I woke up in the morning worrying about the Bangxu concert later today. I went for a walk to practise my lines, all two of them, but kept fluffing them. Literally a dozen characters or so but for some reason they wouldn't stick in my head. I went to the closest supermarket to pick up some jing jiu and cola again, should I need it later, then went home still saying my lines out loud.
It was strange that Lin Hong hadn't pinged me to go as it was late morning already so I pinged her to ask if we were going and she said no (not yet?). Then at 12.30 I'd still not heard from her and then Jiuma got back to tell me it was tomorrow but I wasn't sure. I really hoped it was though. Then I checked the Bangxu group I was part of and found there was an updated document so downloaded it and opened it in Google docs and found to my horror that I was now presenting a few of the acts on the first day, not to mention being one of them.
I reckoned by 1pm Jiuma was right and then saw that the days of the festival were Chu si and Chu wu, being the fourth and fifth day of the lunar New Year. Phew! What a massive relief! Ok, I translated my words from characters to pinyin as many of them were unknown to me. I also sent them to Tan and even she said she didn't understand some of it as it was written in a very poetic manner. So once translated I downloaded the doc as a pdf and stuck it on my USB drive and walked to the place where I'd printed off my music a few days ago. So now I had a printout with my bits highlighted, and I did my best to pronounce them as a bit of practice. I picked up a lovely glass of mango juice on the way back and realised I was really lucky to be in tee-shirt weather when it was pretty grim weather in the UK.
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| A seemingly random poster about network security I passed on my walk - I guess it's good to make people aware |
Lin Hong then sent me a message to say tomorrow 8am. I asked whether that meant 8am at her house or what but got no reply. Ok so I'd need another early night. I decided I'd better have a haircut so set off to walk to Lao Ma's but almost immediately bumped into Lin Hong on the street who was of course talking on her phone. But she asked where I was going and invited me to eat tonight at her place so I said I'd be there when I'd had my haircut. I walked on down to Lao Ma's where I'd been earlier in the day but she had been cooking. She scolded me for not telling her I'd be there at 5.30pm as she was just about to go out shopping, but did my haircut anyway and said it would be 68 kuai as it was New Year, and not the usual 30 kuai. Well, I wasn't going to complain and as soon as I'd paid I had Lin Hong on the phone again asking where I was so I said I'd be shi ji minutes.
I did stop off home to pick up the dian dong che and maybe have a little nip of jing jiu before getting to her place to eat with her and A Zhong and an aunty and niece or something like that. They had gorgeous big red prawns that would not be so nice tomorrow so I had to finish them off that evening and it wasn't that difficult. The home made la chang was also fantastic and I had my fill of that and couldn't take any rice. Lin Hong once again insisted that A Zhong's mum would make me zongzi so I sent a message to Tan to make sure Erjie wouldn't waste money buying them. Tan sent back a voice message in the local language so I let Lin Hong listen to it as I literally couldn't make out a word.
Lin Hong said she'd call me at about 8am tomorrow so I made my excuses and left for my early night. I was actually quite tired but awake enough that I decided to go to Tian Yang Po's for a little bbq at 11pm. She was actually quite busy so I left my order and said I'd be shi ji minutes, meaning I'd probably be longer and got home and had a chat with Mat before getting back to Tian Yang Po over half an hour later and she scolded me for being longer than shi ji minutes! But it was worth it and by 12.30am I was asleep for the earliest time in weeks.
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