Roped into moving boxes

Moving day at Mark and Sue's. Conveniently (for them!), I had arrived in Beijing just in time to help Sue and Mark move from their place to another villa in Capital Paradise. After breakfast at "Steak and Eggs" (yes, that is the name of the restaurant), we spent the morning transfering boxes from one house to another and unpacking as much as we could while waiting for the removalists (aka Chinese guys with a truck) to arrive at 2pm. As you can see from the photo, Sue took the unpacking very seriously with dodgy sunglasses on and red wine in hand!

By about 7pm they had done about 3 loads of furniture with a couple more to go. Sue and I headed over to the hairdresser for a wash and blowdry before going out. Mark was kind enough to stay at the house to finish with the removalists while Sue and I jumped in a cab and headed downtown for dinner with some of Sue and Mark's friends ("The Irish").

We went to a Thai restaurant called "Purple Haze" which had amazing food and a good atmosphere. Sue's friends, Dell and Glen, and some of their friends were already at the restaurant. It was a pretty interesting bunch of people, especially the two Claudia's (Polish Klaudia and Mexican Claudia). Klaudia was a professional table tennis player when she was 14 in Poland and came to Beijing when she was 15 on an exchange scholarship to train with the Chinese national team (a Chinese football player went to Poland and she came here). So she's been here for 14 years and speaks fluent Mandarin. Unfortunately, she was badly injured so could not continue but went to University here in Beijing - interesting story!

Dell's husband and one of the other guys in the group run a bar called "The Stumble Inn" where we headed to after dinner. Glen was leaving the Stumble to manage another bar just around the corner from the restaurant so this was his last night. The Stumble Inn was a little bar below ground level. Predominantly full of expats who seemed to know each other, it seemed like a pretty groovy little bar.

We sat there for hours chatting with everyone, drinking and dancing. Sue's friend Dell reminded me alot of our friend Dee - it was kind of spooky.

Before we knew it, it was 5am and we were "stumbling" out of the Stumble Inn to try and find a cab to go home. A funny night!