Aluminium Foil Exhaust Tubes

It didn’t look like rain when I left.  It’s raining hard just now.  My cabbie meant well.  But I’m at the wrong corner and there are three more of em’ to guess at.  “Hey, I’m here.”  “Where?”  My friend names a landmark that I can’t see.  I call out two or three not particularly memorable reference points that I can see.  “There’s a KFC?”  “A KFC?” Can’t see what I see.  I try directions.  “Is it the North-East corner”, I ask?  She explains that she is not great with plotting North from South. 

“OK.  I see what you’re talking about.  Right.  OK.  Heading there now.”   Everyone seems to have an umbrella, save me.  Umbrella sales people eye me incredulously. “Umbrella!” they yell in Chinese.  “Umbrella!”” They must think I’m a dope.  My friend has popped down the elevator to meet me.  I’m rather wet. 

Korean barbecue.  Lots of aluminium foil exhaust tubes dropping down to the tables.  Lots of lettuce and sesame paste sauce on the table.  I try to make sense of the travel I’d done in the time since last saw them.  This ‘East Africa trip’ seemed so overwhelming as we went made our way through those twenty days, but now I can describe it in two or three minutes. 

My friend is reading the Robert Van Gulik stories about Judge Dee.  It’s been years but I was enraptured with them when I began one and couldn’t put them down until I’d finished them all.  Van Gulick, as Sinologist, was the Dutch ambassador to Japan, during the period of the Culture Revolution, when it wasn’t such a great time to be a Western European diplomat in Beijing.   We agree that the illustrations, pen and ink drawings which he did himself, are half the fun.  I want my bookshelf suddenly.  Not the web.  I want the books I read so I can touch them and put them in his hand.

Sunday, 7/30/17