Up stupidly early then back to sleep till gone midday, as I'd slept in the kids' room and it was a lot quieter and more comfortable with a proper working A/C. Lunch was a tiny pao mian yet again for the fourth time in five days. Li Kun then pinged me to eat at his colleague's place this evening, except I miss-read it as at his house, so that was the evening sorted, at least the first half of it.
Rather than the gym, I managed a session of dumbbells before Li Kun called me to see if I was ready. I said I'd grab a shower and he said he'd send me a dingwei. I was in no rush as I thought it would be at market but when I received the dingwei (or weizhi...I guess they mean the same thing) I could see it was well north of guangchang so I only got there just before 7, but managed to get 12 cold beers in a shop downstairs. Luckily the dian dong che was full of dian.
Tan called me just before I got there to say she couldn't buy train tickets to Baise for Friday, even though there had been no issue getting them to and from Guangzhou. This didn't make sense to me, but she said I should go to the station now with my ID and book tickets. What? She had the kids' passports so there was no way I'd be able to book theirs in person, and no point booking mine alone, so I said I'd try to sort out booking online tonight, though if it failed for her it should do for me. She told me there were only 10 seats left to Baise on the 1.15pm train though so I'd better hurry up.
The meal was a typically bustily affair and I wasn't late at all; the kids were eating at the table by the tv, and some of the food was still being cooked. I placed my measly 12 beers on top of three other boxes of beers and was met with great merriment from the blokes and most of the women, a couple of whom at least I recognised. Li Kun was rightly proud of the squid he cooked and it was probably my favourite dish on the table. I refused rice politely and Li Kun then took one half of his portion and put it into little man's bowl, as if to recognise he should lower his carb intake a little too.
It was one of those not-quite-expected-but-a-little-expected evenings with the blokes sitting round the big table and the women and children running around. But I remembered I'd said I'd look at getting train tickets so spent five minutes on the trip.com app and after adding Tan's Chinese name to the travellers, and confirming passport details were correct, made the booking for £26, £8 more than it should have been due to booking fees with trip.com, but a small price to pay for peace of mind. A few minutes later I got the confirmation email and we had our tickets, and I smugly sent a screenshot of them to Tan.
In the meantime Tan had IM'd me to say the reason we couldn't get tickets online was that Xixi is a minor and minors can only get four tickets online before needing to go and show their ID in person at a station. Apparently she'd called the station to find that out. Well I'd pretty much proved her wrong. But did I get any praise? Oh No...the seats were in different carriages and we weren't sitting together! You just told me less than an hour ago there were only 10 seats left, and I confirmed that when ordering hence I didn't waste time. So of course it was extremely unlikely that any of the seats would be next to each other! At least two of them are in the same carriage. Sometimes it seems like any excuse to have a go! But it's water off a duck's back now....
Li Kun then opened up the caimaiing with me, and then sent me on a round-the-table run, during which I won a good two thirds of the rounds to even more merriment and mirth. But it wouldn't have been fair had it only been me doing a round, so Li Kun followed with a bit less success. We ate till around 9.30pm or so before some people had to go and the rest of us went to sit round the tea table and drank pu er cha. I normally would have avoided that but sod it I didn't have to be in early or have an early night. So we spent the next 40 minutes or so drinking only tea and sobering up a little while playing with a toy with Li Kun's son, which was more amusing than it should have been.
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| Me with Li Kun after a few rounds of caima |
Whenever it was we left, I headed south and as I was going to pass by Zhang Hua's anyway I thought I'd take a look to see if he was there. Of course he was, he runs the place, but luckily he wasn't alone so I turned up to shake hands and be pointed to a table with a few blokes. So it was back to the ganbeiing, and then bbq was brought around of course. One of the wives turned up and drank the local equivalent of red wine rather quickly, considering she had a two year-old on tow. I did the usual table-hopping, although it was rather limited considering there were only two tables downstairs, and I don't think I went upstairs this time. But there was certainly a lot of mopaiing going on and I managed to do ok for once.
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| I'm not sure giving your dad a light at the age of 2 is very responsible...he should have told him to light it himself |
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| At mopai I got a really good hand and made the dealer drink more than usual (though I still don't 100% understand the rules) |
I finally left around 2.30am, and it was so nice not to have to worry about a 1am curfew. I then went for a ride at 3am just because I could. It was only a Tuesday night but other than a minority of people it seems every day is the weekend here. I even found what I presume was a massage place that was open and was so tempted. Though at this time of night it may be something more than just a massage...having said that last year with muscle boss we did go for a genuine massage at gone 2am....
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