Today’s effort to make yet another return to the café has once again failed. This time it was not entirely due to subjective reasons; there were also some objective factors:
Plato Café has changed. When I came in today, I was first startled by the “Merry Christmas” decoration at the door: at this point in the year, we are in the period farthest from both the previous Christmas and the next one, so why is “Merry Christmas” still posted at the entrance? Still, I gathered my courage and charged in, only to discover after entering that the room layout had been adjusted, and I didn’t recognize a single one of the new servers. What mattered most was that even the familiar background music had changed. So in the end I fled back to the neighboring Bifengtang to drink my fill of beverages. (For Plato Café, see: https://yilinhut.net/2006/04/16/371.html )
A few days ago I mentioned that going to a café requires a certain mood, and that mood is not the mood one has when returning to Weiming Lake. Going to Weiming Lake calls for a carefree and relaxed mood, but going to a café does not necessarily require that; whether one is relaxed or weighed down, cheerful or melancholy, one can go. What a café requires is another kind of atmosphere: perhaps what can be called a petit-bourgeois air, or the so-called Bobo (bourgeois + bohemian), or something I would call aristocratic in flavor.
After all, a café is a noble and luxurious place, and probably from after the World Cup onward, Plato Café and Bifengtang began competing over “all-you-can-drink” offers, each advertising a student-card deal of 12 yuan for unlimited drinks. After that, they no longer held cultural salon events either, and in the end Plato Café was turned into another option when Bifengtang was packed to the rafters. That made the café’s atmosphere thinner and thinner. So ever since Plato started its 15-yuan all-you-can-drink promotion, I’ve gone there less and less. And after renting a place off campus, I simply never went again. Of course, since I no longer went to Plato, I also stopped going to cafés like Shangdao and the like, which are dim beyond words.
Because I have spent the past half-year thoroughly resetting my mood, I seem to have returned to the state I was in two years ago and even earlier: standing outside upscale consumption venues, looking in but not daring to enter. Perhaps some chance event will be needed before I can return to the café—maybe a new café opens somewhere, or something else happens.
2007-05-27 14:25
Bifengtang
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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