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啤酒手机 beer / cellphone

I was at a tea house in Chengdu when the guy at a table started talking to me about these gloves I was knitting. He ended up pulling his chair over to my table and introducing himself as Chen. He brought us a packet of sunflower seeds and pistachios (which he called happy peanuts) to share and showed me a big scar on his head which had to be stitched up only a couple weeks earlier. We sat until 9pm drinking tea, eating and smoking. He was on holiday from a city close to Shanghai and had learnt english by watching Friends. He loved Chandler.

We then went and got hotpot together as well as a small bottle of Baijiu. During dinner he let me know that he worked for the government and that he would have to delete my contact from his phone once he left Chengdu as government workers were not allowed foreign friends. I told him I would be sad to not ever see him again, he said that the mountains would not fall and the rivers would still flow, and that he hoped I would remember him as the Chen the gentleman.

The next day, I told a couple of my friends in Chengdu about Chen. My friends said he probably didn’t work for the government and that he actually probably had a partner back home that he was trying to cheat on. Although our time at the teahouse and hotpot felt completely platonic, he did suggest we watch Friends together at one of our hotels. I like to think that he didn’t have a partner back home, and that he was in fact a government worker.

Whatever the case, it is a great excuse if you ever need to block someone but don’t want to hurt their feelings - Sorry, it was great to see you but I have a job with City of Melbourne and and they don’t allow contact with foreigners so I have to block you. I guess it will only really work in some cases. I also got my boots resoled for $2 here.

I finished up my time in China in Shenzhen and HongKong. On the train to Shenzhen, I met a guy called Micheal who was interested in my knitting. I told him I was making gloves with 啤酒手机 and he told me I had a great appreciation for Chinese culture. We chatted over our phones translate apps for a couple of hours and he made me an itinerary for Shenzhen and Hong Kong. He gave me his final orange before getting off at the stop before me and we said goodbye.

The first day in Shenzhen I took a city bike across the city to Talent Park, it took me two hours and I was still in the city centre. I also went to a yum cha restaurant recommended by Micheal. I ordered so much, two waitresses asked me if I made a mistake.

I arrived in Hong Kong at 7pm. The place I was staying was in the infamous Chungking mansions and confusing to get to. My room was a box and the shower was over the toilet. I went to a cafe and then took a bus to M+. I didn’t realise before getting on the bus, but there is no button to signal to the driver that you want to get off. You actually just have to yell out to him. Not confident in my ability to yell to a bus driver in Cantonese, I thought I would just see what happens, but turns out I was getting off where the bus terminated. The driver was very sweet, I was the last one on, we had a giggle.

M+ was epic, there was a great exhibition of contemporary Chinese art called ‘Inner Worlds’ including thirty-eight artist whose work ‘capture their responses to a changing nation, creating art that aims to inspire emotional resonance in its audience’. There was also a Architectural Icons exhibition. I want to live in the Nakagin capsule they had on display.

The next day I got a haircut, I kind of look like a coconut. When the hairdresser finished, he said “is this ok” which is a crazy thing to say after cutting someone’s hair. oh well.