Dom, Tan, Leilei, and Xixi in China: Early jog, late ping pong

Yet another pre-6am wake-up so I Weixin'd Liangwen and we met up for a jog at the guangchang. Unlike last year he wasn't with his female jogging partner, and also unlike last year he insisted in jogging even slower than I wanted to. He also wanted to avoid the road areas due to traffic so we headed towards an area with more trees. This gave me the opportunity to spark up a conversation about electric vehicles and go on about our Renault Zoe. I thought he'd be fascinated but he just took in in his stride (literally), and simply agreed with me when I said that within five years most traffic would be electric. Agreeing and understanding such a prolific change should be a major thing in my book, and should at least have provoked a bigger response! But on reflection I've come to get used to this sort of acceptance of change; change where I'm from comes to a greater extent from the people, whereas here is more "dictated" from the government. Although intuitively it may feel that the former is the better, I'm less and less convinced by it. But the consequence of the latter is that people are more accepting of change from above as it is just the way it is.

It still interests me, the view while waiting for the lift

A really normal view of someone stretching in the guangchang

Later I got the kids a sort of pancake filled with sausage and lettuce and fried in not the most healthy way, then took the kids to A Xia's shop where Tan frequents in order to drop them off as a siesta was beckoning. It was so nice to hear A Xia compliment me on my looks as she said I was more handsome than last year. Pathetic maybe but I'll take it. So many people (a handful) have commented positively on my looks this year it genuinely makes the effort to do the swimming and running worthwhile.

I got back and managed an hour or two's kip without too much trouble and when I awoke set about sorting Leilei's iphone. It was palaver 2.0 as in order to reset the phone I needed to confirm it on another device that had his apple ID, of which there were none. Then in order to reset the password it sent an email to his email, but that required 2FA on one of his devices too. I was going nuts as he'd managed to make monthly paid-for subscriptions on "free" apps that I was massively annoyed about but couldn't cancel until the phone was working. Finally I got it to realise it would need to download the latest update, but after ages it still hadn't done so. Then I realised it may be the VPN that was preventing this, so reluctantly turned it off and finally a couple of hours later it reset the phone. It has taken around 10 hours in total to do this. Not happy.

I needed to pay 2000 kuai to Ling Ming for cleaning and sorting out the flat so got in contact with him and drove around to their new flat around 4.30pm. It's a really nice place at the top of the building and has two floors and views over the river. Their kid is two now but doesn't remember me. Ling Ming wouldn't take more than 1800 and after spending a good half an hour complimenting their new abode I made a move as they were going to his wife's mum's to eat.

Ling Ming and his toddler

In the evening I took the kids to play ping pong in the new place we were supposed to have gone to yesterday. Haiwei had sent a Weixin location and we turned up and arrived on the red dot on the map but there was no ping pong to be seen. We asked about and were told to go to the sports centre but that was far from the red dot on the map where we should have been. Eventually after half an hour of phone calls and misunderstanding someone walked down the road to find us at a hotel and took us to a place down a dark alley not that close to the red dot.

We went out for tea first and it pelted it down not for the first time...very refreshing

What we found inside was a massive ping pong place and a competition that was in full sway. Eventually one table was freed up and a bloke invited me on where we practised for a good half hour. The kids too got their chance to have a practice but had to put up with copious semi-professional phone-photographers snapping them at every opportunity. We'd expected to leave by 10pm but only some time after that did things start to calm down and a big photo opportunity was taken with all of us. Apparently there were two other zhen that had come to compete.

Leilei and Xixi apparently had a good time practising while I was doing the same

It was getting on for 11pm so I took the kids back for a quick bbq as they were peckish. We only got five duck tongues and 10 beef and the total came to 50 kuai without any drinks! That makes Tian Yang Po pretty bloody expensive as it was hardly filling. Back home I kept receiving calls to go out and eat with the ping pong people from earlier. Only at 12.30 did I get the chance to when Tan got back, yet I was met with howls of delight and made to gan bei for a few minutes before I ate anything. It was nearly 2am before I got home.