I1-1: 湛江

May 22, 2023

Spicy crawfish and someone who I remember as a college student

Guy—who I met back in 2007 when he was an intern at the Tour of Hainan—would like it I can stay until Wednesday morning so I can attend the Open Mic Night at his Comedy Club on Tuesday night, but, even with the rest of Tibetan Medicinal Bathing still hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles, and even with the knowledge that an extra day is an extra chance for him to get in touch with the right people at the local Foreign Affairs Office, I can not justify this sort of non-pace this soon after starting out.

I've been in Zhanjiang [insert translator rant #27 about the nature of the word 市 and why it doesn't mean "city"] City ever since I crossed to the mainland. At 13,300km² to the island's 33,000km², the fact that it has roughly 80% of the population should tell you everything you need to know about the economic differences between the two. By which I mean to say, even though I live in the provincial capital, and even though I love Haikou, it's bumfuck nowhere and there are a lot more things available to do in Zhanjiang than in Haikou.

Which is why today's excitement is a visit to a recently opened microbrewery that is, at the very least, a supplier for Guy's bar and which may be partly owned by him.

On the last day of last year's Tour, I fell in love with their semisweet cider. Unfortunately, both Guy's bar and the folk music bar we go to in the evening are out. There's a drinkable wheat beer, a pretty decent IPA, and a livid purple abomination¹ that the Chinese call "cider" because cider apparently refers to all fruit-based beer-like products these days².

Brewery owner rehearsing his lines for my video for the seventeenth time

We've got at least one very big brewery that I'm reasonably sure (like most of the world's big breweries) is owned by InBev, and we've got a couple of places making small batches of some darn nice beers, but—and especially when some of the country's best microbreweries³ have started taking advantage of cold chain shipping to distribute across China—none of them are on the scale to be supplying a dozen different brews to more than 30 bars.

Hotpot lunch with Guy and the brewery owner and a bunch of other people whose connections and names I never quite got (there was a girlfriend, and a restaurant owner, and a someone else). Then, before a late night at the folk music bar, back to the hotel for 11 tortuous pages that I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be the source translator on but which I'm still needing to spend ages researching in order to completely rewrite.

¹ It looked, and tasted, like alcoholic grape soda

² I may resemble the remark that girls want froufrou fruity drinks, but I want froufrou fruity drinks that taste good.

³ I love me some 京A

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