My Second Yunnan Meal

A gent I hadn’t seen in five or six years wrote me a while back to say he’d be passing through town and did I want to connect?  Of course, I wrote some ten days ago.  And today, mid-morning, mid-work, I got a quick note asking when I’d like to meet.  Could I interrupt the seventeen things I was supposed to be closing out this morning?  Certainly not.  But I did anyway.  Especially as he was willing to come all the way to my neighborhood in the burbs.

I’d suggested one mall, and he disembarked at another, which proved fortuitous, as our standard Starbucks is now, under renovation.  He described the place he was at and I knew at once that he was up the road.  “I’ll be there in three minutes.”  And I was glad I’d brought the keys to my bicycle lock, as I wouldn’t want to leave my bike unattended there without something holding it down.

He looked great.  And we had a big hug there, outside of the crowded Starbucks.  He asked if I’d already had lunch and I hadn’t.  A Seattle native he was obviously psyched to go anywhere but Starbucks, which was alright by me.  Yunnan then, upstairs.  We got more dishes than we should and the food was good, but certainly not great or anything like the positive memory I’d had in my mind, walking in.  “Don’t you have those Yunnan cheese cubes?”  “No sir, we don’t.”

My pal had started a new business.  It sounded fascinating as it leveraged Natural Language Processing which is the core tech in another business I’m currently working with.  Proud of him, I was.  He’d gotten a whole revenue model underway without any early funding, which is always on onerous terms, if taken too early.  His kids were younger than mine, and I found myself sharing bits of parenting callouses, and slivers of wisdom about what was still in store. “Never stop traveling with them.  Never stop reading to them . . .”

Later than night I had to meet another colleague downtown.  He wanted to introduce me to someone from Alibaba.  After a torturous conference call on a new bridge, which I hadn’t yet downloaded the app for, I settled in for my second Yunnan meal of the day.  This place was better, certainly.  And I think it’s only when I bit into some of the dishes that I’d realized what a compromise our local joint had been, earlier in the day.

Thursday, 3/14/19