All Our Exhalations Visible

You don’t find yourself over in the west side of town much.  I visited a government “tech park” that I immediately recalled having visited a decade ago.  That day it was cold and we were trying to convince a group of ex-army guys to buy more of something they hadn’t made good use of in the first place. We weren’t successful as I recall, huddled around a table in an ill-lit room with all our exhalations visible.

Not much has changed in the last ten years.   A strivers effort to build something modern, from the early naughts, it was not an especially inspiring construction.  Four grey girders rose from the main compound square to hold up an ominous grey plank, which served no purpose and looked as though it might someday come crashing down.  The Western Hills were close at hand though and today, they looked lovely.

I wasn’t quite sure what we were going to eat.  The host ordered.  He got a large bottle of Qingdao for each of us, though I hadn’t really wanted any warm beer with lunch.  But its open and he’s toasting the overseas guest and it’s all in motion.  A fish has died by a thousand cuts and is served with sweet and sour sauce.  Not one, but two soups were put on the table One of them had lots of beans, which isn’t very Chinese.  The other had a corn broth and lentils and spinach which similarly isn’t very Chinese either. I ignore dozens of peppers in the spicy Hunan dish and they pile up on my plate as work my way through a second helping.

The establishment is a hangar sized environment with plants to suggest environments that city folk might want to bus out to so they might pretend they were having a dish in the countryside.  I went to the bathroom and up above my urinal was a picture of a young girls dressed alluringly.  I considered this person.  It was an advertisement for a spa where presumably lots of alluring things happen.  Over on the other urinal was another girl stuck in another ad and so on for the next four urinals.  

I found myself looking longer than I normally would at the ladies’ room on the way out, wondering if they had pictures in their stalls as well, meant to capture their impulse imagination whilst they sat their relieving themselves.   I think we know the answer. 

Friday, 10/20/17