Absurdly I woke at 0530, tried to drop off again and gave up by 0630. It did however mean an early breakfast after a shower and a much needed shave, having not had time to scrape my face for the two previous mornings.
The anticipated bike ride (which Alice was also going to join) was called off by Jens and Shona as they feared (erroneously) they would be caught in heavy rain midway. No wet stuff has yet fallen although it’s odds-on it will sometime tonight.
Steve left to walk to the lunchtime rendezvous (M Café), leaving Alice and me to follow on later in a taxi. Little did we know then that we would wait half an hour to no avail for either a taxi or a Didi car to take us. Nobody wanted the fare because of bad traffic. Eventually we achieved success but only by paying the ransom of treble fare. Even then the driver had no clue as to where we wanted to be and ultimately left us some distance from our destination. The GPS on Alice’s phone guided us in on foot.
After a flagon of Asahi there outside in the fake grass “garden” area, it was decided lunch would be in a Korean restaurant the others had recently discovered. It was a strange establishment in that patrons are required to remove their footwear on entry. The central dining area was on a raised dais and there were low-slung tables with “pits” to enable people to sit without crossing their legs (thank God) whilst they sat on the wooden floor.
Shona did the ordering and a veritable cornucopia of dishes began to arrive. Not all were to my taste but enough were in order for me to inwardly declare it a rather decent choice of eatery. They did serve barbecued pork and beef which the norm seemed to be to put with a clove of garlic and some unidentified sauce into a large leaf that had clearly been plucked from a tree, wrap it up and eat the lot. I can’t say eating oak leaves is to my liking, I must say.
The food was accompanied by beer and the South Korean national drink soju. These days I am not renowned for being flatulent but naturally a change of diet can produce unwanted methane. And so it was that after the meal was over and we were chatting, I found myself in somewhat of a cleft stick. Knowing that the sheer exertion of getting up from the table and out of the pit to try go to the gents (it had taken some effort just to get IN it) would see an unwelcome gas leak, I thought perhaps I might just be able to get away with it with nobody being any the wiser if I tried to do it discreetly whilst seated.
I do not think I could have been more wrong. The proximity to the wooden flooring had the mortifying effect of amplifying tenfold the sound. Instead of the hoped-for “phhhfft” I became a helpless perpetrator of the most enormous parp known to man and there could not have been a soul in the restaurant, even those dining upstairs, who could have failed to hear it. There wasn’t even a mangy cur lying in a corner onto which I could shift the blame.
The effect on the General Manager of the Doubletree was both instant and electrifying. From a seated start next to me to the time he had put his shoes back on and was striding off up the road it can have been but five seconds. He has not been seen since.
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