Black eggs, red tea, blue win

Despite my forced fasting I didn’t wake up early and famished, and even skipped breakfast, which wasn’t hard as it was getting on for midday by the time I actually properly surfaced. I didn’t even go for a proper lunch but bought a pack of Japanese “beans”, which are peanut-flavoured hard things and some fairly tasteless things the texture of skips, and they saw me through till teatime. I fancied watching the football again but Tan got a call and announced we’d been invited to eat by A Xia.

So off we went to the usual Li Jia He Xian again and had a sumptuous meal, this time with one of my favourite dishes, pi dan (black, translucent, boiled eggs). Afterwards, A Wu wanted to take us blokes to his office, but I wanted to invite them back to our house to drink tea, as we’d hardly had any visitors so far, and Biao ge (Xiao Pan’s husband) had thoughtfully given me a couple of boxes of red tea a few days ago.

Ladies - from left to right: A Xia, Xi Li, Tan, Qian mei, A Ni, A Hua and Xiao Pan

One of my favourite dishes - liang ban pi dan

So the ladies went off to chat and the blokes came back to our place. We did actually drink a lot of red tea. But it was interspersed with gin and lemonade, as I introduced my friends to this spirit. Despite their looks of disdain on first tasting it, they continued to down the third of a bottle that I had left, and I hardly had any at all. Biao ge even called his wife to come and bring another bottle of shui bi (lemonade). It was very nice and comfortable to see our house being used as a home with friends around, especially as it centred around my tea table. As 11pm drew close I turned on Awl’s ex-laptop with the broken screen that is now plugged into the tv and searched in vain for a decent stream of the Bolton – City match.

A Dong, Biao ge and A Wu making themselves at home

The lads enjoying some tea, among other assorted beverages

As it was late the other blokes left as they don’t quite share my passion for City, and I finally managed to find a good enough stream at half-time. An ok 3-2 win for us but could have made it easier – still I’ll take 6 points from the first two games anytime. It still felt early at 1am when the game was over so I justified a visit to the bbq place by the guang chang and ended up chatting with some blokes who were from Ku Nan I think. Then I took my bbq to the seafood place where I ended up sharing a bit and chatting to some other blokes with a few more bevs. Finally got home at gone 2.30am and decided to sleep in Leilei’s room as the two of them were once again with Jiuma.