I can’t remember what I did on Sunday, except for nearly killing myself playing table tennis for an hour. I found a very nice opponent who was much better than me, but too polite to stop playing. Which was fun, in an exhausting, is my arm going to fall off kind of way. I seriously thought I’d wake up stiff as a board on Monday, but surprisingly, I didn’t. What did happen though was that I disturbed some of the low level tar deposits in my lungs, so I’ve had two days since waking up with smoker’s mouth.
Seven days later...
In fact this week has been so busy with work that it's back to Sunday, which I am likewise planning to be quiet, already. I do have a plan for the day, or two plans, depending on how you look at it. I need a haircut. I need to buy some thongs - flipflop type thongs, additional information required by the headlong continuing rush towards American English. It's not really shoe weather. I may even take up wearing shorts.
There is a faint possibility that China Telecom will turn up today to give me a telephone line - I had a long and enthusiastic conversation with one of their people on the phone yesterday & I think that was the gist of it. I'm a little sceptical about any state-owned enterprise employee working on a Sunday, anywhere in the world, but I'm 99% sure that's what the conversation was about. The delays to date turned out to be due to the fact that they had a wrong phone number for me & in all fairness I have to admit that could easily be my fault.
It will be good to get out of Starbucks once I have my own ADSL (although they have cheaper A/C than me as well), and go back to my preferred coffee supplier for breakfast. Actually the best coffee to date has been in a franchise operation called Bluebird, but I can only find them in Shenzhen. I can't remember if I mentioned them before. They do blisteringly expensive espresso, even by Chinese standards, but they also do an Italian-style stovetop espresso machine thing which they bring to your table and it has enough coffee for two people, which makes it good value. And the real bonus is that they can do something with the machine that I never can, which is avoid the slightly burned/bitter edge that I always get with those machines. Instead they produce close to the perfect taste, almost sweet without sugar, flavour across the whole tongue, with a real caffeine punch. Fantastic. If I can only find one in Guangzhou (they have internet too).
While on the topic of good things, I also found, courtesy of a colleague in Shenzhen who is very observant, a great restaurant selling Cantonese style soup/casserole/hotpot stuff. Not only is the food excellent, but their interior designer has done a great job, with tonnes of lattice screens partitioning off semi private dining areas but lots of light so that there is a kind of glow coming from the screens while still retaining a sense of dimness. Maybe it's the lighting engineer who should get the plaudits - anyway, a fantastic piece of ambiance-producing work. It's kind of a modern take on the kind of restaurant that always gets smashed to pieces in a massive 100 person fight in your generic historical kongfu romance.
No pictures this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment