Car money

Hmmm, well my diary seems to be unavailable in China, despite the news that after three years' censorship, blogspot has been allowed back for about a year - link. At least I can't access it.

However, I still seem to be able to write it although nothing particularly exciting has happened over the last week or so.

On Monday, after dropping off Leilei to his grandma, Xiao Li and I went to the bank to withdraw some money. Well the biggest denomination bank note in China is the red 100 Ren Min Bi, and Xiao Li withdrew an amount that many people around us would not earn in five years. Plus he already had 10000 in his wallet.... I got a bit worried that this was some sort of mafia-related thing as we joke about being mafia men a lot of the time which I thought was just some fun.

Well we didn't get mugged, and it turned out boringly that Xiao Li just wants to buy a car (so much for bank cards or cheques). I asked him when and he said at the end of the month but it is the 4th today and we've still not been to a garage (or maybe you don't buy cars from garages here). I wanted to ask him about the interest he'd be losing in the meantime but I suspect I wouldn't have got a logical answer, or that you don't get interest in China.

When they talk about the mafia, I don't think you need to imagine dodgy Italian types in suits. Tan told me a story about the pregnant girl downstairs: Last year, before she fell pregnant, she was in a Karaoke place with her friends, one of whom drank too much or took drugs and in her hysteria jumped up and down on the couch and pretended she was going to jump out of the window. One of the ladies who works in the place came into the room to see what the fuss was about and when she saw the drunk woman told her to go home and die there instead of in the karaoke bar.

Well, this really pissed off the now pregnant girl, and she called her boyfriend to get his mafia mates around to ... well I don't know, really. Anyway, the karaoke place in the meantime had called the mafia around to get rid of the drunk woman and her friends from the bar. It transpired that both sets of mafia arrived at the same time and promptly went out drinking together!

The slightly sad ending to the story is that the employee who told the girl to go home to die lost her job.

It's things like this you have to think about when you criticise our police. At least they would probably have been worth ringing.

On Thursday we went to Huang Chun's new place. She was Tan's best friend when she lived in Pingguo, and is recently married to a man who is younger than her. Well, this place, although not huge, looked like something out of a style magazine - a 50" flat tv attached to the wall, marble floors, lighting at weird angles. I'll put up a photo later. All in all nice to look at but doesn't feel very livable in if you ask me. Still, I imagine that's the way it's going to go in China - more western style apartments in private blocks with security guards and a single pretty garden for the inhabitants. The tackiest thing about it was this horrible elevator music emanating from the garden. At first I thought it was some kids with a radio, but then discovered it was coming from speakers disguised as black rocks dotted around the garden. It was too loud; you could almost hear it from inside the apartment and it made me think of 1984 with the microphones hidden everywhere. I'm sure it was not intentional, but it made my Western mind think that this was some covert means of inducing soporific inertia to assuage any thoughts uprising and rebelling.

Huang Chun's new house. Leilei particularly liked the glass-covered step up to the dining area, under which was an assortment of white stones, shells, and orange table tennis balls which he calls "ba ba qiu" (should be ping pang qiu). I liked the tv.