October 18, 2014
A date with the most beautiful girl in the world: For the tramp who can't use chopsticks
Dea's train was delayed. I stood there outside the arrivals area with my bike waiting for her for a long time, and as I was doing so another touring cyclist came over to me. Needless to say he was from Korea, but he didn't speak very much English at all. He was very enthusiastic though, and wanted to take me to lunch. I considered it. I mean, it didn't look like Dea would be arriving any time soon, and I was a bit hungry. But no, I hadn't come all this way to go on a date with a Korean man, so I decided to stay and wait. I tried to exchange stories with Mr Korea but seeing as we had no common language and all he did was keep showing me various train tickets the only thing I could surmise was that he was, unusually, taking his bike out on a tour of the country by train.
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The enthusiasm of the Korean man began to attract the attention of a few passers-by and one or two of them wanted their photo taken with us. The most prominent of these was, bizarrely, a policeman. Not only did he pose for photos with each of us he then grabbed his camera and started photographing us from all angles. It was really rather a strange moment to have this man in full police uniform acting like a professional photographer as he snapped away. All of which attracted even more passers-by to stop and watch. It was rather like when a crowd gathers around a street performer, and the more people that stopped to watch, the more others became intrigued, and the bigger the crowd grew. To make matters worse my Korean friend slipped quietly into the background, and it was just me, the bedraggled tramp-like mud-man that was the centre of all the attention. More and more people crowded around, photographing me. I think one or two girls were screaming at the excitement of it all. People kept coming up to pose next to me, and I can only apologise to all of them because in all of these photos I am not looking at the camera but instead trying to peer over everyone's head in order to watch the arrival's exit in case Dea should arrive. And this would have been a really great time for her to have arrived too.
But arrive she did not as her train had been delayed for an hour and a half and the crowd finally dispersed and the Korean man left. Thereafter I took a seat away from the bike so as to avoid a repeat of such absurd scenes and prepared myself for meeting Dea. Clearly my appearance was likely to be to my disadvantage in terms of creating a good first impression, but I told myself that didn't really matter so long as I was careful to greet her with a heartfelt compliment. As long as I remembered to do this, to make sure that she knew that I thought she looked good, which she inevitably would, then I was confident she would forgive me my own appearance.
And then she finally arrived. But she took me by surprise, as she had come from another arrival area and therefore approached from the other direction. 'Don't forget the compliment!' I thought.
"Dea! Hi. You... you're very tall!"
'You f*cking idiot'
"Yes I am" she replied.
'Don't you think she already knows she's f*cking tall, you f*cking moron' My brain wasn't being very nice to me.
My initial attempts at conversation weren't very good, but I swiftly apologised for that; "I haven't spoken to anybody in a very, very long time," I explained. She seemed willing to forgive this, and allowed me the opportunity to get myself cleaned up in a hotel before we went out anywhere. I think she also felt like this was a good idea anyway.
So I took a shower and bought some new trousers which were real Nike ones for only five pounds. At least, I think they were real Nike ones. They wouldn't sell me fake Nike ones would they? Not in China? And at some point, I think it was the next day, me and Dea went out together to a restaurant for what I would consider to be our first real date.
It took quite a long time to find an appropriate establishment because I needed somewhere with pictures of the food that I could point to in order to be fairly sure of getting a vegetarian meal. Eventually we did find somewhere on a side street, just a small place, nothing too fancy. The pictures weren't actually very good but there was food going out to another table and we pointed at the things that looked most vegetarian and asked for that, then we took a seat.
We sat opposite each other and I looked at her and thought about how beautiful she was. I hope I remembered to tell her this at some point. I can't really remember what we talked about. I think I probably talked about traffic too much. Then the food came. We each had a bowl of noodles and then two slightly-vegetarian-looking dishes were placed in the middle. On closer inspection they both contained meat and had been cooked in animal fat, so even the vegetables in them tasted like meat "You're going to have to eat all of this" I said. Then the woman in the restaurant came over and tried to ruin my noodles by pouring the meat dish all over them as she tried to show me how it should be eaten. "Nooo!!!" I protested, and stopped her. Then I had to try and eat the noodles with the chopsticks. I can't use chopsticks. Overall I think the meal went very well.
To finish off this successful date I took Dea to a bridge to watch the traffic. We'd already done this earlier in the day as well, I found it a really great pastime. When cycling in this madness it was terribly stressful, but standing on a bridge watching it was hilarious. "Look at that guy!" I cried, "walking across the middle of it all! And that car, what is it doing? Look they've made a traffic jam and there were only about six cars trying to get through the junction!" I thought it was brilliant to watch. I'm not sure Dea enjoyed it so much.
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