The Kaulins Family has Dinner with the Royal Couple of Wuxi Expatdom.

The place: the Xinjiang Restaurant on Jiankang Road.  The event: dinner with Mister and Misses King of Wuxi.  It was a great honor for us Kaulins's, mere mortals that we are, to be in the presence of such august people. 

The King of Wuxi is a fabulous raconteur and teller of funny anecdotes.  It has been said that four persons have choked to death while eating and listening to the King tell his knee slapping belly chortling tales of amusement.  The King has the ability to make the banal seem sublimely humorous.  I, at the dinner, choked three times as he told me about some bread he ate but it was worth it.  The King's humor is unprintable, not because it uses foul language, but because it uses superb techniques of physicality combined with a drollness that written prose will not be able to replicate until another Shakespeare or PD Wodehouse comes along.

Misses King of Wuxi is of course a beauty along the lines of Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn.  Misses Royal K has the ability to appear graceful no matter how many drop dead from her husband's jokes.

The King of Wuxi, by the way, is on a diet.  He has lost 13 or 30 kilos.  I can now put my arms around him when I hug him.  The Coca Cola company, unfortunately, will have to lay off workers.

 

My spies tell me that the crowds at the Blue Bar and Ronnie's were about the same Friday night.