Dom, Tan, Leilei, and Xixi in China: North Korea only lost 2-1 to Brazil then early flight to Nanning

Slept for only 2 hours and woke up at half time during the Brazil v N Korea match. Leilei woke up shortly after so we watched the second half together and saw the North Koreans score a good goal and only lose 2-1 - amazing stuff! As the first free shuttle bus to the airport wasn't until 6.30am, and our plane was at 7.50am, we decided to get two taxis there at 6am to be sure. I'd packed the eight bottles of duty-free booze into our check-in luggage as we have to do here. When in discussions with the bloke in the duty-free in Heathrow he found out that adults could take two bottles each to China if staying under six months. then I realised Waipo was going to be staying a lot longer, I mean indefinitely, so reasoned she was able to take another two, so we got a couple of bottles of Pims for more friends. This did mean we were really weighed down, and the internal flight had a limit of 20kg per person compared with the 23kg Virgin allowed to HK. My bag weighed nearly 30kg and I was concerned until the lady said it was 5 x 20kg with no limit per-bag. After all bags were weighed it came to exactly 100kg so I breathed a sigh of relief. Just as well I didn't bring a bread-maker and toaster...

We arrived a little late at 9.30am in Nanning with lots of friends to greet us. By 9.45am we were in the cars - Er Jie's (Tan's 2nd sister) was a new Mitsubishi jeep even though she can't drive, and A Wu brought his old Toyota Zefiro. We drove straight to Pingguo where we met others for a meal and beer of course. Afterwards we went to Er Jie's house where we're going to be staying, and on the way I saw a couple of Western women in a san lun che (don't see that very often).

I slept for four hours before an evening meal in our house then A Wu called and said he was picking me up in 2 mins - this is true A Wu style. We drove to his work and gave his workers two cases of beer to go with their meal and then sat down to eat and drink with them. A Wu explained that it was good to treat your workers well as they will like to work for you and produce the goods, one of the few times I have really agreed with him. Then we drove the 10 minutes back to Pingguo to join yet another meal with some bosses and I had to do a lot of gan bei'ing and cai ma'ing...this went on till midnight by which point most of the bosses were very drunk. However we did get to see Spain being beaten by Switzerland.

When we got back Tan and the kids went to sleep but I wanted to use the internet on the computer in what I thought was the spare room. I wanted to stay to watch the S Africa - Uruguay game but fell asleep well in advance. But at 2.30am (when the game was to start) I was awoken by A Heng (Tan's big brother's son) coming back from wherever he spends his evenings (he's about 20). Apparently it was his room. He didn't seem to mind too much and just went to the living room to sleep on the sofa where Waipo was too. As I was awake I decided to watch the footy but I probably lasted 15 minutes before falling back into the arms of Morpheus.

Some photos of Tan's second sister's house in Pingguo where we're staying