It is getting worryingly close to having to go back to England now goddamnit, and we had a lot to squeeze into today. First thing we went to the mega tourist trap round the corner where Lloyd got an horrific picture of Phil and Anna made up as a gift. We looked through a big book a cartoony people and settled on the best one we could, but that is largely unnoticeable due to how big he decided to draw their teeth.
The next job was to stock up on touristy crap to give to people back home. I thought some tea would be a good present, coming from China 'n' all. We tried a couple of places before finding one that seemed to have good quality tea. We then went about bartering them down, and when Lloyd and Marisa had got them down really quite low, the woman became very annoyed and complained about how low she had had to go. It was pretty funny, in an evil kind of way. I got some of the pretty teas which open up when you submerge them and some that will hopefully taste nice too. The woman cheered up when we spent about £50 between us, and Marisa caved in and paid slightly over the price she bartered as she felt a bit bad.
I bought a couple of cheap mugs from another tea place while Lloyd went and did something else. I knocked the girl in the shop down 50% which might be considered amateur. I waited in the shop for Lloyd to show up again because the temperature was so much cooler than it was outside and I chatted with her about China England and mahogany trays and she invited me to sit down with her and gave me a thimble of tea.
Next stop was go-karting which we had to squeeze in before bowling. Tonight was to be Marisa's leaving do as she is heading off to work in Hong Kong, and kind of my leaving thing tacked onto it too. The go-kart place was a good taxi ride away, which gave us a chance to cool down before we had to go and basically sit on some engines.
We got there and had a beer while we watched people drive round on the track below us. It was fun watching the Chinese drive - some clearly didn't have enough strength to handle the carts while others were real naturals. I left my precious £1.25 mugs behind the bar and we bought tickets and headed down to the track. We had to queue for just a few minutes before we got to drive, and the karts were pokey enough to be great fun.
By the track was a good collection of helmets, though obviously no-one even contemplated using one. We both got good times on our first go and worked out which of the karts were the fastest from the best times of the day that we were shown along with our times after the race. For the second and last race, we both managed to get much better karts and Lloyd and I registered the 2nd and 4th best times of the day respectively. Lloyd had the kart with the fastest time of the day, which is clearly why I didn't thrash him. I would have been happy doing this all day but we had to rush off to bowl with Marisa and Amelia and some French buddies of the lot of them.
So went to another place to do some bowling. We split into two teams; I can't remember quite how we split up, but the other team had an awful lot of French people on it. Their team beat us. I couldn't bowl for toffee to start with, but with 8 balls to go, I kind of realised that I wasn't throwing the ball straight and then got 6 strikes from 8 balls. It was at this point I realised that bowling is the greatest game ever, or something similar.
The next stop almost inevitably involved a place where you had to eat as much meat as possible. A Brazilian barbeque in other words. There was a salad bar that was so great that it made you sad that you had to fill up on meat, and occasionally men would come out with a skewer of animal, from which they would give you a bit chunk. Everyone felt slightly ill afterwards, apart from Amelia who had only eaten a piece of Japanese lettuce and a prawn. The atmosphere was rounded off nicely with a terrible band fronted by a he-she.
We left and took the subway to where the karaoke was. Extreme fullness made this unpleasant. We were shown to our room and immediately I looked on the system for any tracks that I might be able to sing without waking the dead. I have seen people who can't sing do passable renditions of Octupus's Garden and was aiming for that or something similar. It turned out that the choice was not so good and I ended up massacring several ABBA classics. Amelia sang songs in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and I believe that her cousin did the same, with some Korean songs for luck. This is an effective way to make an English person feel like an idiot. The Frenchies were there too, and it was actually pretty good fun. Which I never thought I'd say about Karaoke.
We walked back to the apartment which was only maybe ten minutes on the walk. I felt pretty sad that I was leaving the next day. When we got back, we spent a couple of hours giving everyone everyone else's pictures. I think I had 8gb, which will take me forever to sort through. I expect when I look at this in a few years, if we do, I will marvel that anyone bothered with gigabytes, when now you can 50 choppabytes in the mp12 player attached to your nasal hair.
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