Mangoes for breakfast and tea for tea

Up at a leisurely 8am in time for a less leisure 90 minute ping pong session to sweat out any of yesterday's excesses. I realised we still had loads of mangoes from Tian Yang so had the excellent and healthy idea of having a couple for breakfast - luxury! To avoid too many going bad I put the rest in the fridge and brought the other box to Waipo's when we went to lunch a bit later.

Healthy and delicious breakfast

We had been told that Da Jie would be coming today to see her son Ling Ming and younger sisters Er Jie and Tan. Except I suppose Er Jie should be called Er mei as she is younger. It's all rather confusing. Depending on who is calling me I have a different moniker. So if it's Chuan Chuan I'm Yi Zhang, but if it's someone else its Jiu Jiu or Bo Bo so I have to be aware what each means to know if it's me that's being beckoned. Needless to say I must fail quite frequently. So I was interested to hear Tan call Er Jie by her actual name, Tan Lihong, as I thought that within families one never used actual names. Tan said this was quite normal but I have my doubts. I didn't make her aware of my doubts though.

After tea at Waipo's the kids and I went for a ride and we found ourselves near Li Kun's place where we've had tea before. We weren't on a mission so decided to give him a ring and he said he be around in a few minutes. Of course we weren't expecting him straightaway so popped into a small supermarket we hadn't seen before. This was the third or fourth place I've been to this year that sells fizzy soda water and it was one kuai cheaper than the other places at 4 kuai, so I bought a few and got the kids some sweet drinks too. After quite a few phone calls we finally met up with Li Kun a good half an hour later at A Ni's place as he was near there. After a wee chat with A Ni and son, we followed Li Kun, his wife, and daughter in their 4x4 to his place where I learned this place was his tea-drinking house only and he actually lived by the market. A house exclusively for tea-drinking? I had no evidence to oppose this as we spent the next 45 minutes or so doing exactly that.

The kids were wondering why there was so much phone number graffiti - I think I remember Tan saying it's places offering fake degrees but I've never tried calling one

But the kids were quite bored so as promised I took them to play at the guangchang where they got soaked again on the ben ben chuang jumpy castle before showers beckoned. In the end it transpired that Da Jie wasn't coming today but would be here tomorrow. Then for some reason I couldn't sleep till 3am - must have been the blasted tea.

Colourful scenes at the guangchang