No credit and no charge

Up at 3am for a few hours but meandered through sleep till lunchtime. I received an SMS at 4.53am saying my account was underfunded by 129.39 kuai. What? Ok, the first time yesterday I could understand but this was just 12 hours later! I forwarded the text to Li Kun as I thought there must be some issue. But he just confirmed it was underfunded and that I needed to top-up. Well I wasn't going to spending 250 kuai a day. Li Kun said maybe someone had been calling abroad...but surely the boys wouldn't have been that stupid with all the messaging apps and VPN? I found out later Leilei had been calling abroad...bloody 18 year-olds...how can you not be aware of foreign phone calls? Probably because they've never really had the concept of paying for electronic communication, and don't consider the difference between using mobile data and an actual voice call.

I had my doubts about the dian dong ches and had them confirmed when Leilei had paid me back 200 kuai and I'd put it on our mobile account and had mobile data again. I tried driving one of the ches and it barely moved, meaning no overnight charging. I tried more attempts using Weixin but was going round in circles. Eventually I "followed" the company that does the charging and after a convoluted sweat-inducing few minutes I managed to get the charging light to change from green to red which I was reasonably confident it meant was charging now. Finally!

But by now it was raining again and without wheels it wasn't practical to go to the police place to register us. Tan said they were now getting very strict about being registered when you arrive in the country. If that was the case why were they closed for Dragon Boat day?

At least they still have a fairly decent selection at the supermarket by the guangchang

As it was getting on for 6pm I was aware we'd been invited out to a meal at A Wu's new office, so set about getting home to pick up the boys to walk over there. To be fair they have been ok about turning up for such meals for a while at least, but they were already out eating DFC, so I just went by myself and to be fair it was one of those boss meals they would have been fairly bored at.