Dom, Tan, Leilei, and Xixi in China: School and Ghana and another insect meal

Up lateish but not too late to meet up with Haiwei at 11am as arranged last night. But by 10.45 I still hadn’t received a call from him which is strange, so I called him and clearly woke him up. It transpires that we’ll go to his son’s school at 3pm instead…. Well I’d missed breakfast and didn’t fancy doing much for lunch so I snacked on some dried fish, which I usually have in stock for these times. And anyway Uncle Yellow had invited me to a meal this evening which wouldn’t be later than 6pm so there wouldn't be long to wait.

Some boss, I don’t recall his name, invited me to drink tea after lunchtime, which I did until Haiwei called to say he was picking me up. So I left the dian dong che by the tea boss and five minutes later we arrived at the school. It was a bit of a sweaty walk up the five storeys but I duly did my inspection and said it looked very tidy. The term hadn’t started but there were a couple of teachers there drinking tea so I restarted that. Sometimes I think that the ritual of drinking tea is just something to make it look like you’re doing something instead of nothing while waiting for the next meal. At least it always involves conversation, so if nothing else I’m improving my Chinese a fraction.

I’d got in contact with Steve but at 3.15 he still hadn’t turned up. I’d sent him the location on a map so he shouldn’t have a problem, but for some reason he wasn’t there. I told him to look for a black car before realising he could almost be anywhere in Pingguo and see a black car. But WeChat has the option of letting people know where you are, and once Haiwei explained how to use it I told Steve and we found out he was by the guangchang, literally nearly a mile away so it took him a good 20 minutes to get here as this is not a place for quick walking.

Inside we talked a bit about schooling but didn’t go as specific as offering him a job. Luckily he speaks a little Mandarin so I didn’t have to translate everything. Then we were kindly invited to a meal with Haiwei’s family, but I already had my evening plans so Steve would go without me. But I still needed my dian dong che so Haiwei took us there as it was on the way to his house. On the way Haiwei was asking about Ghana. It was a little tricky to converse and semi-translate at the same time especially with words I wasn’t sure about, but it came down to Ghana being colder than here, and with lower storey houses. I could well have missed something. Also, apparently Ghana is relatively rich due to its natural resources such as bauxite and gold. Ah gold, the natural basis for an abstraction of value due to its scarcity, durability, portability (to some extent), fungibility (to some extent), divisibility (to some extent). But imagine what would happen if they found massive reserves of the stuff under the sea in some Ghanaian port (actually it wouldn’t necessarily have to be in Ghana, it just got me thinking). If they found as much gold in one place as has already been mined the value would plummet. It’s not like its value as jewellry or in electronics justifies its value alone. No wonder people have been trying to emulate this in a digital fashion for years...but it took the solving of the double-spend problem before we finally got a workable digital currency that people can trust due to its trustlessness of a central authority. People will look back and wonder how we managed previously.

The meal was a typically matey-one with the usual suspects from Uncle Yellow’s band of brothers. They were explaining how they each got through two bottles of red wine and three glasses of rice wine (56%) last night, then straight away ordered beer. We stayed there till 11.30pm and that was all I could manage.