distant ruminations

So last night, to celebrate the news that my boss is happy to keep me here for another year, we went to Big Pizza.

Big Pizza’s all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet  has become one of our favourites. The food isn’t great, but it’s certainly edible, and all you can drink? Need I say more? At the very least, we always get our money’s worth. Most of the time we get a decent feed.

So we went there last night. And we discovered something: It’s changed! It’s cool now! Big Pizza also does deliveries, and the last time we had pizza, that’s what we did. It’s always a pain in the arse because no matter how many times we order a pizza to be delivered, and no matter how well we explain how to find our place (and it really isn’t that hard), the delivery guy always gets seriously lost. Anyway, it’s been some time since we actually went to the restaurant for the all-you-can-eat-and-drink deal. And they’ve redecorated. Seriously redecorated.

I remember when Big Pizza first opened it’s Wudaokou branch. I don’t know if that was the first branch or not, but it certainly was the first one I knew about. That was about five years ago. Then just after I escaped Tianjin I took lzh there for pizza and discovered that in the five years it had been open the only thing that had changed was that they now had a clientele. I must have been one of the first customers. I remember going there with a few friends not long, as in a week or two, after it opened. Apart from our group of four or five, there were maybe half a dozen other customers in the whole place. That was pretty sweet. All you can eat really was stuff yourselves full, there’s no competition for food. The same applied to the drinks, and being drinkers all, we did our best to relieve them of a keg or two. Then when I escaped Tianjin and took lzh there all of a sudden there was competition for space as well as food and drink. So much so that they’d instituted a number system. You walk in, take a number, and wait, because the buffet area really is that packed. Lunch times are ok, usually, but even weekday nights you can be left waiting until a table clears for you. That’s alright, though, it means they’re going to stay in business for some time yet, meaning we get plenty of reasonably priced pizza.

So last night we went there and they’d completely redecorated. This was our first time there since before Spring Festival, so I guess they’d taken advantage of the holiday (and the fact they’re in the university district, and so wouldn’t be losing any cash by closing down over the holiday) and redone the place. It looks cool now. Kind of a hip, urban, semi-industrial look. The walls have hip, grafitti-style paintings. The ceiling has all the ducts and pipes and cables exposed and painted a cool sky blue. Well, it looks about as cool as it is possible for an all-you-can-stuff-down-your-gullet place to be cool. They’ve also rearranged things so they can fit more tables in, which is good, cos that cuts down waiting times and keeps them even more in business for even longer. Doesn’t add any to the noise level, though, fortunately.

So we got there. We ate. We stuffed ourselves. I drank our money’s worth. It was that nasty Chinese draught beer. Here’s the unfortunate thing about beer in China: The bottled and canned beers are all much of a muchness beer-wise, but the quality does vary noticeably. That’s why I almost always drink Snow. Tsingtao when there’s no Snow. Yanjing when there’s no Tsingtao or Snow. Hapi in the absence of the others. Serious formaldehyde hangover in the absence of any of those beers. But the draught beer is all equally bad, whether it’s branded Tsingtao, Yanjing, Beijing or what. It’s as if there’s one brewery in the whole country churning out this nasty, sweet, heavily formaldehyded piss-coloured, ridiculously fizzy shit liquid, pouring it in kegs, and calling it draught beer.  After a year or two drinking Chinese beer, bottled, canned, or draught, you’ll be able to handle a few of these without too much hassle. But you’ll learn to recognise that formaldehyded feeling. And that all depends on how old the beer is and how well maintained the equipment isn’t. I suspect last night either the beer had been sitting in the restaurant a few weeks too long or it’s been quite some time since they cleaned out the pipes. And they’d certainly pumped far too much gas into the beer.

The result? This morning that familiar old formaldehyde headache woke me up bright and early to wish me a happy and productive day off work. Goes without saying that I hadn’t slept that well to begin with.

Oh well, a bottle of hair-of-the-dog at lunch time cured me just fine.

Oh, and now they have a pizza that has bacon on it! It’s weird, I never really liked bacon when I was in New Zealand, shit, I hardly ever ate meat of any kind back then, but when I tasted that pizza last night I was in heaven! Mmmmmmmmm….. Bacon pizza……..

I’m back. Not that anybody missed me.

We spent the weekend up in the village. Apparently it was Easter. Didn’t notice, as usual. Easter just kind of slips by barely noticed here.

Well, it was the usual weekend trip. We stuffed some winter clothes in my pack and got a taxi down to Deshengmen so we could get on a bus to Yanqing as early as possible. The quickest way to Deshengmen from here is to go straight down the Badaling Expressway, which is, of course, the road the bus takes up to Yanqing, so we got a good advance view of the traffic we’d face for the first part of the journey. Blocked up and moving so slow it makes a snail look speedy. Perfectly normal, in other words. We got to Deshengmen and found they’d separated the buses again. Half were going to Badaling, the other half direct to Yanqing. Usually this means trouble for me, but I managed to get on the bus unmolested and sat down and waited. Nobody was bothering me. I was starting to wonder if we’d somehow found ourselves in another dimension or some alternate universe when, just before the bus left, the conductor finally came up to us and politely asked lzh if she was with me and if we really wanted to go to Yanqing. One of these days I’m going to have to tell the conductor “对，她跟我一起，我是她的翻译” or something like that, but I think I’d wind up having to clean up the mess caused by the conductor’s brain melting if I did that. After all, everybody knows all foreigners catching the 919 are tourists going to Badaling and it is a direct contravention of the laws of thermodynamics for any foreigner catching the 919 to speak Chinese or go somewhere other than Badaling. Well, I was relieved to discover we hadn’t somehow been transported to an alternate universe, and it was good that the molestation was so mild and polite (instead of the usual Foreigner. Must. Get. On. The. Badaling. Bus. Now. Now! bullshit I usually get).

It was also good to see that the bus company is buying bigger buses with greater seating capacity.

Anyway, the bus left, we did the usual slow, crawl up the Badaling Expressway past Qinghe, then gradually the traffic got lighter until by the time we got to Changping town we were driving as if we were actually on an expressway.

The weather was beautiful on Saturday. Clean, clear air, blue sky with scattered clouds. Visibility was awesome. The bus from the county town out to the village takes State Highway 110, which skirts the mountains along the northern rim of the basin as they wind their way northwestwards in the direction of Zhangjiakou. On the way to the village we could clearly see the mountains on the southern rim of the basin looming blue and distant.

Well, the clouds weren’t so scattered, really. They seemed to be gathered over the mountains, both those to the south and those to the north, while the sky over the basin was clear and blue. And the clouds were dark and threatening, and leant the mountains a foreboding, almost menacing air.

But that’s ok, mountains are often rather moody.

To continue the strangeness of the buses: The conductor on the bus to the village actually understood me for the first time ever. I don’t know how that happened. lzh was busy talking to a friend sitting a couple of rows back when the conductor came, so I had to do the talking. Situations like this I find it’s just easier to play the dumb foreigner rather than have to fight my way through a thicket of racially-motivated stupidity only to have to mop melted brain off the bus floor and open the windows wide to clear the smoke out. But no, this time I said “Z village”, the conductor looked at me funny, I repeated “Z village” and she said ok, swiped my card, and guessed that lzh must be going to the same place, swiped her card, and moved on.

Anyway, we got there safe and sound. That’s always a small miracle. I really wish they’d hurry up and finish this new highway they’re building and force all the trucks onto it. They’re a bloody menace, roaring down the highway at top speed with no regard for anybody else on the road. But it’ll be quite some time yet before the new highway is up and running. They’re making progress, but slowly.

Still, I guess it takes time to build roads.

Anyway, we got there safe and sound. Only to discover that Ma had decided Zaizai’s fur was too long, too matted, and too dirty, so she gave him a hair cut. She had hacked all the long fur off his head and ears. My dog looks like a monk! And somehow lzh decided this was a good idea, hacking his fur off, so on Sunday morning she and Ma held Zaizai down and hacked all the long, filthy, matted hair off his belly and legs. My poor dog! Funnily enough, he didn’t pay much attention to lzh for the rest of the day. Don’t blame him, either.

The rest of our time in the village was spent pretty much as per usual. Ma and Ba did their usual farm chores. I sat around watching DVDs and drinking beer. lzh alternated between helping her mum, watching DVDs with me, and amusing herself somewhere else. We dug out our old badminton rackets and tried to play a bit of badminton, but there was a bit much wind for that. And occasionally we’d have to round up the lambs and chase them back into the pen they can break out of far too easily.

Saturday afternoon, after Ba had taken the sheep out to graze, leaving the lambs behind as per usual, I was watching a DVD, Ma and lzh had gone off shopping. I heard some odd noises out in the courtyard, and looked around to see the lambs had escaped yet again and the dogs were chasing them round the yard. I rounded them up, got them back in the pen, put the gate back where it was supposed to be, and was heading back inside when I heard baaing from the well.

Shit.

One of the smaller lambs had fallen down the well. I discovered the hard way that my arms are not long enough to reach down the well, grab the lamb, and pull him up, even if I lay flat on my belly. The ladders in the courtyard were too wide to be of any use. But the well wasn’t too deep. So I climbed down and was reminded just how stupid sheep are. The bloody lamb tried to run away from me. That’s right, that’s exactly how you do it: You’re stuck in a well with no way up, somebody comes to rescue you, so you run in a circle around the well to try and escape your rescuer. Anyway, I grabbed a hold of the lamb and threw it back out of the well, then set about finding a way out for myself. I’m 1.8 metres tall, and I guess the well must be about 2 metres deep. I had my feet planted on the edges of the bottom of the well, which were a few centimetres higher than the centre, but still…. Well, I managed to hoist myself up so that my head and shoulders were above ground, then found a couple of footholds on the sides of the well that allowed me enough purchase to clamber out.

Bloody idiot sheep.

The good news, though, is that Hu the cat had three cute little kittens, who are just now entering that age where they’re curious about everything and just about strong enough to go and find out.

Anyway, that was about all the excitement of that trip. Now we’re back in the city. lzh is at work, and I’m doing everything I can to avoid work until 2 this afternoon. Life as per normal, in other words.