One evening, seven or eight years ago, I popped over to say hello to people working at the hostel where I stayed when I first arrived in Beijing. I was sitting at the bar, when the manageress came in, accompanied by a very large, very fierce and scary looking Finn. He turned out to be a really nice guy and we drank beer and talked till dawn.
I remembered Scary-looking Finn (whose name I’ve forgotten) when I saw this picture at Liuzhou Laowai. It’s an 8-meter-deep hole that suddenly opened up in the middle of a road down there:
When I met Scary-looking Finn, he’d just spent a couple of months in hospital after riding his motorbike home in Liuzhou one night and crashing down a suddenly-opened hole very much like that one. Is this a particular feature of Liuzhou? Roads with Liuzhou characteristics?
Scary-looking Finn’s probably dead by now. Despite his appearance, he actually had muscular dystrophy and only had a couple more years to live.
He had an excellent sense of humor, especially about his ability to learn Chinese. Everyone else in his class in Liuzhou seemed to take to the language like a duck to water. (I was going to write Peking Duck, but dead roasted ducks probably can’t swim.) Scary-looking Finn sank to the bottom of his class as quickly as he fell down the Liuzhou pothole. When it came to exam time, the teacher walked round handing out the papers until he arrived at Scary-looking Finn. “You can draw a picture,” he said.
Goodbye, Scary-looking Finn.
Post a Comment