Dog paws

Tan and the girls went to Nanning in the afternoon, after having visited A Ni's mum, who's in hospital with a lung infection unfortunately.

Er Jie and her husband and Qiqi have been back for a couple of days, and she told me we were going to eat at the place around the corner. Great, I was quite hungry, so we went to the restaurant that opened two months ago and she ordered a huge hotpot for us (including the kids, a neighbour and Jiuma and Waipo). Before it was even served I got a call from A Wu asking me to come over to his friend's house for a meal. I told him I was just about to start a meal, so he said I could come over in an hour. I said I'd ring him. The cow ribs were very tasty and I was quite stuffed.

We got home an hour later and I remembered I needed to buy plane tickets for next week boohoo, so went to the Ctrip website. Conveniently they have a skype button, which means you can make a free call. Even more conveniently, I didn't have to wait any time in a queue. I ordered plane tickets from Nanning to Shenzhen at 3.10pm. That should give us enough time to make it to Hong Kong for the 11.30pm flight back to UK. I did enquire about direct flights to HK, but there were only two seats left and they were three times the price anyway. During this time I got calls from A Wu asking where I was, and I explained I had to finish buying the tickets first, so eventually got to his friend's place around 7.30pm.

In fact there were two "tong xue" (colleagues - from primary school), and they were having a sumptious meal that I just couldn't take part in. However it was nice company, and it was all I could do to do a couple of gan beis. The main speciality they had was dog paws. A Wu made the ingenious statement that they were special because you only get four per dog. I couldn't let them down so I took the smallest one, and started knawing at it. It's not that much different from a really large duck foot, except for the shape and you get more padding. They took delight in seeing me eat it so put another one in my bowl straight away, this time taking photos of me. I made my excuses to get up and play with the host's 6 month old baby girl. She was delightful, and managed a smile or two. So light as well, and no nappy of course. Finally left, bloated, at around 9pm.


Another delicacy - dog paws

Leilei had been up all day and I made the mistake of calling Tan so he could have a word with her at 11pm. As she put the phone down he started wailing for mama, and wouldn't stop for half an hour by which time he'd cried himself to sleep.