Meal with Haiwei, beer with water man, KTV with Boss Zhou - fun!

Well I’d been wondering when to take the train back to Guangzhou - Leilei wanted to have a couple more days in Hong Kong but I wanted to stay in the mainland. I used the very genuine excuse of the current uprisings in HK to justify staying one night in Guangzhou to meet my ex-colleague and one more night in HK before our midday flight on Saturday, So at least we’d get an afternoon and evening there. Although it’s nearly two weeks in the future there were not that many tickets left already and none in business class where I thought it may be better for our suitcases, so we snapped up a couple of normal class and would hope for the best.

Leilei had told me about this experiment and I found it worked...neat but I need to understand why

The rest of the day was work until I went to Haiwei’s at 5.30 as promised. We were pretty sensible and only had a couple of cans with the meal. But that turned into a couple more after the meal as my friend 2-1 was there and his girlfriend is pregnant and before we knew it it was 9pm and pissing down outside. 2-1 invited me out tomorrow and I said thanks but I couldn’t commit due to work.

After a wet journey home advertising friend invited me out for a drink but I sadly had to refuse as water man had been badgering me for the last couple of days to meet up for a beer. But this in itself was slightly rushed as Boss Zhou had also invited me to go to sing song. But I stayed a good hour sitting in the doorway of his shop in the good company of some of his mates who are becoming my mates a bit now. Apparently we were to be eating slivers of raw fish and I was a bit disappointed when they didn’t turn up but other fishy stuff did instead. But soon after bbq turned up, including the infamous zhu bian, of which you only get one per pig, and only male ones at that.

Only one per non-sow pig

They were understanding when I made my excuses some time after 11pm and went to see Boss Zhou at the KTV. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him in a KTV, and he was in high spirits, as were a number of women, one of whom apparently knew me from 15 years ago as we’d gone for a meal with her as a family. I took her word for it. But the next 15 minutes became a little bit like my former, pre-kids time in China where I was the centre of attention, and copious photographs were taken that would get sent out on WeChat in near-real-time. It was totally innocent of course, and I felt my smile was a little forced, not that they sensed this. But at least this slowed down the intake of 2.5% beer and I was able to leave the place as sober, if not more so, than when I entered.

Still friends were trying to contact me but as tempted I was to continue the night it was late enough and I managed to sleep before 4am.