Haiwei meal

Up at 8am so logicked myself to ping pong even though I wasn't massively feeling like doing it. The Chinese (at least here) are well into sweating, like it's a really good thing to do, and I don't disagree with them in general. A good place to do this is around a table tennis table. I was hoping for a siesta but was pleasantly surprised when Yang Haiwei called me to go for lunch. Despite going for a few cups of tea first we did go before 1pm and were very reasonable with only four 500ml cans of 3.1% Li Quan beer between four blokes. I took the opportunity of asking if people were buying bitcoin here. Haiwei was not interested but the other bloke made it look like I'd tickled his funny bone. I said I was no expert by any means but was interested a bit, and he told me that A Wu recently had 5.5 BTC but had sold them. Based on the recent value I bet he wished he hadn't. But that's what it's all about - betting. Even if you don't buy any you're betting that it's too risky to. In fact, annoyingly, every decision you make in your life is a bet in some sense. In every sense actually. It's just a bit hard explaining that to your kids.

But I was really glad to have this bitcoin conversation. It brought a really international flavour to the conversation and we talked about volatility and inflation and I certainly learnt a few new words. I just felt a bit embarrassed that Haiwei was nothing to do with this conversation. I wanted to talk about the concept of money and how I'd explained scarcity, fungibility, portability, divisibility, etc to my kids during the course of a drive to school, which was much more than I'd learnt until a few months ago. But we could save that for another day.

After this nice meal I picked up the kids but they wanted to stay at A Xia's with mama for a bit. This fitted in with me and I managed just a small siesta between 5-6pm at home. At 7pm I went to Waipo's to pick up the kids to go to ping pong. Annoyingly they weren't that interested as I was playing some other friends and they wanted to play me. There is a group of kids that practise every evening at 7.30 but my kids refuse to join in. I'd really love that they do but unless we're here long-term won't force it.

Yuck! Pic from the back of our dian dong che

I left them to shower at 10.30 as Tan was home, and I had a friend calling me to go out to have some bbq. Although I thought it was at the place we'd met last year it was actually just at the bottom of our place, and eventually I got there at nearly 11.30pm. But it was great bbq and I managed to force myself in to pay too; 200 kuai for five of us including cai mai'ing with the boss for quite a time. Bargain!