Val was off to work at 9, at the English-speaking club for kids. Understandably, I stayed in bed till a little later, before getting up + eating a leisurely breakfast. I was then just about to tackle the washing when I discovered it had somehow gotten to be 12.15. I was supposed to be at the bottom of the building now, meeting Val + going off to a 12.30 showing of “First Contact”, a film about New Guinea. By the time I rushed down there, she had gone to see if I was waiting at the theatre, a few hundred yards down the road. And by the time she’d come back again to find me, + we’d rushed down there again, it had already begun, + we decided not to bother. She felt, naturally, very let down, + missing it just added to our depression.
As some sort of compensation, while we were in our room, a German guy called Peter came in, saying he had a message from Lion, that the people in beds 47 + 50 should go to see him this afternoon at 2.30. Val was one of those people, + we thought that I might as well go too, especially since the other guy wasn’t around. We still had some hopes for the bigger trip, and there’d been some murmurings of a phone message from Terry, the other chap, today. But nothing came thro’, + when Val rang him, she received a curt “not here”, after which the phone was hung up. So, acting on the bird in the hand principle, we went around to see Lion.
His place was a small flat in a place almost identical to Chungking, called Haiphong, just down the road. It was a veritable hive of activity, with a team of women wrapping Walkmans, car stereos etc, in bubble wrap. For these trips one takes absolute mountains of gear (like about 30 Walkmans for example) but the system is apparently foolproof since the organisers have a couple of customs guys paid off in Taiwan. For the longer trips, things are apparently by no means as easy, since Koreas in particular is cracking down hard, + one guy was fined $400. One imagines (or hopes) his organisers paid it for him. Lion himself seemed friendly enough, was happy enough for us both to go – the trip is this Tuesday. We agreed to come back tomorrow to have our visas sorted out.
We went to see “Terms of Endearment” in the evening. It was superbly well-acted, especially Shirley Maclaine + Jack Nicholson. If I were a film director, I don’t think I’d ever cast him in a supporting role, as he’s an amazing scene-stealer. But I didn’t like the film as a whole tho’ – mawkish, sentimental stuff. It achieved the effects it was after, but it cheated – anyone can induce tears by having a kid cry. Val liked it more than I did, but she was more able to identify with the mother/daughter relationship at the film’s core. Glad we saw it tho’ – another one ticked off the list.
And it appears we are good to go, off to Taiwan at the weekend. There is no further comment on Val’s trip to the morning language club, so I can only assume that that too was rejected as a long-term project, and my guess is that they would not have been paying very well. One of my regular cock-ups regarding time – not surprising after my late-night antics – but it did mean we messed things up regarding the film. Correction – I messed things up.
