Normal

Zhang Liangwen had invited me to go jogging at 6.30am but that didn't happen after a well-past 3am sleep last night, but I still got up before the kids and while Leilei went with Tan I took Xixi out to find somewhere different to eat. We happened upon a place with its doors shut which meant air con was on, and as it's been blisteringly hot for the last couple of days we took refuge there. The couple of women working there had hats on and I realised they were probably from a muslim part of China, so I made sure not to order pork. In the end Xixi and I both ordered beef dishes which were really good and I was surprised Xixi ate a fair amount of hers as it was pretty spicy.

Spicy beef noodles for brunch

I've realised it's just normal being here now - I hardly ever feel like taking pictures and the only reason I did of the food was just to put a message on WeChat so that the rest of my Chinese friends would know I'm back in the country. The only aspect of holiday about being here is the relative lack of work at the moment, otherwise it's been mainly catching up with old friends and enjoying the extreme weather, whether hot or raining or both. Ah yes, and managing siestas - those saviours of sanity.

The iphone palaver continued...in order to reset it I needed itunes so installed that on the work laptop but the bloody thing wouldn't connect. Then the same thing happened on my laptop so I had to put it in factory reset mode. Finally it got recognised but when I tried to reset it another error happened. That had taken the best part of an hour so I put this mini project aside as I wanted to get some ping pong in with the kids. After that we went to the guangchang, and unlike yesterday the bouncy castles were up so I let them slide into five-year-old mode and spend half an hour getting drenched there before showering early.

As it was only 10.30pm, I took the kids out on another magical mystery tour on the dian dong che. Nothing magical other than it's something we can't do in the UK and you generally get to learn something new. Today we just went on a new road and found a flashing light that turned out to be some sort of firefly. If nothing else it got me the chance to talk about how this was chemicals reacting in the fly's bum but Xixi told me off for being too sciency.