I need more sleep

Bloody hell I woke up at 3.30am again. Stupidly since we took the flight I have forgotten to take my melatonin as really its main use is supposedly to counter jetlag. And I've been taking it most nights for the last few months despite almost no jets.... Well with the help of VPN and Youtube podcasts I managed to doze on and off, too tired to go to ping pong but too awake for a proper sleep. If I was living here properly I'd have just got up and got on with my day, knowing I would find a few spaces (in terms of time) to grab a nap here and there.

In the morning Jiuma had left to go to Baise, saying Erjie would turn up at 3pm. I didn't really pay much attention to that as people say lots of things here. But at 2pm Erjie video-called me to say she was outside Pingguo and was going to pop in to see Leilei. Sure enough a couple of hours later there was a knock on the door and Erjie and a couple of other ladies walked in and shrieked to see Leilei. Of course as all relatives do they remarked on how tall and how thin he is. But he seems pretty cool with that. As an 18 year-old I was so self concious about being thin. But we managed the photo-shoot and then they said they were going to Baise for a meal and that we could go with them. Hmmm...no thank you was our reply but we were told any time we wanted to go there we could get a hotel for free...yeah not dodgy at all.

Leilei with Erjie and another aunty

Leilei had forwarded me a text, which I worked out was saying the account was under-funded. What? Already, after four days? Oh well, I guess Li Kun had just got us the cards but no credit which is fair enough as we haven't paid for them yet. Topping up would be via Weixin of course and Yima's friend helped me out as I topped up my account with 50 and the same for Leilei. I tried to top up Nezha's account but it wouldn't allow me to input his number for some reason. I know when Li Kun got us our cards mine was the "main" one and the others linked to my account. In fact I'm not sure I needed to top up Leilei's at all. Anyway the text I received appeared to show my account was still 112.99 kuai in debt. So I added 100 and then 30 and that appeared to enable all three of us to get back online outside of wifi zones.

Bugger, I still hadn't registered us and we'd been here for five days already. Five days or 5 days? The former seems more correct but in this internet age do we need to bother? I understand in general from one to nine should be written like that but from 10 and above it's the number form. But is it a rule set in stone? Are any rules for the English language set in stone? It doesn't bother me that much as I'm not an English teacher but I just want one single rule to be adhered to: "literally" means exactly as is. Not similar to. If we could adhere to that single rule I'd be happy for the rest of English to swim about in the mud of ambiguity.

Well it has pretty much been raining since we got here but at 4.30pm there was a break and I took this opportunity to go to the police station. It was still overcast but only about 30 degrees so I walked it. It's such a cheap thrill, walking in Pingguo. Even though almost no-one shouts "hello!" any more, I still have an acute awareness of where I am and that to some extent I will be judged as a foreigner and I will never lose that feeling of needing to be a "good" diplomat. I got to the vicinity of the police station and asked a shopkeeper if he knew where it was. He pointed and said "not far" which was all I really needed. Three minutes later I was there and couldn't understand how I'd missed it the other day.

Inside I explained that I needed to register us and the lady wasn't sure what I meant. I wasn't really sure either so just said when we come here we need to show our passports to the local police and she seemed to get it. But then the other police woman - no, just police person - told me that I had to go to another place to "deng ji wai guo ren". I was slightly disappointed but not surprised; there have been at least five places we've registered ourselves in the last 19 years or so. She kindly wrote a couple of sentences to explain where to go and who to see in the building, which was on the other side of town and they wouldn't hear of me walking there (not least because it would take 45 mins and they closed in 30).

So after this most recent unsuccessful attempt to register ourselves I started walking back and picked up a couple of small towels for wiping the seats of the dian dong ches clean. Again, such a trivial thing as that turned into a delight of talking with the shopkeeper's daughter who didn't know how much to charge me so called her mum to find out. Yes it was only a 2 minute conversation with her but it probably gave us both more value than it would have normally...although it most ways it was totally normal. I also needed a shower mat to save us from a near-certain injury in the slippy bathroom. Neither of the shops I tried understood the Google translation of shower mat so I had to explain the action of taking a shower and slipping over in order to get them to understand what I needed. But the second shop had a dirty one hiding away somewhere.

A Wu called as is his wont and I agreed to meet him shortly at his new office. But first I wanted to sort out charging the dian dong ches. These days all the charging places have a number and a QR code, so clearly I'd need to sort something in Weixin. I duly scanned the code then got page after page of instructions in Chinese that I was gutted not to understand. This is the difference between being able to chat to a person in Chinese and actually interacting with applications. I got as far as taking a screenshot then literally writing the characters down on paper then inputting them into Pleco, and found out I needed to fund an account. Fair enough I added 10 kuai but then there was more stuff to do. I sort of gave up and sent Tan a couple of screenshots and she sort of helped. I plugged them both in and saw that the chargers' lights were green so hoped they were charging...green is for "go", right?

The evening consisted in a walk to A Wu's new office for "tea", then going out to a restaurant not far from our place. I pinged the boys and was a bit surprised to hear that they'd come over (on their hired bikes). The meal was with Boss Wei, who seems to be A Wu's main boss-companion so far this time. Plus A Wu's new wife and Boss Wei's wife and a few other people. The boys turned up to the delight of the others but Nezha said he felt sick and went to the loo. Meaning they both left minutes later. I guess it does take time for your belly to adjust here. 

At 9pm I explained I'd been invited out to see another friend so I was allowed to leave. I went to meet Lu zong at his new place in Jiang Bing Lu. Annoyingly I can't order a didi che with my phone without doing photo ID, which I'm not sure is a good idea as I have Li Kun's banking details and his photo ID attached to my phone too. So as I saw no other means of transport I just ended up walking and getting there a little late. We had a couple of beers  and bbq with some friends for a couple of hours before A Wu wanted to meet up again at a KTV bar around midnight. Again I walked the 1k or so and made it there to find them in a strangely non-singing room in the KTV place. I was getting pretty tired and it didn't help that the woman who decided to sit next to me whooped me at cai ma, And I made my excuses and left soon after 1am.

Nice grub

Awoke bang on 3.30am after 3h30 sleep. So much for getting over the jetlag. Dropped off a little between 8-11 though, and again after heating up some leftovers from Uncle Yellow's meal a couple of days ago.

Some mate IM'd me at 5.42pm to drink beer and as I had nothing officially on I said I should be able to. Then I bumped into Waterman, no, Lu Zong as is his name I now know for sure, and he asked me to go out tonight. I said I may already be busy but maybe I could come over later. I had a portion of bao zi at our local place and the woman was very happy to see me after such a long time.

Then Chen pinged me to ask me to go for a bite and I explained about the existing dates. He answered fairly logically that the bloke (who quite frankly I couldn't remember) who'd invited me for a drink hadn't even given a time so we could count him out, and that we wouldn't need to go to Lu Zong's till 9pm. So I pinged the bloke I should be seeing and explained I had two other dates and we could meet up in a couple of days, and he said "ok" and 10 minutes later I was waiting outside our building, watching Chen coming up the road in live location on Weixin. When I saw him lean out and shout my name from the right-hand side of the car I knew he must be in a didi che and that meant he was going to drink, as he's one of the few people I know who are very strict on themselves about not drink-driving.

We drove up to just north of the guangchang into a residential area where we walked in to what looked like an alcohol shop, to a great cheer from mostly red-faced people drinking baijiu. Chen was aware of my dislike of this vile liquid and had brought a load of German beer. And although it may not have been real German beer it was German strength at 5% so I knew I'd need to be careful. But I was brought straight up to the boss to gan bei a large glass of beer with his thimbleful, but after that I insisted on half or third measures when gan bei'ing the rest of the table.

I wanted to take a picture of the food and that was fine but Chen made a point of me not taking a picture of the people. I sort of got that and understood that the multiple people taking pictures with us were of their own volition.

Nice array of food at the meal

Well 9pm arrived and it was pretty clear we wouldn't be going to Lu zong's place so we went with the flow. Then I got in contact with Leilei and it appeared they had sussed out how to use the public dian dong ches using Weixin. Now that he has someone's card assigned to his account he can pay for stuff with a simple scan. So he simply scanned a couple of the yellow bikes and they both rode up to where we were. To more cheers of course! I do understand that people still like to have their photos taken with us, but I was happy it was the boys who were more the centre of attention rather than me. Apparently they hadn't eaten since lunch so gorged themselves on the grub, and in this case quite literally were eating grubs, as far as I could understand.... Well they were explained to me as "wood worms" which sounds self-explanatory but I wasn't aware they were so big.

The boys enjoying their grub

Oh dear...

The boys made their excuses after a while and at well gone 11pm I had to admit I was flagging again. But Chen is cool and understands that and won't try to force me to stay. So one gan bei later I was saying my goodbyes and not quite committing to coming back tomorrow as invited. Chen had ordered a didi che and 5 minutes later I was back home not even contemplating a night cap.