For the last ten days or so it has been noticeably cooler during the night. I mean, sometimes at midnight you see people in long sleeves eating their bbq. And when you get out of the shower early in the morning, it’s actually a bit cold. This makes Chinese parents go over the top and you see young children in three layers of clothes in their mothers’ arms. Leilei doesn’t escape this, and he’s bundled off to his grandma with a tee-shirt, jumper and cardigan, even though during the day it’s still 30+ degrees C.
One nice thing about this change in the weather is that it is much clearer outside, and less humid than before. The mountains around the town are much more appreciable and walking more than one pace a second does not make you break out into a sweat. Unfortunately, Leilei has developed a bit of a cough again, and of course this is blamed on the change in the weather. I asked if winter had come and was answered in the affirmative – I’m a bit saddened at the thought of having to wear long sleeves at 1am…
Well I haven’t written for some time as life has taken something vaguely resembling a routine now. A sort of typical day may consist of:
Wake up at 8am with Leilei. I’ll change his nappy and get his milk while Tan gets washed (takes 65 minutes). She’ll feed him some porridge and clothe him. I’ll take him to Wai po’s house (grandma’s) in a three wheeled cab at 9.30am, and maybe do some shopping in the supermarket before heading back to have a shower, by which time it will be after 11am and someone will be making lunch. After lunch I’ll try to settle down to doing some work in preparation for getting a new job. Sometimes, though, we’ll both have a little siesta. Tan will generally go out in the afternoon with Xiao Wei, and they’ll come back around 6pm with our sons for tea.
The women go out dancing most evenings so I’m usually looking after Leilei and bathing him and putting him to bed around 9.30pm. The girls come back around this time with some bbq (usually duck intestines and duck tongues). We’ll have a beer and I’ll help Xiao Li with some English before going to bed. Nothing special really.
For the last few weeks Xiao Li has been out of the house most days until the evening. He’ll generally come back at lunchtime with Lao Tao (his cousin and business partner) to cook something, and then again at teatime. It’s strange because for the first eight weeks I was here he seemed to be around almost all the time and I wondered what he did for a living.
We bought a sort of car for Leilei recently. You can make it go simply by moving the steering wheel which is really cool. He really likes it and so does Li Mingda, so they both share it sometimes as you can see....
Hmmm, well my diary seems to be unavailable in China, despite the news that after three years' censorship, blogspot has been allowed back for about a year - link. At least I can't access it.
However, I still seem to be able to write it although nothing particularly exciting has happened over the last week or so.
On Monday, after dropping off Leilei to his grandma, Xiao Li and I went to the bank to withdraw some money. Well the biggest denomination bank note in China is the red 100 Ren Min Bi, and Xiao Li withdrew an amount that many people around us would not earn in five years. Plus he already had 10000 in his wallet.... I got a bit worried that this was some sort of mafia-related thing as we joke about being mafia men a lot of the time which I thought was just some fun.
Well we didn't get mugged, and it turned out boringly that Xiao Li just wants to buy a car (so much for bank cards or cheques). I asked him when and he said at the end of the month but it is the 4th today and we've still not been to a garage (or maybe you don't buy cars from garages here). I wanted to ask him about the interest he'd be losing in the meantime but I suspect I wouldn't have got a logical answer, or that you don't get interest in China.
When they talk about the mafia, I don't think you need to imagine dodgy Italian types in suits. Tan told me a story about the pregnant girl downstairs: Last year, before she fell pregnant, she was in a Karaoke place with her friends, one of whom drank too much or took drugs and in her hysteria jumped up and down on the couch and pretended she was going to jump out of the window. One of the ladies who works in the place came into the room to see what the fuss was about and when she saw the drunk woman told her to go home and die there instead of in the karaoke bar.
Well, this really pissed off the now pregnant girl, and she called her boyfriend to get his mafia mates around to ... well I don't know, really. Anyway, the karaoke place in the meantime had called the mafia around to get rid of the drunk woman and her friends from the bar. It transpired that both sets of mafia arrived at the same time and promptly went out drinking together!
The slightly sad ending to the story is that the employee who told the girl to go home to die lost her job.
It's things like this you have to think about when you criticise our police. At least they would probably have been worth ringing.
On Thursday we went to Huang Chun's new place. She was Tan's best friend when she lived in Pingguo, and is recently married to a man who is younger than her. Well, this place, although not huge, looked like something out of a style magazine - a 50" flat tv attached to the wall, marble floors, lighting at weird angles. I'll put up a photo later. All in all nice to look at but doesn't feel very livable in if you ask me. Still, I imagine that's the way it's going to go in China - more western style apartments in private blocks with security guards and a single pretty garden for the inhabitants. The tackiest thing about it was this horrible elevator music emanating from the garden. At first I thought it was some kids with a radio, but then discovered it was coming from speakers disguised as black rocks dotted around the garden. It was too loud; you could almost hear it from inside the apartment and it made me think of 1984 with the microphones hidden everywhere. I'm sure it was not intentional, but it made my Western mind think that this was some covert means of inducing soporific inertia to assuage any thoughts uprising and rebelling.
Huang Chun's new house. Leilei particularly liked the glass-covered step up to the dining area, under which was an assortment of white stones, shells, and orange table tennis balls which he calls "ba ba qiu" (should be ping pang qiu). I liked the tv.
Woke up with a terrible pain running from my left collarbone down about six inches. It was so bad Tan put a special plaster on and I went back to bed for a couple of hours. When I got up it was still excruciating and I couldn’t even hold Leilei (or twist my head to see him calling). Everyone said it must have been because I slept in a bad position. Xiao Li kindly gave me a massage on the right place, then, without telling me, yanked my left arm in an amateur attempt to crack my bones. Not only was it painful, nothing cracked, and I felt worse than before. Then Xiao Wei suggested I go to hospital to have it cracked. Well I didn’t want anything cracking. The last time I had anything like this was after one of the England World Cup matches earlier this year when we were at Al’s house doing press-ups outside as a punishment for not catching the ball in some silly game we made up. I must have done over 100 press-ups that evening with no stretching beforehand and the next day I couldn’t even get out of bed. I only did ten the previous night…surely it can’t have been that.
Well anyway, at 3pm Tan took me to the massage place we’d been to a couple of days before and explained the problem to a bloke. We went upstairs, where he rubbed by back with hot water infused with herbs, and then started to massage all over my back. Tan said he was making the muscles relaxed before he would attempt to crack my back, which was not what I wanted to hear. However, it later transpired that there was to be no cracking…something a lot more scary in fact.
He did a very good job of the massage, and although the pain was on my left side, he stated that my right side had problems due to having been sitting down too much at a desk and not exercising enough. I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion – if it was muscle stiffness, it might have been caused by playing badminton. Anyway, he put some oil on my back, then started to scrape my skin with an implement like a comb but without the teeth, made from bone. This was to prepare my back for…cupping.
Cupping is a strange procedure whereby you heat up a glass bowl and quickly stick it on the victim’s back while there is a vacuum, which sucks the skin up into the bowl. I really don’t understand what practical purpose it serves but I understand it has been common practice in China for around 1700 years. Check out some information for yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+cupping
Here is a video of the procedure
Well, I don’t know what the masseur was using to heat the bowls, but it sounded like a blowtorch. The painful part was not the heat of the bowl, but the suction of the skin into it…he must have placed about twenty of these bowls on the whole of my back and by the time he had finished I felt as though I had been lifted into the air such was the pressure on my back. I could hardly talk, but managed to ask how long till he took them off – “five to ten minutes”, he replied, which felt a lot longer than that. Actually, having read a couple of pages I realise the masseur was probably heating cotton wool balls soaked in alcohol to heat the bowls.
Me after my first round of cupping.
When released, each bowl made a noise like a fart that you only half tried to keep in, but the relief was tangible. By the time he removed the last one with a satisfying “prrrrweeee” I could have laid there for an hour. But to my horror, a minute later he started putting a new set on. That’s like going to the dentist, having an injection and a filling, then going to the waiting room only to be called back a minute later for the same procedure again. This time was more painful too, and I gave a quite audible sound of relief as they were removed. It didn’t help that Tan kept saying: “ooh, that one’s really bad…look how dark”, as if I could.
I nearly passed out when I heard he was coming in for a third run, but Tan said I actually didn’t have to have it if it was painful. Well, I’m sorry, but from where I come from that’s a challenge. I said of course he could do it again, and grinned and bore another ten minutes of this strange pain…
The results are quite scary. If you didn’t know better, you’d think I had caught some alien form of disease, or was the illegitimate offspring of a human and a tortoise. Don’t look if you’re just about to eat.
Me showing I liked the experience by the international sign of the thumbs up.
They charged 30 kuai for the experience, which lasted about an hour, and included more massage and pressuring of acupoints after the cupping. I did feel a bit better afterwards, apart from a general tightness of the back, so I suppose it was value for money.
That's what it looked like afterwards. And still does three days later as I'm uploading this stuff...
Back home I was told I wasn’t allowed to have a shower for four hours, so we went out for a bbq with biao ge (the bloke who is always there – I now know he works there and his speciality is duck) and a couple of other blokes. Unfortunately my heroic story of pain and suffering didn’t appeal to anyone’s compassion as it’s quite normal for them there.
Up lateish at tenish, to be told that we been invited out to eat lunch with Fan and his wife. I got a shower while Tan took Leilei to his grandma’s to babysit as he can get quite bothersome at meal times with adults, especially if he is tired. We took a taxi to the Pingguo aluminium company area. This company is one of the biggest aluminium mining places in China, and a target for American ownership, although they have only sold 8% to the Americans as there is a big need for aluminium in China itself. The reason we sometimes go to eat here (it is on the outskirts of the town) is that many of the employees of the company live there, and are catered for by numerous restaurants.
Horse boss and his wife came along for the meal, and Fan’s son was there too, so in total that made nine people. We had our own private air-conditioned room, as is quite normal now, and the table was already resplendent with coriander grass root, cow ligaments with fried boiled eggs (yes, they boil them and cut them into quarters before frying them), boiled peanuts and the like.
Then the bombshell…Fan took out four bottles of yesterday’s Spanish plonk and set about opening them with a variation of corkscrew, chopsticks, fingers and lighters. I suggested that we open one first to see how it was (just in case), but this just fell on deaf ears as Fan cumbersomely managed to open four bottles, then give one each to me, Horse boss, Xiao Li and himself (chivalrously avoiding the women), each with a crumbling, floating cork inside.
After I had exchanged my wine glass for a clean one, I poured myself a small glass, as the others filled theirs nearly to the brim. The wine had a slightly orangey hue, which, along with the pungent smell, the year and the country of origin, didn’t bode well.
Well, yes, it tasted rank. Of course I couldn’t say this, although Xiao Li did remark, “it isn’t sweet”, which would have been almost a compliment in Europe. In order to keep face, but also keep myself from looking like I was eating a lemon, I poured a small amount of lemonade in to reduce the bite. This made it bearable, and Xiao Li did the same, although Fan wouldn’t taint his pride and joy. To add to the awkwardness of the situation, as each man had his own bottle, you couldn’t just sip slowly as it would be quite evident that your bottle wasn’t going down. On the contrary, Fan seemed happy to drink half a glass at a time, which meant we all had to too. After half an hour, Horse Boss’s face was as red as his drink, although he seemed quite jovial. An hour later, more food arrived, then more and more. Suddenly we realised Fan, Xiao Li and myself had finished our bottles (I was on half lemonade by that time), but Fan noticed Horse Boss still had three quarters of a bottle left. Oh, phew, just what I wanted…how we laughed as we quaffed the rest of it down.
We got back at 3ish and I went to pick up the photos I’d put in for developing the previous day. They turned out really well, although most will be appropriated by visitors to Xiao Li’s house, as happened to forty or so of the fifty I brought from England.
Going back after red "wine" lunch - Horse Boss's wife, Tan, A Ni in the middle and I think that's Fan on the right
Slept from 3.30 to 6.30pm on a bellyful of wine, then got up to eat, before being whisked off to the hair salon by Xiao Li. I had a new masseuse this time as this one specifically asked to do me, and my usual one did Xiao Li. Wow! This one was even better and really made me feel comfy with a fantastic head massage. When she started doing my neck, another girl joined in to do my arm and I was in heaven for twenty minutes. When my hour was up I felt so good I did ten slow press-ups on the couch to impress them, then jumped down to have my hair brushed and gelled. In the meantime, Xiao Li’s elder sister’s husband had turned up to take us out to “drink tea” again.
So we ended up at the same KTV bar as last time and although I was served tea, I never got the chance to drink anything else but 3.1% beer with a load of friends/business partners who seem to take delight in having a foreigner amongst them. Actually I was quite sensible and didn’t drink too much and got home at midnightish.
A friend of Xiao Li’s (Fan) and his wife came round in the evening for a drink. They brought two bottles of Spanish red wine as a gift, and I was worried we may have to drink them. They explained that you couldn’t use a cork screw to open them as the corks were too old and crumbly, something confirmed by a glance at the label that said “Denominacion origen 1993”. I mean this was 13 year old Spanish wine called “Duc de Fois” (not Rioja or something nice), was corked, and had somehow made its way to China.
Thankfully, we stuck to beer and soft drinks, and as Fan and his wife were both from outside Pingguo we all spoke Mandarin for a change. Got to bed at 3am in the end, and watched some of an Ali G video I’d downloaded…had to stop after a bit or would have woken up Tan and Leilei with the laughing.
The girls went to have their hair done for the umpteenth time in the last six weeks. Xiao Li and I caught up with them at the hair salon where we once again went for a hair wash.
The women being a bit shy
This time I had ear rinse (guang er duo) too, which includes, not surprisingly, rinsing out the ears with water, then inserting cotton wool buds into the ear canal a great deal further than your GP would advise. It was a strange experience and I kept deathly still while the bud felt like it dug two inches into my brain. No, unfortunately I didn’t catch a glimpse of the bud once it was extracted so no waxy photo of that….
Having said that, it was an awfully nice experience….
The hand massage was part of the head wash experience
They do something with the nerves - rather weird I thought
On the way to get some breakfast I told Xiao Li I didn’t have enough money for the cab fare, at which he showed me the contents of his bum bag – a wad of 100 kuai notes that must have been at least 10000 kuai, or about £650+.
On the way back we stopped into the bank where he produced his id card and his sister’s id card, then withdrew 40,000 ren min bi (not much less than £3000) in £6.50 notes). He calmly put them in his wallet, except for the last 10000 which wouldn’t fit, which he put in his trouser pockets. As this was several years' salary for most people, I asked him why he needed so much cash.. Well, apparently he is going to buy a new car at the end of the month. And he wants as 4x4. Fair enough – obviously credit cards are not expected here….
Xiao Wei complained of a very painful neck in the morning, due, according to her, to the neck cracking at her massage yesterday (she and Tan went to the same place I went to yesterday). Just as I’d got over my fear of neck cracking I don’t need to hear this.
Incidentally , I read a worrying article in The Guardian online about the dangers of not drinking. It seemed to suggest that unless you have three units a day you stand a greater chance of having a heart attack. See the article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1929774,00.html
I had just one bottle yesterday and none the day before…oh dear.
In the evening, after having a couple of beers at the bbq place, I was invited out to “drink tea” again. This time there were about 15 blokes in the room and only two women. I wasn’t really in the mood, but did my best to be sociable and chat and sing songs with them. I managed to remain reasonably sober until I suggested that it was time to go, as we needed to get the girls some food.
As we were leaving, Xiao Li said we would just pop in to another room in the building to say Happy Birthday to one of his mates. We knocked and entered a room filled with drunk men (and two women who may or may not have been friends). I was forced to “gan bei” (drink a full glass) several beers with the men before I was allowed to leave, a good deal less sober than fifteen minutes previously. Well at least I caught up on consumption re the Guardian article.
Mobile phone use here is different to the UK. For a start, most people have a clamshell style folding phone, including men. And a good deal of people have two phones. Even the poor folk who wear tatters and ride around in decrepit tricycles going through people’s rubbish all have a small mobile in a leather case attached to their belts. It’s not as though they are particularly cheap – reasonably small ones ranging from £60 to much, much more. And I believe that most people have to pay to receive a call (although I am on a different tariff so it’s free to receive but probably more to make calls).
The other thing is the tones. Not once have I heard ring ring or any of its family. It’s always some mad pop song that would get you booed off the 7.39 to Charing Cross. Even Tan changed her tone to something more jazzy when she got here. Ok, I admit it. After being given strange looks for my British ring ring I set my tone to be Land Down Under by Men at Work. Hope I remember to turn it back before I get home.
Lastly is the funny expression people give to their phones when receiving a call. Women especially, upon receiving a call, will wait the statutory 12 seconds before fishing out the phone from their bag. Then they will open it and hold an expression on their faces for another few seconds that makes them look as if they’re trying to work out a particularly difficult quantum mechanics equation, before finally pushing “Accept” and shouting “Waaaayyyyyyy!!”, (which is the way you answer a phone in Chinese, although it doesn’t have to be that loud). I used to think this was because a great deal of people haven’t programmed names into phones, and still use recognition of the phone number as a way of determining who is calling, but I have seen the exact same behaviour on women that have names on their phones that come up when someone is calling. It must be something to do with pretending you are so busy you can’t answer phone within 10 seconds of someone calling, or you want as many people to know as possible that someone is calling you.
Anyway, in the evening Xiao Li and I went out for a massage at a different place from before (the wives had had theirs during the day). The price has gone up in Pingguo from 25 to 30 kuai for an hour (about £2). Despite this ridiculous rise in inflation we paid anyway. The massage was the best I’ve had here. For the first time I was able to relax my neck sufficiently that the woman was able to crack it both ways by twisting my head to the left and the right! In fact she cracked just about every bone in my body – the trick is to massage the area well first and stretch the bones. They also apply pressure on specific places (I think they’re called acupoints), which can be painful at times (e.g. on the gums) but must be good for you.
The sore point of the massage was about half way through when the woman started on my legs. They first put pressure using their thumb on an area high up on the inside leg and hold it there for a few seconds. Well, the right leg was fine, after which she proceeded to do the relevant massage and stuff. Then she moved on to the left. I don’t know if it was her first time on a foreigner (I suspect so), but she managed to apply pressure on a particularly sensitive piece of skin that wasn’t part of my leg. Being a man, I bit my tongue and bore some significant pain for 30 seconds (I counted each long one), while she blindly got on with her otherwise very good job.
To be honest I’ve feared this every time I’ve been for a massage, but so far dressing to the left has served me well. I’ll have to reconsider for future sessions. Thank God she wasn’t particularly attractive or it could have been worse.
At least I had managed to allay my fears about European bodies being structured differently from Chinese ones. Ok, so I’m taller and hairier and fairer and whiter than them, but I think I have the same amount of bones in the same places. But until today I couldn’t properly relax, worrying that they may try to crack a bone that existed in Chinese bodies but not in English ones, and render me unable to walk again. I then performed a thought experiment regarding Leilei that showed me the folly of my ways – I mean, would he have an extra bone from his mum if she had one? And no, it’s not true about spare ribs.
While Leilei was with his grandma, I did some checking of the news on the Internet. They block bbc news here, unfortunately, so I tend to check The Times and The Guardian web sites.
There seems to be a lot of stories about religion at the moment – I understand much of this has been sparked by Jack Straw’s comments about a Muslim women wearing niqabs in his surgeries, compounded by a teacher in Yorkshire being suspended for refusing to remove hers while teaching children.
Even more fascinating for me was the amount of comment this has provoked (at least on these online newspapers). I admit I spent most of the day reading the comments of obviously well-educated people on such topics as “Should faith schools be abolished?”, leading to “Should England be a secularised state?”. I find the answer to both of these to be “yes”. Most definitely. Anyway, you can find a lot of comment at http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html or http://www.timesonline.co.uk/comment
I found out that we could change the tickets to leave on 2nd December instead of next Saturday, which was nice – and we shouldn’t even have to pay to change Leilei’s ticket as he doesn’t take up a seat.
Li Mingda's classroom. No Chairman Mao in sight.
I feel more like I’m living here now, than holidaying. We often eat in, and Leilei has a regular routine. I went out on my own to the other side of town to pick up Li Mingda from his school, and chatted with the parents like any other normal 6’1” fair haired, hairy-chested foreigner. Then went to pick up Leilei from his grandma’s and looked after him while his mum and Xiao Wei went to their dancing class. Haven’t played table tennis or badminton for a week – will have to make amends….
Xiao Li and I were supposed to go for a meal with some “big sister” in the evening, however, our lift didn’t turn up so we decided to go with the girls and Leilei to the bbq place. There we met the usual suspects and sat around their table eating lamb and prawns and greens, and drinking beer, as you do.
Getting ready to go
Now and again I got up and went for a walk. I wanted to see how the Man U – Liverpool match was going so I found a place with a tv, and asked the people eating there if they minded me changing the channel. No, that was fine. Some youths then invited me to sit down with them for a bit, which I did – pig penises washed down with beer. I bade them farewell then bumped into Lao Ma, one of Tan’s friends, and sat down with her and a friend for some more nosh. All very social here!
Last week Tan and I went to look at one of the local nurseries. Although it was a semi-government place, Tan thought the sleeping area was dirty and didn’t want Leilei going there. She was right. But it would have been nice for him to be spending so much time with other kids during the day – they give the kids lessons, but don’t indoctrinate them with photos of ex-leaders. And it is only 100 kuai for the month (less than £7). Anyhow, Leilei goes to his grandma most mornings and stays there till we go to pick up Li Mingda (Xiao Li’s son) from his school at about 5pm.
Spent a lot of the day waiting for the televised Man City game at Wigan, in which we played disgracefully and lost 4 – 0.
Leilei went to stay with his grandmother most of the day, as he has most of this week, which is nice and convenient…she is even toilet training him! I did try this two weeks ago. I refused to put on his nappy as no other children of his age here wear nappies. It didn’t take long before there was a load of poo on the bedroom floor, but I manfully cleared it up before washing him and immediately putting on a new nappy.
In the evening Tan and Xiao Wei went to their dancing class while I took Leilei out to the Guangchang to play. We went on the bumper cars, which until we got there had looked pretty tame. But as soon as we got on, all the other kids wanted to go as well, so all the cars were being used and there was lots of bumping going on…it’s not like an English fair where you’re discouraged from ramming into others. Well, Leilei didn’t complain.
In fact he complained bitterly when I went to take him home. The three wheeled taxis tried to rip us off as we were foreign but I wasn’t having any of it and told them in Chinese which shut them up!
We had planned that I would fly to Shanghai to get the tickets changed once our passports had the new visas, as posting would take up to five days. But when we rang the Baise police station to ask when the passports would be ready we were told that the man in charge of that process was in Nanning and wouldn’t be back until next week. With that spanner in the works Tan declared that we would have to go back on 28th as originally scheduled. I was less pessimistic.
I got her to ring China Eastern and ask if they needed to see the visas on the passports in order to change the tickets. They said no, they just needed the passports. The Baise police station said we could take the passports and bring them back when necessary, so this morning Tan went to Baise while I nursed Leilei and my head in bed.
She was back at 2pmish, then went to post the passports and tickets to Shanghai, where her former boss said he’d be willing to receive them and take them to the China Eastern office to change them. Jolly nice chap. He even said he’d pay for them and we could pay him back when we get to Shanghai. So here’s hoping nothing goes missing, and that they get there on time, and that we can amend the tickets to next month, and that they get sent back successfully, and that we can go and get the visa done again. Any one of those fails and we’re up shit creek.
Horse Boss came and helped me fix the cabling in the house, so now I can get Internet in our room (no more disturbance from the ever-illuminated television). As I know Horse Boss quite well now, and as a gesture of thanks, I gave him a bottle of duty free Gordon’s Gin. He really appreciated it, but will have problems getting tonic water in this town!
In the evening Xiao Li and I went out for a “face wash”. This is the best face wash in the world. You lie down on plush fake leather beds while the lady first washes your hair and massages your head for about 20 minutes. Then she washes your face gently before giving you a nice face massage, which moves down to the neck and shoulders, and before you know it you’re on your front and she’s doing your back. The thing lasts and hour and it only cost £1.50! Must have been some sort of discount. Ahh…want to go back every day.
Leilei deciding he'd rather watch tv than go out for a head wash
