had dinner with von and darryl at sweetea cafe (formerly a tea tray in the sky). i am most fond of this small vietnamese cafe on mass ave, across from porter exchange, which i had stumbled on in the first week of school. cozy and inexpensive, with no more than 6 tables, run by cantonese speakers, and with a good selection of leaf teas. dinner last night recalled primary school canteens - we had tall latte glasses full of ovaltine (army milo! said von and darryl simultaenously) and chrysanthemum tea (real dried chrysanthemum, just like your mothers made you drink!) to go with our baguettes (extra wangsui!) and fried turnip cake (with all the right sauces!) i am too tired to blog about it now and will leave it to von, division of labour &c. besides which he knows about food, not me.

then we all come back to my place and have tea and speak dialect and try to download theme songs from old sbc serials (von wants that song about ye xu wo, yi ge ren....apparently lee hsien loong's favourite. heh.) and chinese movie soundtracks. i let von and darryl debate von's pet topic of the week (whether he is a heartlander/cosmopolitan, and whether that is static identity or simply performance.) and we eat butter wafers and try to get von to read about the aesthetics of the plum flower as expostulated in 病梅馆记 in earlier post, in addition trying unsuccessfully him addicted to the ruan lingyu soundtrack. and von corrects my teochew and i miss choonping terribly and his demonstration of the tones in teochew and long for him to tell von off (you speak teochew like an acs boy speaks chinese!) and then many hours later everyone staggers home and for a little while i sit out in the hallway where four of my hallmates are having collective grad school meltdowns and then i decide it was safer and saner in my own room. and then it was book of duchess and pearl which i speedread as far as it was possible to speedread middle english and then sometime later it was morning.