It's 2 a.m. in Hong Kong and GF is drunk

Also, she's trying to digest a 15-course dinner served in celebration of Chinese New Years. But she can't sleep with all that food and all that booze -- and the jet lag finally caught up to her -- so at 2 in the morning, she rings me up. Fortunately, that's 10 a.m. here, and I was in the the final throws of writing a really BORING paper.

"Everybody was Kung Fu fighting!" she said (and an "earworm" of that song was immediately deposited into my head -- thanks!). They were putting on a demonstration, it seems. And there were some "Hong Kong dancers," whatever that means. She adds, "I think we drank 29 bottles of wine at our table."

The connection on my cell phone is crystal clear. Better than calling across town. But GF's voice is fading. She's about to fall into slumber. "I just called because I couldn't sleep, and your voice usually puts me to sleep," she says. "It's working...."

I'm not sure how to take that. But what the hell. I'm happy to be of service, I say. Sweet dreams.

Those words spark a thought in her. "Soup," she says. "They eat soup for dessert here. It's not sweet at all. They served me fungus and sweet bean soup last night for dessert. I don't want to eat that again. But I liked the shark fin soup. The shark fins were like noodles. Like glassy noodles. They didn't have any flavor. It was shark fin and chicken soup, so it just looked and tasted like chicken noodle soup. But there were no noodles. Just shark fins."

Then she yawns. "Ugh, I am so drunk. They've been getting me drunk every night, and we've been doing business at the same time. It's very ... weird ... to conduct business when I'm, like, smashed." With that, she bids goodnight and slips off to dreamland.

I don't envy the hangover she'll have on that 15-hour flight back to the states. Makes me queasy just thinking about it.