Market and evening meal with A Wu and bosses at his office

I managed a breakfast of some biscuits and lunch of jiaozi. A Wu had called me at 9am to invite me for a meal at his office this evening. And as luck would have it I happened upon his black Camry around midday while out. So it was that I would accompany him to the market to pick up food for the meal this evening. It's always a sensory-overload experience in the market, but in a good way. In fact so many experiences are sensory-overload here in a good way. We spent the best part of an hour buying fish, lamb, loads of vegetables I don't even know the words for in English, before driving to near my place to pick up some raw fish at the same place we did last year. Then he dropped me back to Waipo's to attempt a siesta, which I can't remember if I was successful in doing.

A fairly rare left-handed chopper sorting out some lamb ribs for us tonight

Cute kids playing fake Lego while the boss was cutting up the raw fish. I pretended that I was a local person and they somehow saw through it

Later, ss I was having a pre-evening-meal beer, V sent a link to an English quiz from 112 years ago that many English teachers fail today. I'm almost proud to say I "only" got b) and d) wrong. Missed the wrong tense for d) but thought it should be "anyone" instead of "any one". I wonder what the equivalent in Chinese would be.

I found my way to A Wu's office no problem and of course there was some waiting around while they were finishing the cooking. There was clearly far too much for the 10 or so bosses along with some of their wives and children. But of course it was a cracking meal, but so many leftovers that we agreed to come back tomorrow to continue. I was going to make my way back home when it finally tapered off around 10.30pm, and was planning to pop to Li Kun's when A Wu asked me to clean the floor. Fair enough, there had been 20+ people and it was quite grubby. So I spent the next 45 minutes or so sweeping then mopping up while he sorted the excess food into what could and could not be used tomorrow.

Getting ready to eat at the bosses' table (women and children were at their own table in the other room)

Finally it was time to go, but we had to take the extra stuff to his place so spent two trips going down the lift to put it in his Camry before driving over there. Of course one of the bags split as soon as we got out of the car in the basement parking, so I kept the lift door open as he slowly put the contents inside it as we didn't have another bag. Another this would have been an annoying waste of a few minutes but here these sort of things just sort of add to the moment in a positive way...at least mainly because I wasn't in a hurry to do anything else. Finally we got the stuff upstairs and into his apartment. I think I said I'd walk back to pick up my dian dong che as I wanted the exercise, and I don't think he argued too much as it was around midnight.

Which meant in the end it was a bit late to go to Li Kun's, not that I'd told him I'd be popping round. So instead once home caught up with the lads back in the UK (and Reunion) for nearly two hours.