I should have paid the $3 to book train tickets online....

Up 8.45am! Yes, a decent time! But for some reason the next time I looked at my phone it was nearly midday. Bugger. Being Friday I still had work to do but almost as importantly I needed to arrange getting to Nanning tomorrow for the week-delayed flight to Wuhan. I checked trip.com to make sure there were still tickets for tomorrow but refused to pay their exorbitant $3 booking fee for a $4 ticket, so went across our road to find the place I’d bought train tickets from last year. Of course it wasn’t there. Things change big time in Pingguo, especially when you’re generally only here once a year.

I still appreciate the way that cans are often stored upside-down, but not as much as the fact there are more and more choices regarding sugar-free

So instead of paying the $3 I took the best part of an hour to drive down to the train station (and pay for the privilege of parking the dian dong che), queue up and buy my ticket in person, before finding the dian dong che and driving back home.

After work I pinged Uncle Yellow to see what he was up to and he told me to meet up in a bit. A “bit” was 17 minutes, which seems quite reasonable really. Then he sent me a weizhi and I realised we were to go to A Ming’s place to have a bite to drink. Unlike a usual meal it was very much drink first eat later, and I did the latter as I was rather hungry. A Ming’s father and son were there so it was quite a family affair despite the cigarette smoke. I managed to leave relatively soberly not long after midnight and called it a night. Too many times I’ve decided to “just pop in” to somewhere around this time and it has consumed the early hours. Tonight I was good. Well, better.

The rather pretty outside of A Ming's family place where we spent a couple of hours