Well after last night's vomit session I decided to take it easy food-wise, and just made some pao mian to keep it carby and simple, before deciding to take A Wu's kids' hongbaos to them. Tan had said that you only give hongbaos on New Year's Day, but I'd seen for myself that that wasn't necessarily the case. I needed the exercise so decided to walk the 20 minutes or so north to his qu, and thought I remembered which block he lived in but when I got to the 25th floor and knocked on what I thought was his door, it was eventually opened by some bloke who looked rather nonplussed to see me standing there. I apologised profusely and he was then perfectly ok about it, probably more in shock of seeing a foreigner outside his front door. Finally A Wu had got back to me to say he was in block 2, not block 1, so a few minutes later I was in his place.
I hadn't given his kids their hongbaos the other day as there were other kids around and I didn't want them to feel bad, so I handed his younger son and daughter one each, to big thank yous, before A Wu's wife's sister's daughter entered the living room from one of the bedrooms. Oh no! The one thing I came here to avoid! I felt bad and told her I'd bring hers next time. She was fine and I gave her a little hug and kissed her on the forehead for some reason. She walked to the table to get herself a biscuit but instead of opening it (nearly everything's wrapped here), she just gave it to me. What a sweet thing to do when her two cousins had just received a red envelope. Then I realised I still had 300 kuai in my pocket so asked A Wu if he had a spare red envelope and after a couple of minutes searching he found one, as most Chinese houses have a few lying around, although like Sellotape (one of the few brand names I use instead of the proper term which as anyone who's ever seen Blue Peter will know, is "sticky tape"), they can be hard to find sometimes.
A Wu said to go to A Zhou's place again tonight for a bite to eat, and he'd ping me a bit later, so I made use of some spare time to go for a little walk. In fact I'd included the walk to A Wu's in my Strava recording and managed 7.4km in 1h26m of moving. And not that long after I was called to go to eat. I sort of knew most of the people there and once again I was nearly the only person not on the baijiu. We then started to play mo pai and I sort of did ok for someone who has not worked out 20% of the rules yet.
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| Yet another family meal |
I left before it got too raucous saying I had a "matter" to attend to, which was true as I needed to transfer some money before the mortgage was taken out. That took longer than it ought to have and by 10.30pm A Wu was saying to meet up at the guangchang to go for a walk with the kids. Why not? So just before 11pm I met up with him and his wife and wife's sister and husband and the three kids but they told me to get in a car as we were driving to Yang Ming park on the south of the river. Fair enough. It ended up being an excuse for taking lots of photos and was pretty fun as it wasn't cold.
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| The dried up river isn't a patch on Valencia's but it actually does turn into a wet river when it gets warmer |
And I heard "Peng Duoming!" being shouted out and I noticed some friends drinking by the side of the road. I would quite like to have joined them but it would have been rude so I said I'd ping them a bit later if it wasn't too late. Then around midnight we moved on to a place near A Xia's old shop and ordered deep-fried bananas and chips, with mango juice to wash them down with. A Wu said it wasn't good to eat meat all the time and he'd gone for the healthy option. I agreed with him about not eating so much meat but didn't tell him I didn't think he'd chosen the healthiest alternative.
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| Deep fried bananas and fries, with mango juice...no calories there then |
Finally they dropped me back at the guangchang to pick up my bike around 1.30am as the kids were getting tired. I pinged the friends to see if they were there and indeed they were, so 10 minutes later I was catching up on the beers after a break of about 5 hours. Apparently one of the women was the daughter of the owner of the set of buildings we were eating outside of, including a discotheque that I was invited to attend another day, not that I think I can do that anymore, thanks all the same. But it was a good laugh and we managed to stay up till 3am before there were signs of flakiness. All in all another full day, and no being sick this time.
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| "Friends" at Yang Ming park at 3am |
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