A Wu's new work opening and another big meal

Xixi practising karate in the house
A close-up of Pingguo bus station with an interesting mosaic effect (And took this)

Today was the opening of A Wu's new business - a stone producing factory based a mile or so outside Pingguo town. It was a fairly auspicious occasion. There was a "magic man" humming something that sounded like mumbo jumbo to us in front of some candles, joss sticks, alcohol and cooked chicken.
Magic Man making mildly mysterious mumblings

It was a blisteringly hot day in the countryside and the whole procedure took a couple of hours, but after a couple of speeches and loud bangers the whole thing kicked off. It's a fairly simple procedure of blasting a mountain so that rocks falls to the ground, then loading the rocks onto tipper lorries that take them a few yards to a chute. The rocks, from a foot to two plus feet in diameter are then tipped down the chute where they are crushed into stones varying from a fraction of an inch to a couple of inches in diameter. These stones then get sifted and placed onto one of three conveyor belts according to size, with the largest returning to be recrushed. Caterpillar diggers then fill blue lorries with the stones, and the lorries carry them off to other factories to make bricks or whatever else you do with stones.


A Wu`s work in full swing

There were a couple of first day issues; the lorries couldn't drive up the slope from the loading area with a full load, and also they tended to leak stones from the back. The first problem was solved by using the digger to help push the lorries up the slope (though I don't see this as a long-term solution). The second problem was solved by pushing cardboard down the back of the lorry and spraying water there to make the stones stick. Again this is not a long-term solution but it was quite fun to watch. Apparently if the lorries were to leak stones on the roads in town they would receive a hefty fine from the environmental authorities.


A lorry getting a helpful shove (note the piercing later) and then finding the stone leak

Around 11am we went to a restaurant for a meal with A Wu and his friends and the wives. Unfortunately in the area where the restaurant was there was no electricity. Which meant no air conditioning. Which meant we went to another part of town to have the meal. I was told that on very hot days, when everyone has A/C on, there is not enough electricity to go around so certain areas are turned off. It must be pretty grim to own a restaurant in one of those areas; they lost a good couple of hundred quid due to that.

At the other restaurant we enjoyed a big meal with beer till 3pm. All the blokes played cai ma with me, and And learnt how to say "drink a glass", "cheers!", "drink alcohol!" and "toilet". A Wu and his friends carried on drinking and eating but we had to get to the estate agent before 4pm so we left around 3pm rather the worse for wear. Tan signed some more documents and we drank some water. Apparently it will take up to a month for bank confirmation for mortgage and other stuff so it's by no means done and dusted.

And`s pal was more worser for the wear

After a couple of hours' sleep And and I went to the Night Market where they do bbq but we wanted some veg to counter the copious amounts of meat we'd consumed in the last two days. We found a place that did fried sweetcorn and bbq'd grass, and I heard someone calling for me - it was a couple of blokes from the tea shop that I frequented last year near our house. This was quite lucky as they had commandeered the only fan in the eating place, that was normally used for cooling the poor person cooking the bbq. We sat down to our first light meal and endured (enjoyed) a couple of beers.

We'd told our friends that we wanted to watch the Khasakstan - England football match at 11pm and were told no problem we could find a place showing it. We went to the KTV bar at 10pm and the ladies set up a couple of tables in front of the tv for us to settle down with a couple of beers. When A Wu realised there was an hour to go he decided we'd go somewhere else and come back later. That somewhere else was a tea house with a very nice interior (internal stream etc). It then transpired we were going to stay there for the football. However things did not look good at 10.50pm as the sports channel was showing two ladies warming up for the French Open tennis final. Our fears were realised when flicking through the 50+ channels there was no sign of football. I was then told there was no chance of watching it as A Ni's friend has lots of satellites and could not find it either. That's not the main problem - I would just like to have been told they don't know rather than going to the effort of taking us out on a guess that it might be on. Had I known earlier And and I would have gone to an Internet cafe to watch it.

We decided not to stay at the tea place, and went with our ladies for a bit more meaty bbq at another place near the guang chang. A Wu, after his earlier marathon beer session, stayed on the water.