Charging and unlucky charger

Tan has been told that we're not allowed to charge the electric moped ourselves as if everyone did there would be wires coming down from everywhere and it wouldn't be safe. Not that this is the most safety-conscious place in the world but it does make sense. Instead we need to pay 10 kuai a month to charge up the bike. Bit of a bargain I reckon as I'm sure it would have cost more than that to do it from home. If I was so inclined, I could hide a car battery under the seat and charge that instead and run the house lights off it. But I'm not that way inclined. The way it works is that there is a box attached to the wall where you park the bikes that has a lockable opening to which only the security guards have the key. Inside the top of the box are the slots to put the charger plug in, and at the bottom is a biggish hole where the wires go through to the actual charger. So I tell the guard I want to charge up the bike and he'll come and plug it in for me, then when it's done (this bike takes around 6 hours to fully charge) you just yank the wire out of the box without having to open it. Quite a clever way of ensuring that the security guard only needs to come out once.

Charging a "dian dong che"

With the remaining juice I had in the moped I took Leilei down to "Old Macdonalds" as he calls it. Actually it is more of a KFC place and the only place I've been to where the chicken is tasteless. Waipo and Xixi joined us and at least they had some food. I then dropped them off with Tan and picked up the key to the flat we lived in last year as I wanted to go back to pick up my flipflops. Waipo came with me and we slowly walked up to the 5th floor. The stairs had not been cleaned for months and looked very unkempt. Waipo said she was the last person to clean the stairs, then it dawned on me that she had been away for a year.

Inside, the place was obviously not lived in and had a musty smell to it. Quite sad as I remember the vibrancy of living there not twelve months ago. I didn't find my flipflops, but I did find my guitar from 2008 still almost completely in tune. And finally I got my hands on my camera battery charger. This is the unluckiest charger I have ever had. I was doing some last-minute charging before leaving for China in 2008 and of course I left it in the UK. I didn't make the same mistake last year except I did in the opposite way, and left it here. Now we are reunited it is a bit quicker to recharge the battery, though I've grown very fond of the makeshift chargers they have here where you just adjust some metal pointers so they touch the battery contacts and trickle-charge just about any battery.

A Wu had invited us all to the fish restaurant in the evening where we had some great beef, duck and lamb. I tried to join in with the men drinking thimblefulls of white alcohol but I just can't stand the stuff. I insisted on beer, and the ladies drank cold, sweet, weak red wine. In typical Chinese style I was led away from the table after an hour or so to sit in another private room with some bosses where we gan bei'd and cai ma'd until it was time to start preparing for the England Germany game.

All I can say is that I'm glad it wasn't a 2.30am start. Apart from the 20 minutes where we came back and should have been 2-2 we were by far the lesser team and didn't deserve anything from it. Oh well, time to take the flags down for another couple of years or so. Booooo.