on this beautiful blue sky day, we were originally supposed to have a barbecue at zhaomushan botanical garden north of chongqing, but the company driver that was supposed to take us there was called away on the last minute by the boss. sunmeng told me about it yesterday, and i relayed the message to wangyan, who we'd invited to the barbecue as well. so instead, today we went to go visit wangyan at jingyu station, just 9 stopped directly north of us via blue metro line 3 (a few stops north of the chongqing north railroad station).

sunmeng went to go get her nails done around 10:30am, figuring it'd take an hour, and that we'd then later rendezvous at 11:30am at gyq. but it took longer than she anticipated as she texted me she'd be running late. i in turn texted wangyan to let her know we'd get to jingyu not at noontime as originally scheduled by at 12:30pm instead.

as for me, i took the bit of time to finally do a load of laundry at the hotel. i put in RMB2 which give me 20 minutes of rinse time. i stain-sticked the collar of my one dress shirt, and poured in an eyeballed amount of powdered tide detergent i bought a week ago. there was a cleaning woman who give me some tips on where to hang the clothes. on the 4th floor there were beams set up for clothes hanging by the staff, and she said i could hang my stuff there. as for smaller items like socks and underwear, she said i could tie a string up on the upper levels (where was there more sun), but i'd have to remove the string since management had discouraged them from doing that.

the laundry finished faster than expected, i hung up the shirt and two pants on the 4th floor fire escape, and strung up a plastic line on the 6th floor fire escape. there was just enough hooks for 10 items, with only my socks remaining which i decided to hang dry in my room.

i gathered up wangyan's presents and headed down to gyq, to wait for sunmeng. all seemed fine until i realized i'd forgot wangyan's cousin's coach purse. so i texted sunmeng then ran all the way back to the hotel, find the purse from the suitcase, then run back down to gyq. i was a sweaty mess by the time i arrived.

i texted wangyan of our updates and she waited for us at the station right when we arrived. she looked the same as i remembered her, even though she said she put on some weight. we went to go eat lunch first, wangyan was treating us to korean barbecue.