I should have been knackered but was up early again. And I felt pretty crap after last night. At 10.30am I got a phone call but as usual in this room in the house I couldn't connect to the person who called me. I guessed it was from the police station and this was confirmed a couple of minutes later by a Weixin message telling me my passport was ready and I responded gratefully saying I'd be there to pick it up later in the day.
I wasted the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon before forcing myself to grab a shower and some nuts and an egg I found in the fridge that I must have bought three months ago. That kept me going for a while and enabled me to walk down to Jiang Bing Lu where I'd left the dian dong che last night. I might over-indulge now and again but I'm getting a lot better at knowing my limits when it comes to driving powered vehicles. The walk was slightly surreal though. It was not warm but not cold, but I broke into a slight sweat despite my rolled up shirt sleeves.
It was that time of day where you sort of see what normal people do when they are not asleep due to the heat. Still so many young people making earphone sets I can only assume are for aeroplanes even though I've not had a set in the last 10 years or so. But anyway I picked up the bike and somehow found my way to the police station. Well in fact it should have been easier but all my VPN apps on the phone have stopped working so Google Maps didn't want to show me how to get to this place that I'd saved in the summer. However, it did show me relatively where it was so I had a good clue and made it in 15 minutes. So again I was finally official in Pingguo! I felt like celebrating but couldn't really justify it so went home to pick up my shopping bag to go to the supermarket instead.
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| I'm not sure how official or acceptable it is to sign with my Chinese name - probably neither |
Li Kun pinged me to see where I was and invite me to drink tea, so I told him I'd pop round after shopping. Then the bloke from yesterday pinged me to see if I was about but I ignored him until he called me, at which time I said I'd call him back a bit later if that was ok. Tea at Li Kun's really was tea and we had another reasonable chat. I let him have a look at my passport and he rifled through it and seemed genuinely impressed about the number of stamps there, and countries I'd visited, but I had to explain that since Brexit now all European countries stamp me in and out but nonetheless due to work in the last few years I guess mine is a lot more worn than most. Shortly later the bloke I ate with yesterday called me again to go to eat, and I said ok, and Li Kun invited me to go back to drink tea later in the evening. I have since found out he is called Huang Zhongxing (the other bloke, not Li Kun).
Well the place to eat was within Yu Jing Hua Ting so it was pretty easy for me to pop round after picking up a 12 pack of beer first. I was about the 10th person to arrive but by no means the last. Unfortunately the food had quite a lot of skin to deal with, and by now my teeth are starting to suffer from the tough meat that is preferred here. But I soldiered though until cai ma started and a couple of other blokes moved to the beer too. One of the blokes beat me pretty badly. But one of his fingers was more of a one inch stub and it was really hard to tell if it was "out" or not, so I had to go by others' expressions as to whether I won or lost. It seems like a bit of an unfair advantage but I wasn't going to complain (or maim myself to have the same advantage). By about 9pm I'd had enough, and made my semi-genuine excuse of jetlag and they were ok to let me leave.
On the way home, which lasted all of one minute, Beihai Huang video-called me to go over and have a drink. As I was full I wasn't massively in the mood but said I'd go over later. And about 40 mins later I walked out of Yi Jing Hua Ting and immediately two of the blokes I'd recently been eating and drinking with drunkenly called over to me "Yingguo lao!". I felt rather guilty about using my jetlag excuse to leave them earlier as I was clearly going out again, but they were drunk enough not to remember and I left them with a smile.
Huang had had some of the brown alcohol I can sometimes stomach but had no intention of tonight, so a couple of beers were cracked open and we had a relatively (for Huang) sober chat, without him giving me those annoying hand shakes with the middle knuckle pressed in. And it was cool to see his younger daughter and wife again. But I really was flagging now, so for a second time tonight made my excuses and went home.
I was in bed by midnight, and normally would have been asleep very soon after, based on my good schedule since arriving in a time zone eight hours ahead of what my body was used to. But jetlag decided this would be the time to introduce itself this visit. However, this time I had a little bit of a plan to take advantage of it. The Man City v Young Boys Champions League game was to be on at 4am, and if I couldn't sleep I had that to look forward to. Knowing my luck I'd probably fall asleep bang on 4am, but in fact I was still awake and the VPN was holding up, so I found a pretty good stream to watch it with. It seemed that the jetlag was coming for me from the other direction, i.e. barely letting me sleep. I've done this in the past when having to wake up an hour after the match to take one or both the kids to school but felt so tired I couldn't see it happening. Then it was 2am, and I wondered if it was too early or too late to have a beer.
Andrew said "neither" (as in too early or too late) so I thought my usual Chinese thought of "sod it" and cracked one open as the match started. And tamely made the one can last most of the first half. Most of 45 minutes is 30 minutes and one second though, so I was on my second well before half time. But I appreciated Foden's beautifully and deftly crafted goal just before half time with a whelp I wouldn't have been able to give at 4.45am back in the UK.
Somehow I managed till 6.07 till I crashed out.
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