Two dogs in two days

I got a call at 9am, after not much more than 90 minutes sleep and for some reason answered it. It was to say that there would be a package delivered today so I knew it was confirmation of Er jie's dried mushrooms. I was as polite as I could be and pretended I understood everything and they seemed to be ok with that. Hopefully that won't come back to haunt me. 

Managed to sleep till gone 1pm and although I would have liked to do so for longer I reckoned it wouldn't be a good idea. So at 1.45pm I went to the jiaozi place but annoyingly they were closed...oh well...does it really matter? I'm in my last few days here and just walking about makes me happy. I picked up my nicely cleaned Converse trainers that had got caught up in my suitcase wheels on the day I arrived here. Well the laces had been black, but now were pristine again.

Lunch ended up being a tiny pao bian with a couple of quail eggs and I was still feeling rough with my cold and cough. A Xia then asked me when I had time to pick up more clothes for Tan...oh yes I'd told her I'd be around today. I told her in about half an hour, which would give me time for a quick shower. But it also gave me time for a tiny medicinal nip as I still hadn't gone to buy some cough medicine. Well that turned into two nips and by the time I had my shower A Xia was asking how much longer as she'd be leaving the shop soon. So I told her I'd be right over and of course that was fine.

I wasn't expecting quite such a large bag of clothes, but couldn't really complain...it looks like I'll have to leave a load of stuff here again though. It was good to have a brief chat though and I met her husband A Dong again for the first time in over four years. I picked up a haircut at Lao Ma's a few minutes later. Almost nothing has changed in her shop - even the original CRT tv is still there. But again it was a nice chat as we talked about normal things like not having a car anymore and such. Again, the most banal things take on a new meaning here.

Picking up a haircut in the almost unchanged Lao Ma's salon

My next task was to pick up the dried mushrooms that had been sent by Er jie. This should be a simple every-day task but I had no idea where to go. I asked at the main security place but didn't understand what the bloke said and was too proud to admit it. So I went to the other security place but he told me to go where I'd just come from. Eventually, from the international language of pointing I saw what looked like a normal shop but inside were loads of packages. I told the young lady I needed to pick up a package and she asked me a question that might as well have been in another language such was the vocabulary she used. I genuinely didn't understand and telling her it contained mushrooms wouldn't help. So I called Er jie and handed over the phone. No, still no further, but she sent me a barcode at least, but it wouldn't scan. Then she told me to try "Wu ye" which meant nothing to me, so I asked at security again and they pointed in the opposite direction this time. So I asked a woman holding a child and got pointed to some external stairs, so tried them and ended up in another shop-like place with loads of parcels on the shelves. Once again, the conversation was crooked so it was another call to Er jie and apparently the parcel was addressed to my Chinese name so had I thought of that I could have just let her know. So finally I had the parcel in my hands, and the amount of space I'd have for my stuff just diminished again. A trivial task that should have taken a couple of minutes had taken 15 but I had learnt something. At least I did later: Wu ye (物业) means "property" I think. Oh, and I'm probably not even allowed to bring in the mushrooms anyway.

My next thing to tick off was helping Li Kun sort out ChatGPT4 with the Merlin plugin for Chrome browser. All of this would likely need the help of VPN. So I pinged him at 6pm and his response was to ask me if I had anywhere to eat. I hadn't meant to invite myself to eat so told him I'd had a late lunch which was sort of true. But I was told to eat with him anyway.

At his office he was working on FL Studio. It appeared he was trying to synch various tracks of young people singing a song. We had some conversation about the cost of the software and that he had got it cheap as it was for education, and in fact the young people in question were students so I guess it makes sense. I left him to mix as I got a zero sugar cola to help perk me up. 20 minutes later he got on my dian dong che and we drove to near the deng ji police place where his friend lives. We took the lift to the 23rd and top floor before walking up a flight of stairs to a nice rooftop where there were already a few blokes sitting around a table. Oh, and in the middle was a pan of dog meat. So much for not consuming that again. I'd managed five years without it and now it was twice in two days.

Two dogs in two days...

The blokes were just about to start drinking white alcohol and there was no beer. But there was no problem as a quick phone call meant the delivery of cold Snowflake beer would be just a few minutes later. It was quite an enjoyable meal and I had more of the dog than I would normally, but it was delicious. Li Kun was ganbeing the likes of which I'd barely seen before. I kept it easy as I'd be driving and also to be in a position to look after him if he overdid it. Well the young Boss Liu to my left overdid it a bit and moved on to the beer, and there were some very red faces a couple of hours later. Li Kun was pissed but not dreadful and I was a bit relieved when it was over. At least Boss Liu, being from Jiang Xi, didn't speak the local lingo so it was a better test of my Mandarin. A lot of the time here I feel like a spectator as I barely understand a word of the local languages and they seamlessly slip between them which makes it even harder. They did tell me not to worry, and that if I spent a month here I'd pick it up. I've spent two and a half months this year already and I definitely haven't.

A Wu had videoed to show that he was having a boss meal, and I was to go there. I wasn't massively in the mood but dropped off Li Kun then remembered about my promise of ChatGPT. It took half an hour as he didn't have a VPN on his desktop so once he installed Chrome he couldn't install the Merlin plugin. But luckily I'd already downloaded the Windows clients of my three VPNs so I copied PureVPN onto a handy micro-SD and he installed it on his. It wanted to upgrade to the latest version and I was surprised it worked as the VPN hadn't connected itself yet. Then came the fuss of logging in with my credentials, tweaking the protocol, then attempting to connect to the Hong Kong server, and it worked! We then installed the Merlin plugin with his Google account settings and I showed him how to use that too after I set it to version 4.0 - 50 goes a day is not too shabby for free. He checked he could do it himself by closing everything down and restarting the process. I told him not to disconnect the VPN too often as it doesn't always reconnect, but since I've moved to the Wireguard protocol it's been pretty solid on both phone and PC. The last thing he did was to check access to YouTube...I've never seen him smile as much as when it loaded successfully!

So it was off to A Wu's office, and when I got there he used his remote control to open the shutter to let me in. There was a bloke on his phone on the sofa when I got in and I seemed to stir him. He got up and looked slightly dazed and I guessed he was drunk. He walked in the direction of the shutter and promptly hit his head on it, then bent down and got out as it was lowering. I got into the lift to the 4th floor and indeed it was just a few blokes left drinking and playing cai ma. On another night it might have been interesting but I basically did my bit and stayed no more than an hour. Even A Wu was pretty pissed and talking about how we were great brothers etc. It was good to be home and I put the dian dong che on charge and had a bit of a chat with Mat and Awl and what I thought was an early night but was at least 2.45am.