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Reader question: When people say a certain “little town is the best place to blow off some steam,” what does it mean exactly? My comments: If this “little town” is in the suburbs near a big city, then it probably means this is a place city folks congregate during weekends, i.e. during the off days. Here, they can, say, walk around, have coffee or beer – lots of beer – or go to the cinema or, if the big city were Beijing or Shanghai, a karaoke bar. And things like that. City folks do things like that to decompress, as they say. City folks like to do things like that, moving into remote corners of the city to get away from it all. By “it all”, I mean, work. Generally speaking, there’s too much work for the city fellow. He or she seems to be always hard at work, 9-5, five days a week – not counting the occasional extra hours’ of work thrown in when there is a deadline to meet. For some, there seems to be a deadline to meet every day, so there. So, therefore, for these people, an escape to the suburbs is a good way to escape, to relax, to detox and to recharge the batteries, so to speak. Oh, and to blow off some steam, to be sure. That means to get rid off some of the pent-up pressure (from fatigue, anger and resentment, etc) one has accumulated at the work place. To blow off steam means to release and let go. Originally, this expression was borrowed from watching the old steam train arrive in the station, billowing huge balls of white steam as it rolls in. The old trains were powered by steam engines, by boiling water into high-pressured steam. Soon, the pressure in the engines is so high that it’s enough to move the train forward. If the pressure is too high, however, then it has to be released lest the tank explode. | 
