Leilei haircut and another boss meal

Woke up at 4.30am but after a bit of counting in German I managed to squeeze back in and out of dreamland till 6.30 - a bit more successful than recent mornings. After giving up on further shuteye I went to ping pong from 8.30 - 10 in the rain but still managed to sweat as much as if it was a sunburner.

I'm trying to work out the algorithm for whether to get up or not. There are various factors that need to be weighed such as:
 - how much I need to sleep
 - how much benefit I'd get by doing the exercise I otherwise wouldn't be doing
 - what chance I'd have of having a siesta if I've had less than five hours sleep
 - what chance I have of having a couple of beers for lunch
I'll have to sort this out later.

We went to Waipo's again at 11.30 and I picked up some dou jiang and breakfast stuff up on the way. I excused myself soon after and went to the kids' piano place by the river in the hope that I might get a tinkle. I'd forgotten that this place doesn't even have doors to close out even a small percentage of the music and my Scott Joplin was competing with various Bachs and Beethovens, and therefore probably lost. I tried to look on the bright side; if you can manage to play in such conditions, it should stand you in good stead for playing in many more. I still look forward to the time I have the balls and ability to play on one of those public pianos though.

I only lasted half an hour at the piano place before I left to pick up the kids and take Leilei to have a haircut at Lao Ma's. This was the first place that Leilei ever got his hair cut and he probably doesn't remember how he only allowed it after shaving my arm. I noticed that Lao Ma had actually taken some care over her wifi password. Literally half the time the passwords for wifi are 88888888 or 123456789 but hers was 88889999 - cunning. Xixi says she has an app on her phone for getting onto wifi without a password but now I'm guessing it just tries the most popular few passwords and generally works.

Lao Ma's nice BMW X1 - I still wonder how you can afford one at twice the price as a hairdresser earning much less than in the UK - I must be missing something

Leilei actually enjoying a haircut for the first time in his life

Haircut done - not bad

Leilei shaved my arm in 2008!

We went home after Leilei's haircut as I needed to work and Leilei wanted to chat with Momo. We're thinking of going to see him and his mum in Zhuhai in a few days. Then A Wu rang to ask me to go to the same boss as a couple of days ago to eat. Well he was obviously over his little tiff with me when I didn't go fishing with them the other day. I was fine with this and took the kids to the same place behind the KTV that I went to a few days back.

But there was no-one there. Fine, I spoke to A Wu and he said they'd be there "soon" which could mean anything. So I left them for a bit to pick up some stuff, but well after 6pm there was still no sign of life. I took them to get a bite to eat as by this time they were hungry and picked up a not massively healthy fried sausage wrap with a bit of lettuce that Xixi gave straight to me but otherwise they both ate fully. In the end the meal didn't start until gone 7.30, well more than two hours after A Wu rang, so I said I'd take the kids to Waipo's as it wasn't fair to leave them here in the smoke when they'd already eaten.

What the kids ended up eating for tea (I had Xixi's lettuce)

What grown men do while waiting for food to be served

It was a nice meal, and one of the women from the women's table came to the blokes' table to cai ma, and I guessed she was without husband and therefore "reaching out". I may be totally wrong and I usually am, but I boringly made a point of saying my wife was from Bangxu. I'm sure there is a term like that for women when they make it clear they are not available but in a not very subtle way.

The men's table but the woman is hidden on the left hand side

Later that evening I remembered I told the kids we'd put out the camera trap so we went to the mini mountain behind Deng Xiaoping hill and found what we hoped would be subtle place to capture any animals by the side of the path. I hope we get something though I'm not betting on it.

The hidden camera trap

Back from Tian Yang with yummy mangoes

I was up reasonably early at 7 but the kids weren't. Luckily I had the wherewithall to check what time breakfast served till and found it was 9.30 so got them up at 9 and 10 minutes later we got downstairs to find almost nothing left. Grrr. I did sort of moan but I managed to salvage three boiled eggs, two fried eggs, three man tou, and a portion of noodles each for the kids so we weren't hungry but I'm not sure how healthy my five yolks were as the kids don't seem to like them.

Back at hotel room kids wanted to watch a film but I said there was no point and as if to confirm that Yang Haiwei called a minute later to say he'll be there immediately to pick us up. Did he not know about checking out? At check-out Leilei forgot his chong dian so we had to go back. Yang Haiwei had to wait a little while and wouldn't let me pay, saying the business would, so I said I'd say we were his clients as a sort of joke but I think he may have took my excuse seriously. It was 600 kuai after all - why not put on expenses?

Back at Haiwei's office there was lots of waiting around, drinking tea, and I really wondered what actual work was being done. To be fair, occasionally someone would walk in and talk to someone with some papers in their hand, but that seemed about it. I had hoped that Haiwei's one hour absence was due to work but found out he'd been cooking lunch, which we partook of before waiting around a little later. I was told we'd pick up some mangoes from a market then leave back for Pingguo at 3pm. This was a change from the original plan as we were expecting to take the train with Haiwei's wife and kids after lunch. But it transpired Haiwei would now be driving back today so we'd all go in the same car again.

Haiwei's car outside his new office in Tian Yang - there are few blue cars in China

Before we left we went to the market in the boiling mid-afternoon sun. The ladies cut out bits of mangoes for us and they were utterly gorgeous. As Haiwei and his wife discussed how many they wanted and at what price I went for a little walk in the sun which made the local stallholders look at me in a queer way as if to say "what's that bloke doing out in the...oh he's one of those...". Haiwei's wife spent about 360 kuai on three quite large boxes of mangoes, and they put something else in the car too.

Kids and Haiwei at the Tian Yang mango market

Eating straight out of the fruit as mother nature intended

Back in the office 3pm came and went as more and more tea was imbibed. Eventually it was time to go at 4.20 but first we drove a few minutes to some factory outside Tian Yang where we stopped for some reason. Someone brought me out some "liang cha" (cold tea) which was actually warm, and I recognised him as the bloke I conversed with yesterday. I wasn't really in the mood for another deep conversation but luckily I didn't have to as it was time to go.

But instead of going to Pingguo we stopped at Tian Dong, the next region down from Tian Yang. Haiwei was on the blower to some woman trying to find a place to eat. Ah, so we were to eat here before heading to Pingguo. But the place was closed, and looked like it wouldn't open till the evening, so we did end up going back to Pingguo where we found a nice place to eat and Xixi found a tiny kitten on the stairs that wasn't scared. There were a couple of other blokes there, one from Tian Yang, and a tacit agreement between Haiwei and me to only have a couple of beers as the other guys weren't partaking. In the meantime Uncle Yellow had called me to go to a bar tonight so I said yes that would be great, and he'd call me at 8.30.

Cute

I got a lift home with the the kids as Tan was going out to eat at A Xia's as she'd not had any tea yet. Haiwei then forced not one but two boxes of mangoes on us. So unnecessary but appreciated. We'll have to give most of them away though. A few minutes later Uncle Yellow called to say he was downstairs so the kids and I went to see him in his nice new white MG (which he was quite proud to tell me was a Chinese brand now). I called Tan to see if I could drop off the kids at A Xia's but she told me she was about to go home as she was full, which isn't normal, so I asked Uncle Yellow to go to A Xia's and pick her up and drop the lot of them off home.

Uncle Yellow and his new white MG

So I had a couple of hours free and we had a relaxing time just talking about stuff with another bloke I'd eaten with back in 2008, and his wife and eight year old son. We were on 2.5%ers but the boss came over and after a couple of gan beis took a selection of three other beers from the same brand and opened them up and we had a bit of a tasting session. I said I preferred the 2.5%er in the hope that that's what we'd continue with, but paid compliments to the 3.6%, 3.7%, and 4.0% too. I got everyone to line up the cans in order of their preference and it seemed we all agreed we weren't massively keen on the black lager - phew - it was the strongest.

My order of favourites for some reason from right to left

What I wasn't particularly happy about was seeing the kid with a bottle of blue alcopops. Ok it was 4% and he nurtured it the whole two hours or so and didn't even finish it, but it seemed wrong. Then I thought of the French parents who supposedly bring their kids up on watered down red wine and everything seems ok and it results in the kids not interested in drinking when they grow up. Except that it doesn't. I didn't overdo it at all and got a lift to A Xia's 11.30 where I picked up the dian dong che and took it back to chong dian and got an early night at 12.30.