had to go, then sat down with a couple of gentlemen more my age and had a little beer with them too. They drove me back at around 1.30am when the bbq had arrived, but Tan was virtually asleep, so I non-greedily put them in the fridge for tomorrow.