Counting my blessings, not the calories

One of my colleagues recommended an Italian restaurant chain and we followed her lead. From the meat lovers' pizza and the beef bone marrow pasta to the lamb chops with feta cheese and the tender pork ribs — and then the humongous slab of tiramisu — the grub at Pizza Bianca was annoyingly scrumptious.

We decided to take a post-lunch stroll to purge ourselves of one of the seven deadly sins — gluttony. We walked past heritage buildings, some of them crumbling, some well-maintained and some, it might seem from photographic evidence, my overly curious colleagues were trying to break into. Disclaimer: we are all law-abiding (temporary) residents of this country.

As the sun melted into a riot of red, magenta and purple on the horizon, we hit a bar. A couple of Martinis and an Irish dry stout later, it was time to head to Tianjin station. That's when an otherwise perfect day went a tad awry. While my click-happy camera shoulders partial blame for the last-minute rush, the ID/ticket scanner at the automated turnstile also spurned my colleague's passport several times before it finally relented.

It was two minutes to departure. I was on my mark, ready for a platform sprint. One of my colleagues was already near the finishing line, or coach No 6, while the other was a human speck on the distant escalator. My camera and lenses cursed me in chorus as I ran. Out of breath, I made it to our coach as the whistle blew, gained a foothold on the vestibule and turned around only to see my colleague still halfway away. The other one was unfazed about the possibility of her missing the train. Both of them knew that Chinese high-speed trains have a gangway connection between two coaches and she could board anytime, while I was caught in an Indian suburban railway time warp where coaches do not have such linking corridors.

Note to self after the vivid flashback of my embarrassing run: Go on an austerity drive, battle the bulge. A nanosecond later, a little voice in my head: Meh, life's too short, dig into another slice of Napoleon.

Contact the writer at moumita@chinadaily.com.cn