Friday, July 27, 2012
Mario Kart Wii and crap KTV
I woke up to a pair of small feet in my face and gathered very quickly they belonged to one of my offspring, thankfully the female one. It was already nearly 8am which meant it was too late for sporty stuff but my tummy wouldn't really have allowed it anyway. I moped about at home for a bit before going to the local jiao zi place to get some lunch and the kids and I ate it at home. A bit later A Da and Nong Kaicheng called to ask if they could pop around and duly did, and the next couple of hours were spent with the boys playing Mario Kart on the Wii.
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| Guess whose feet were in my face |
While the kids were playing I thought I'd try to get 40 winks. Some chance - Tan rang to ask me to go downstairs to pick up a vacuum cleaner that had been delivered at the security place. So she had ordered one after all. It looked a rather pathetic attempt after I'd constructed it, and later when Tan tried it it wasn't particularly impressive as sucking up the dust. Well what do you expect from 130 kuai?
A Da and Nong Kaicheng left a little later so I took Leilei out for a ride and to go to Yi Xiao, the place I used to think was a toy shop, but is in fact the name of a school - the toy shops just happened to be situated by the entrance. I let Leilei choose some more battle cards for 2 kuai and then we caught up with A Da and Nong Kaicheng again. Leilei had refused to go and eat with them at A Hua's place as he was a bit angry due to something that happened at Mario Kart. Although he's not much shorter than A Da and Nong Kaicheng I have to remember that he is four and five years younger respectively and I suppose there will be some misunderstandings at times. Luckily at this age such tempers are short-lived and forgotten about easily.
We found a place on Jiang Bin Lu, the road where Tan's favourite bbq aunty sometimes comes, and got Leilei some jiao zi that he shared with me. Until this year it has either bucketed down or been scorchy sunny. But for the last few days, since the last big storm it's actually been drizzly, making it significantly cooler and slightly UK-like. The rain has also somewhat curtailed our eating-out habits, so I was glad it held off for 15 minutes while we were sitting there.
More Mario Kart was required so I took Leilei and A Da back on the dian dong che with Nong Kaicheng following on his pushbike. We met Xiao Nong waiting downstairs for Ling Ming and surprisingly Leilei was happy enough to have his photo taken with her.
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| The boys with Xiao Nong |
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| Mario Kart Wii! |
After another bash at Mario Kart the boys had to go, and Leilei asked to go to Waipo's house to play. On the way back I bumped into a bloke I know who used to run a food place I frequently got my breakfast from back in 2008 and 2009. He told me he had a new business selling beer and doing bbq by the guangchang. I hadn't seen it before but he told me to come that evening, so I asked him what his number was. He said he didn't have his phone on him, which wasn't the type of answer I was expecting, but he told me to tell him mine as he would remember. This isn't very extraordinary as for the Chinese numbers sound like other words and thus seemingly random strings of numbers for us can make sentences for them.
Well in this case after I'd got through the first five numbers he told me to stop and start again. This time I got to seven numbers before he realised this particular sentence was not rememberable. Instead of doing something sensible like telling me his number he proceeded to try to etch my phone number on the inside flap of a beer box. It took several attempts and minutes before he was able to read back what he'd scratched in and I doubted he'd be able to read it later.
Back home I got another phone call from Lu Wen, whom I'd met the other night and he'd paid for my bbq. He was asking me to go out that night too for some beer. I said maybe. Then of course A Wu called me to go to sing song. It was already nearly 10pm and I couldn't really be bothered so I used the excuse of having to rescue A Ni's ipad, which was disabled due to A Da giving the wrong password too many times. Unfortunately, A Ni had never used itunes, so there was no easy way of getting it back. After some research I set it into "DFU" mode and spent a few hours downloading the latest firmware in order to reset it. Finally it was downloaded but itunes couldn't confirm it was genuine or something as it couldn't check with its update servers. A long time searching later I found out it just seemed that the site was blocked, but I hit on the idea of running a proxy server from my London laptop, and pointing the computer at that. That actually did the trick and the ipad was reset. If only I could explain exactly what I had to do and get appreciation for that. The women probably thought I was having fun sorting all that out.
I finally relented to A Wu's calls and texts, and while A Ni and Tan were chatting at our house I drove to the local KTV to meet him and the friends that were desperate to see me. Sadly, when I walked into the large KTV room there were only three blokes and A Wu there. They were all half cut and I had no interest in being there whatsoever. I did a few half-hearted gan bei's and one quarter-hearted rendition of "Peng you" before even A Wu realised there was not much benefit in us being there so we left before midnight. The girls were still chatting when I got back, with A Da bored and listening to music on the sofa. I told A Ni that A Wu was waiting for her downstairs so she left with A Da at around 12.30am, leaving us a bit of time together before getting some sleep (both the kids slept at Waipo's again tonight).
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