Rats

Up 10ish, so before the kids, and decided to get up rather than lie in. It was a bit late for breakfast so took the kids to go to lunch at 12.53. We went to the underground car park to unplug the charging dian dong che to find out it wasn’t plugged in anyway. The security man was shouting something to me about electricity so I feared the worst, but on turning it on I found it seemed to be full. So we all got on but as we tried to mount the slope to get out it gave up and I accepted that we had no dian. However, on further inspection it turned out to be a flat tyre. The bloke who had just shouted at me then told me there was a place that would fix it just around the corner so we started walking there. But as soon as we got to the waterman’s place just 30 seconds later the drizzle we’d been having turned torrential and we were stuck so we took advantage of this and went to the jiao zi place to eat. Leilei ate all of his plus one of mine and added some chilli sauce which made me happy. Xixi had a portion of bao zi and managed all but three which wasn’t bad. The rain eased off and we walked the dian dong che to a small place with tyres outside and woke up the man lying there. He checked the back wheel and straight away identified a buckled rear wheel and got to work straightening it out. Five minutes later it was working again. He said “wu kuai” and I tried to give him 10 but he would not accept and pushed back five kuai into my hand. I was really grateful though not surprised and knew it could have been a lot more in a different place.

Checking the mileage on the clock

The buckled wheel

Fixing the buckled wheel

Lunch of bao zi

We were supposed to go to A Xia a yi’s but popped home first to do the important job of putting fizzy drinks in the freezer so they would be solid by the evening. Mama was still there so ordered a di di che to take them to A Xia’s. This is the equivalent of Uber and is incredibly efficient and cheap. We’re talking about 5-6 kuai for most rides, so undercutting san lun ches and not to mention they’re air conditioned etc. Sadly for me this really could be the death of san lun ches here, but it is simply a sign of market forces in action.

As soon as they were gone Haiwei called me to remind me to go to his office and drink tea. Well it was 2pm and I wasn’t going to get a sleep so why not? When I got there I bumped into Boss Huang and first had some tea in his office with his wife and kid and some other bosses. Then Haiwei came and we moved to his office, just the two of us. It appeared he wanted to talk business. Over the course of the next hour I learnt that his new job is at an aluminium factory, except it’s not actually aluminium that they will produce but some sort of fluoridised version that can be used for extracting pure aluminium from alumina during the electrolysis process.

Haiwei was very serious about this and kept writing down terms with a pen in Chinese characters that I couldn’t understand (quite frankly I couldn’t understand the English versions most of the time). He had to keep writing on my Pleco app so I could see what he meant but at the end I understood he wanted me to become a middleman between his company and foreign aluminium factories that would be interested in buying this flouridised substance. Of course I had many questions and posed these questions as coming from a potential client rather than trying to sound critical. Why wouldn’t other companies do this? How good is the quality compared to what they are using etc. It boiled down to the “fact” that the environmental impact of producing this substances is considerable, and many countries won’t allow it.

As I’ve been going to Canada quite a lot recently he wanted to give me some samples to show to prospective companies. As if I could just step out of the office and walk up to a factory owner and do this. To be fair Canada is the world’s third biggest aluminium producer after China and Russia. Then he said there’d definitely be money in it for me and when I said that wouldn’t be necessary he nearly took offence and said it wasn’t up for question...if I managed to help a sale of course I’d be recompensed...no option. He was already talking about bringing prospective clients here and showing them the factory and taking them out to eat and drink, and the factory won’t even be operational until November.

Then we leapt into his car and 15 minutes later we were at the factory grounds, where it was in the process of being built. We entered an office and met his boss (with whom he’d worked about 15 years ago in a similar business). They then talked shop for the next half an hour at a pace I found difficult to keep up with, so I buried myself in my phone and started studying the aluminium production process. Maybe I have a low threshold for this sort of thing, but I found the process fascinating; pure aluminium doesn’t occur naturally on this planet as it requires huge amounts of electrical energy to separate it from other chemicals. Typically, alumina is first extracted from bauxite, before being hit with very high currents of electricity at a high temperature so it can be sucked away from the other elements. It’s a very complex process that’s been used for over 100 years, though there are constant efforts to refine it, one being to get rid of carbon anodes in order to avoid spewing out a load of CO2. But once the aluminium is made it’s very clean and more recyclable than other metals as it doesn’t corrode.

I still need to understand properly where the fluoride stuff fits in in the last part of the process, but if nothing else I hope to learn some more chemistry here. This is how education should be done; instead of going to school and learning ionic and covalent bonding in order to pass a test, then instantly forget it, we should first identify a need, then work out how we fulfil that need. In this case the need is for a clean metal that is currently mixed with a load of stuff we don’t particularly want. So we need to break the chemical bonds by using other chemicals and energy - kinetic (crushing), electric, and heat. When you have the context of this need you have a much stronger drive to learn. I’m really trying to find these contexts for the kids to make their learning better grounded instead of just going to school because you have to. I don’t expect it to be easy but there must be some way to make then find a need to learn algebra. I’m going to make a concerted effort to be more aware of this during everyday situations. I wonder if I could have used the dian dong che’s wheel as an example. The man had to let out air then use some metal pincers to bend the metal...so much maths and chemistry there, from the angle and length of the pincers, to the pliability of the metal wheel, followed by the pressure from the machine to pump back air into the tyre and the spraying of water over the fixed area to check no bubbles were coming out. Why can’t the kids be so fascinated by this?

Anyway, we eventually left the factory office and headed back to the bosses’ place to drink more tea. Haiwei said he was going to play ping pong this evening and I said I’d join him with the kids. But when we got back to the office one of the kids pointed to a yellow bag and told me to look. Inside were two giant frozen rats, each the size of a sturdy man’s forearm. They were on their backs with their front feet sticking up in a begging position. Nice.

So 6 o’clock rolled along ushered in by more tiny cups of tea and finally we were all told to eat. We went into the room that the bosses usually drink red wine in to find a table with two trays of meat on it, but no rat, at least yet.

Two frozen rats

Two non-frozen rats

 A non-rat dish that was fine

Soon after the red wine and beer appeared, followed by lots of cai ma. I actually got a bit tipsy on the beer so at 8.30 I made excuses and went home to pick up my guitar to take to Li Kun’s to practise, but not before the rat appeared, thankfully in small non-rat-like chunks and I did try some - not bad if a little tough.. I spent a couple of hours at Li Kun’s drinking only tea and practising Scarborough Fair with him on the flute, focusing on the timing mainly. A couple of mates dropped by and then a woman appeared with beer, and then some food arrived and I realised this is where I would be for a good hour or so.

Haiwei called me a couple of times to come back to the bosses’ place and the third time Li Kun answered and and shouted that I was over at his for the evening! Eventually though I did head back to the office but Haiwei had already gone - well it was after 1am.