Food and Poo Tea

Despite no kids sleep was once again fractured so much that I didn't bother getting out of bed till 9ish and left Tan while I had a coffee and bit of breakfast to wash down my back medicine. At midday Tan went out to meet A Xia, and a bit later I stepped out of the house to find a bite to eat myself. I had the idea of going back for a nap later so considered getting some jiao zi from the local shop but instead gave Haiwei a ring to see if he wanted to eat too. "Have you eaten yet?" is what is usually used for "hello" here, so by the time we'd both said "hello" to each other I no longer needed to ask if he'd eaten, which somewhat shortened the conversation. He hadn't and bade me come to his office for a quick cup of tea first.

His office is five minutes away from our place but I had a little trouble locating it as for the last few years it had a great wooden eagle standing at the bottom of the stairs. As I was standing looking at the space it should have been occupying and wondering if I'd come to the right place I heard a woman's voice coming from a car nearby: "There's no-one there!". I explained that I'd just been told to come around and she shouted back "that's ok then". I had no idea who I'd find upstairs but I shouldn't have worried; Haiwei was there and we went to a new room where he was brewing up.

I didn't really want to drink tea as it can keep you from sleeping, but it was very nice and quite gentle. And Haiwei kindly gave me a pack of this 10-year-old Sheng Pu tea. More blokes popped in and half an hour later we got in a couple of cars and went to a nice simple place where I ordered a sort of omelette with greens and a couple of other relatively simple dishes. Beer was ordered (not by me) and consumed, and then more ordered. I didn't mind in the least as it would bring my beckoning sleep that much closer, or so I thought. More blokes came over the next hour or so, including 2-1 who I remembered from four years ago during the last World Cup.

A mate, 2-1 and Haiwei where we had a relatively simple meal for once

Haiwei mentioned that his big sister had a daughter who was going to spend a year in a British university, and that one day he would arrange a nice seafood meal and could I come and talk with her when he arranged it? I made some joke about my work for Haiwei being so hard as it involved talking to young Chinese ladies and the blokes seemed to think it was funnier than I expected, so we ganbei'd and ordered some more beer.

Then Tan called, as though she had a remote beer monitor on her phone. But she was actually asking me to get some money out for Ling Ming's wedding; apparently we have to give 2000 kuai as everyone else did. This suddenly reminded me that I hadn't gone to try to retrieve my bank card from the bank, but I didn't tell her that. Instead I told her that I'd come over to A Xia's place to pick up her card as I didn't have mine on me, which was 100% true.

I mentioned about my card to Haiwei. I'm glad I told him as he knew exactly which branch to go to and it wasn't the one I would have gone to at all. So we drove there and sort of pushed in a queue to ask about my card. The teller seemed to know exactly what they was talking about and asked for the number of the card. I was quite looking forward to showing off that I knew all 16 numbers, but they only asked for the last four. And that was it - I had my card back with no further security requested. To be fair I don't expect it's every day that an Englishman leaves his bank card in an ATM in Pingguo. I then called up HSBC to unblock the card, went to the bank to withdraw the cash and brought it over to Tan a few minutes later.

I don't know if it's my Chinese or Haiwei's quick wittedness or both or neither but after this we went to the market to buy a load of seafood. I quite enjoyed the experience, chatting to the market stall holders and picking up the crabs, pretending I knew what I was checking for, when the penny dropped that the meal was to be tonight. I protested that I was tired and needed a nap but was just told we'd get there and drink tea first so it would be ok.

Four of us then went straight to Haiwei's big sister's place, by which time it must have been 4pm. There were actually two houses, one on the fifth, and one on the sixth floor, probably extended family. We went to the one on the sixth floor first to meet the family, who seemed very decent, middle-class folks, before going down to the fifth floor to drink tea with the father. He looked a bit young to be retired, and had dozens if not hundreds of packages of tea in the room. We sat around drinking tea that to me tasted like boiled fish that had been living in polluted water. When asked about it I said honestly that it had a distinctive taste. The father then explained that it was expensive because it was the shit of the insects that lived on the tea leaves. "Aaah", I said. I was so relieved when we moved on to some tea made from actual leaves.

2-1, the father, a mate, and the daughter enjoying a few glasses of insect-poo tea

Despite its nature, the tea wasn't keeping me very awake. I did a rather Chinese thing and got up from my seat, went and sat on the wooden sofa and closed my eyes. I was a bit worried about falling asleep so I avoided counting, even in French, but I felt myself dropping off a little anyway. I eyed a couple of small pillows and just lay down a little to rest my head on something other than wood and the next thing I knew Haiwei was waking me telling me it was time to eat. I didn't know if it had been 30 seconds or 30 minutes but I groggily got up and went upstairs to the sixth floor where it was waiting for us. Haiwei was cooking the last of the greens and we all sat down to tuck in.

Minutes later there was a knocking on the door and a little cheer as some bloke walked in with two crates of 24 cans of beer, ordered, as is usual here. I don't know why we don't have this service in the UK - after all, people order pizzas on the phone.... As is usual more people came during the meal. The girl who is going to UK and Haiwei's elder son started off a bit shy but ended up speaking some English to me and I reciprocated, telling their parents how good they were and how hard it must be to learn here in Pingguo etc. I'm not sure if it was in any way because of this, but the father then presented me with a rather expensive box of tea, which I was slightly relieved to hear was not the insect poo version, and would get better with age.

We did play quite a lot of cai ma, and I won quite a bit too, so I wasn't too affected by the beer. And we left at a reasonably civilised 10.30pm. I got a lift home and found that the kids were once again staying at Waipo's with Chuan Chuan so when Tan got back we had a relatively nice early night.