Can We Push Back?

Shanghai is full of friends.  Too many to all visit on a swing through town.  One friend had suggested we meet up after work and so, after a long day, I found myself up in the Meridien lounge with a chum I’d spent the day with, talking animatedly as we always do.  He had his plans this evening’s and mine just wrote to me:  "Can we push back to seven thirty?"  Yes, we can.

He suggests the World of Beer, which I have been to before.  It is adjacent, as I recall to another such, kegs-a-plenty type joint, with outdoor setting across the express way from where I presently typing in my phone.  I’d been there before at the invitation of another friend in this town.  And as I recall the gent I was off to see showed up at that meeting as well, and its’ all fused in my mind with his persona.

I don’t really want pub food.  The shrimp tacos are tasty, but the caridea have all been deep fried.  My chum suggested we get an enormous pretzel and we do.  It hangs from a hook and comes with a mustard and a cream dip.  I shouldn’t.  I do.  He’s having a Budvar beer and I remember thirty years ago when I was in Pribram, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and learned that this local nineteenth century brewery antedated the American Budweiser of international fame and middling taste. 

Somewhere into the third IPA we are pleasantly surprised to find that both of us are making our way through the Wu Yue mountains.  I haven’t met anyone else who’s actively trying to climb them all.  We trade notes.  He has one I haven’t climbed, and I have one he’s yet to surmount.   Neither of us have climbed Hua Shan, the western-most of the five, which is reputed to be a steep cliff hanger, not for the faint of heart.  We’ll be off to climb Song Shan, dead center in Henan later this month and he assures me it’s certainly workable to imagine climbing and returning in a day.  He'll have done Hua Shan by the next time we meet.

Sunday, 04/07/19