Right, so Saturday was a day of relaxing. DD's friend Shu Li who now lives in London was back in Beijing and we went to visit her. Shu Li is very very rich. Well really Shu Li's brother is very very rich as he is number 5 on the Hong Kong stock market list (I do not know what that means) but anyway she has a massive house and swimming pool and all that jazz. DD says she is crazy and at first I had this image of a crazy eccentric woman but this was wrong. She was just angry. She shouts at everyone. She's not entirely evil or anything just not much fun to be around. And DD says that if Shu Li wants her to spend time with her she will have to pay for things. So we went to the spa.
At the spa you get naked. I've become used to pretending like everything is normal when it really isn't so I just went along with it. You don't share the shower but there isn't a door. Eventually I'm taken to a room on my own. A masseuse comes in and covers me up a bit. She massages my back. This is kind of nice but at times it hurt quite a lot. I haven't figured out if it's meant to or if there is something wrong with me. A bit of me wonders if it's because I have virtually no muscles though I have no idea why that would make it hurt. Anyway, they do that thing where they stop your blood flowing in your arm for a min and then let go and it feels really nice. It's a bit like the feeling when you have sat on your leg for too long and blood rushes back but without the pins and needles and feeling slightly concerned your leg may have given up on you completely and you'll never walk again.
After the massage I get a facial. It's my first facial so I didn't know what to expect. They rub in about 20 different creams. Some they take off others they leave for a while and then kind of dab you with a sponge. She put some gloop on and then covered my eyes and left. Then I thought I could hear her in the corner and I thought why is just watching me, surely this isn't normal, oh my god maybe she is going to kill me! So I try to open my eyes and it really hurt because the things covering my eyes have got some kind of bloody soothing cream on them. The pain caused my paranoia to subside and I realised she wasn't in the room it was just the air con rattling.
Next she attempted to ask me if I wanted to have my eyebrows done. It took a while to get this across. I thought she was telling me to close my eyes at first and then I thought she wanted to do my eyebrows so I said yes and then she looked confused and started pointing at her eyebrows so I said they looked nice. Eventually she got a pair of tweezers and a eyebrow razor and waved them at me. I picked tweezers and she used the razor anyway. Though to be fair I do have a lot of eyebrow.
Finally she gets a pair of ultra thin tweezers and sticks them into my face. This was by far the most painful part of the whole thing. After a while she says tong bu tong (which means does it hurt) I say Tong! (yes!) and she shows me all the gunk she has pulled out so far. It's quite amazing that I could have that much crap in my face and not know about it really. I let her continue without complaining and felt a bit guilty later when I covered my face in foundation because we were going out.
So I've learned that being pampered is fairly painful and rich people have to go to much less effort to look good than everyone else because other people do it for them but it's not a fun experience and they would be happier with the gunk in their faces.
For the evening we went to dinner with a couple who are friends with DD. DD was in the military secret services from the age of 14-19 and this is where she knows the man Wan Ge from (I remember his name because it sounds a bit like wanker though he seemed very nice). His wife who introduced herself to me as Kylie is learning English (from someone from Liverpool which I said was a little unfortunate but I don't think she understood). Their daughter goes to university at St Andrews and might be considering staying in Scotland so Kylie wants to be able to communicate. I wanted to say in that case learning English from a Liverpudlian might not be such a bad idea cause the Scottish accent is even harder to understand. But I didn't.
So we had a hot pot which is amazing. You have a a big bubbling pot in the middle and you throw stuff in and fish it out once cooked with your chop sticks then dunk it in a bowl of brown tasty stuff. It's great. In China they eat a lot. And they seem offended if I don't also eat a lot. So I've been trying but there is a limit. The other issue I have is that they eat fast. Some of you will know that I am not capable of eating quickly and I feel a bit silly when everyone has finish about 30mins before me and has eaten twice as much.
Anyway I need to get to the interesting bit. So Kylie says "do you like shopping" I say yes and she looks at her watch. It's 9pm. "We go" she says. So I follow her and we go to some Harvard inspired store and she picks up a few jackets and then she takes me to another store and says "do you like this store" I say yes because I've never heard of it and I don't want to offend her. She then says "anything you want I will buy for you, because I like you". Obviously a bit of me wants to buy everything just for the sake of it but I feel a bit worried about picking something too expensive. So she basically picks for me. I try it on and try to see how much it'll cost but the labels don't have prices on. She buys them for me and it comes to 1070 yuan (about £107)! She pays on a special store card. I'm very grateful and tell her I like her lots as well. Which wasn't a lie. I did really like her before she spent a load of money on me. Although a part of me did think who says money can't buy love?
On the way home DD tells me that the reason they have so much money is that the husband is very high up in the military and he gets bribed a lot! So I feel less guilty about having the money spent on me in a sense but a tad worried about what he might have been bribed to do.
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