Diplomats and acrobats

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Well hello again cyber adventurers,It seems the Blog site has been down but we are back on the air and have much to relate.When we last spoke we had just finished our travel arrangements.The tickets arrived today sometime while we were out.We are on the 18:27 train out of Beijing tomorrow for Xi'an.I am getting ahead of myself though.Yesterday after we left the travel agent we headed back to Bob and Nadia's but not before we stopped at a restaurant for lunch.I went back to the Peking duck and Ann had a combination plate of sorts called a meeting platter.Nice restaurant with business folk eating. Chinese is a strange language and sitting next to people talking you would swear at times that a knife fight is about to break out with the harsh gutteral sounds and what I think is a Beijing accent with lots of rolled r's.Anyway the food was good again and I am getting better with the chopsticks. After lunch we sat with Bob for a while having a beer and chatting. I have known Bob since 1969 or 70 and we have lots of shared friends.The mists of time and other things have obscured the memories but Bob has better recall than I and it is a pleasure to sit and talk about the memories.
Bob and all of the unsung heroes of our Canadian Foreign service finish early on friday and the anticipation of Happy Hour is palpable.It seems to be a tradition here and as we are here to see and learn, off we went to Happy hour at the embassy.There is a bar/club there with TV pool table and a table top hockey game(how canadian is that).All that was missing was Gordon Lightfoot planting a maple tree .The beer is canadian and cheap so it is clear what brings them together.I kicked Carlo's ass on table hockey and then we headed off to the Acrobats. Oh yes I forgot to mention Carlo's school had a terry Fox run this week.
The acrobats were great and we had tickets in the third row center.Very Ed Sullivan at times but very professional and a fw gasps of awe in the crowd.I took some photos and will post them later.After the acrobats we went to the Hole in the wall restaurant.Apparently the ex-ambassadors favourite.It was Japanese place down a small alley in a hutong. Not much to look at to be sure but when we entered the embassy happy hour crowd was well installed.All you can eat was on the menu and made sense to us so we settled in to a feast of grilled skewers of chicken,beef,liver, gizzards,peppers,some kind of meat ball,some corn/grain,rice in seaweed,grilled onion slices, excellent fare.We decided to walk back to burn off the caliries and were all asleep within a few minutes of our arrival at apt 601.

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