hui2 jia1

In line with the "time" theme from yesterday, it goes without saying that life is too short not to give it some serious thought. After some eighteen months in China, I have decided that enough is enough.
There is a sort of illusion here that everything is available and, indeed, almost everything is albeit with certain restrictions. You can get a decent coffee but you are normally restricted to "Costa Coffee" or "Starbucks" for that and there is no "Cafe Machiatto" on the 'Hauptstrasse', no Tambosie, no Cafe Demler, no Dommayer and no Cafe Florian. On a Saturday evening you can pick up all of the Premiership football live with English commentary but then there is no buzz in the city with the fans floating around before the big game. Of course, one shouldn't complain, this is a comfortable enough existence but the emphasis there has to be on "comfortable enough".
So, what about China? Well, I have seen the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, The Terracotta warriors and a few other things. They are all impressive! However, you cannot help but feel that there is something missing and that that might have started to go missing during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. It might have but then that is rather academic. Oh, you can walk through the back streets of Nanjing early in the evening in the summer and the people are sitting outiside, playing cards, supping a cold beer, chatting and slurping their noodles but there is just no 'je ne sais qua' and, while there is a sniff of 'la dolce vita', no convergance of the football fans in the city and the more I think about it, the more I feel like Antoinne, the hero, in Jean Paul Sartre's "Nausea" when he decides, that after his years in Asia, enough is enough.
Of course, in this day and age we do have the world wide web but even here there are periods when you are being hampered for no apparent reason and only this evening i trecked from one "Starbucks" to the next with my laptop only to discover that the wireless connection in all three "Starbucks" in the Suzhou Industrial Park aren't working. In the one closest to me, it hasn't been working for over a week. A simple thing to repair and it is time to leave China.
The picture is of Vienna's 'Cafe Demel' they melt the chocolate for the drinking chocolate in front of your eyes.