just a week in Guangzhou - nothing fancy

I'm not sure if I'm winning or losing the battle with technology, so whether or not I get any pictures into here remains moot at this stage, but I certainly have found a lot of it to play with. Starting off with the simple ambition  to get movies from the mobile phone onto my computer where people could see them, I have ended up with 14 new programs on the laptop. Since all of them were free, none of them is without idiosyncrasies.  But just as I think this is ridiculous, I realise that I can actually shoot a video with my phone, edit it on a computer, add a Beethoven soundtrack (say), add a few special effects, subtitle it & distribute it for pretty much nothing (given that I already had the mobile phone & computer). So what if it takes 14 programs? If I could remember which one to use when, it would probably only take about 4.

Kafka's - view from my couch

Last Sunday I went back to the coffee shop Liz & I discovered, Kafka's. It's conceivable that this is some kind of a deep-ish joke - but it's hard to be sure & the Chinese appropriation of any random passing English word for a dash of marketing cachet makes it hard to be confident about intention. 

Missing from the photograph is the wall of books - mainly about Tibet - which adds the final touch of niceness, really. It's like having coffee in a library, only more comfortable. it's certainly quiet enough to be a library. On the two occasions that I've been there now there hasve beem miore staff (3) than customers (maximum 2). I'm not sure if their cat is staff or a customer. 

This is really a multi-layered nostalgic experience. The flooding natural light and the absence of air-conditioning for overhead fans plus the clogging humidity immediately make me think of a coffee shop in an outback/rural country town. There's one in Gympie, and Balmoral, and Goulburn, and Seymour, and Ballarat, and ... The one in Berwick probably has airconditioning now, and maybe the rents are too high for it to sprawl like this.

Of course, those rural coffee shops are reconstructing the inner-urban proto-European coffee shop of the 60's, Pellegrini's, Tomani's (Tiamo)  and their folk-music analogues (of which the Twilight in Kew is the only one I actually set foot in). It's really very kind of someone to put a potted history of my coffee-drinking life into Guangzhou, just in case I get homesick. The coffee is really excellent -  priced a bit like Grange though. With the Australian dollar where it currently is, the coffee starts at $7 a cup.

I'm tempted to make it into my office & claim them on expenses.