Day 61 - Thor's Birthday

Monkey Girl!

June 8th, 2015

I am woken up by a message from Laurens about the plan for tonight. Technically, his birthday starts at midnight tonight, which means he will want to celebrate both tonight and tomorrow. That means tonight is “The Game," hospitality industry night. Technically, I work in hospitality because I was never fired, but I was also never paid. This leads to a slight problem in admission.

Shimou messaged me throughout the day to quiz me on my Chinese pronunciations, getting me to send recordings of the four vowel pronunciations, and doing it with the various common combinations of vowels. I’m getting better, but the difference between them is still thin. Another one is Father: ba ba is father, downward intonation; ba ba, upward intonation, is akin to saying “poo poo,” so they told me.

I’ve finally begun working cardio back into my exercise regime, going 2 days of weigh, 1 day of cardio. For those of you who hate cardio, and are looking for good results, I suggest High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Studies have shown that people doing HIIT for 30 min showed twice the fat loss, less muscle loss, and found that the time passed faster than 1 hour of conventional cardio! The form I’m choosing to experiment with is from a Canadian study that found 30s of 100%, hard-as-you-can-push-yourself effort, then 4 minutes of moderate cycling as a rest period, repeat for half an hour. If you’re new to fitness, or rusty on cardio, I’d suggest only 1-2 days a week of this, and ease your way into it.

Caio wearing Yuzu's hat

On the way back from the gym, an Asian woman asked me for help to somewhere I didn’t know. I told her I couldn’t help her and moved away. We were both waiting at the corner for the lights to change, going in different directions, when I realize that I’m not living up to the standard I want to. I go over to her, ask her where she’s going, and google map it. I mean, it took 30s and cost me nothing, but I almost passed her by. She seemed grateful, and I felt better for helping.

I worked at home until meeting at Laurens’ place for his birthday. They were ready to head out when I arrived, and I met a number of cool people. His place is like a hostel, both for the good and the bad. Brazilian Caio, French Leia, German Julia, Yuzu, Alberto, Sander (forget his nationality), and Japanese Kohei walked with a relatively drunk Laurens and a fairly sober me to The Game.

Watch out!

It was a very quiet night at the game, much more than the past weeks we had gone to hospitality night. That's a little disappointing. Nonetheless, we had a lot of fun, danced about, monkeyed around, and were generally the ones having the most fun in the centre of the room. We sang Laurens Happy Birthday, which I made sure to yell as loud as I could to goad strangers into join. The entire room seemed to be singing him happy birthday, which amplified the awkwardness for Laurens (what do you do when being sung to?!) and humour for me.

The crew dwindled, as people dropped off because they had to work early in the morning. Laurens and I stayed until closing, and walked back together.