Saturday, August 19, 2017

Foreigners and Waterworld

Tan was taking the kids to some “Waterworld” in Baise. I was asked if I wanted to go and decided I would as it would be an experience out of the house after having worked all week, plus wanted to be with the kids. Surprisingly this visit wasn’t cancelled as most are here. I had to rush to get some food from the local supermarket and happened upon two Ghanains there. Apparently one is working in Pingguo, so he is one of my nemisi, and the other works in Baise but comes down most weekends. I bet they just love looking bloody different from the rest. But anyway we exchanged WeChat IDs and said we’d meet up soon, as if being non-ethnically Chinese was a reason to do so.

After grabbing money from the bank, and receiving multiple phone calls to hurry up, I got home and we took Chuan Chuan’s car for the journey and Tan took another friend’s. I was a little bit mortified to see the BCH was doing very well against BTC, and I’d bloody dumped my one when it was worth $500. Now it had crept up to $900. Because I was angry I decided to exchange some BTC for a few hundred MIOTA. Not a great decision as it was going for 90c but reason doesn’t work like that. In fact over the course of the 90 min journey I think I made three purchases of MIOTA as actually I’m quite interested in a non-blockchain distributed ledger technology and if it actually works it could render the former technology less interesting.

We got to Baise at 4.30pm, the most fiercely hot time of a ferociously hot day anyway. Just the walk from the car park to the entrance saw us leaping from shady place to shady place like crabs darting from pool to pool on a tided-out beach. Then we saw two black women walking past us. Gosh, two Ghanains in Pingguo and then this? Then another two white people walked past and I thought of going home. Then I saw that all the adverts for Waterworld had foreigners on them and I gathered that they worked here. Indeed when we got in the grounds and dumped our clothes and phones into the lockers we saw a trail of around 15 foreigners dressed up and doing what I suppose were foreign things in front of the locals who were happy to take snaps of them. The girls’ smiles looked particularly false here without too much effort to make it look real.

Tan and most of the ladies left at 6.30pm - so under two hours for 125 kuai and not even any swimming...it seems hardly worth coming especially factoring in the three hour drive. But I’m probably over-thinking it as usual and putting efficiency over...something. Then I bumped into Haiwei and his wife sunbathing as it turned out they’d decided to pop up here too. We agreed to meet up later for a bite to eat as they’re eating snails in Tian Dong soon.

So we left in the other car at 8.30pm and got back at 9.30pm. We found an expensive and crap bbq (well, 61 kuai and the fei niu didn’t turn up - won’t be going back there). I took the kids for a quick ride and some exercise outside before getting them to bed, before going out at midnight to see Beihai Huang who was drinking and happy to see me, so I stayed for a late tipple. Then some other mates turned up at a neighbouring table so I joined them for a bit, then what do you know? Haiwei turns up at 1am. He said something about meeting up at 10.30 tomorrow morning as it’s his son’s something-or-other, and we’d be eating at midday. Ok.

Mates at Huang's Beihai place

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