Unexpected guitar at Li Jia He Xian

Up lateish due to yesterday but so what I’m officially on holiday now for a bit. I got a call from Li Kun at 1.30pm and at first I thought he was telling me to come and practise music but then realised it was to go for a meal with musicians from the town of Baise (an hour and a half north of Pingguo). I wasn’t really thinking but I knew I was on holiday so I thought “sod it” and I said I’d be there “soon”. I  didn’t tell him I needed a shower so would be longer than the 5 minutes he was expecting, so obviously when I arrived he was already waiting outside the famous restaurant Li Jia He Xian where they were.

Wow. They were well into their meal and I thought it a little strange that Li Kun had only called me at 1.30pm rather than the day before. A few beers were drunk and then a violinist started a very professional piece with the classical guitarist (though the former wasn’t drinking the latter was). It was a spellbinding session for me and I clapped heartily when they finished earlier than most people who were filming it (ok I was too).

Unexpected wonderful violin performance

The guitarist was great too

But then came the problem. Li Kun said it was my turn to perform. Actually one of the men at the table had said it was very interesting that literally the minute I had arrived he had been watching a video of me playing Scarborough Fair (Canticle) and when I turned up it was like some sort of vision (his words not mine). Li Kun picked up the classical guitar that had just been played beautifully and thrust it in my unwelcoming hands. Apparently it was worth more than a thousand quid.  I hadn’t played a classical guitar for well over 10 years and explained so. But apparently that wasn’t a problem, and as soon as they heard my excuse Li Kun was on the phone ordering an acoustic guitar and not 10 minutes later one arrived at the restaurant.

What could I do? They’d only bloody arranged a delivery of a guitar so this white man could try to entertain professional musicians…. I was quite embarrassed so actually drank a glass of red wine which I don’t normally do here. I’ve never sung Scarborough Fair before, only played it to accompaniment so I put the capo at a much higher fret than I would normally have. Oh it was not good...my voice was quiet and probably not on key as I am no Garfunkel, but I got polite applause afterwards.

I downed a beer and decided that I would show them I wasn’t that bad, so went to another scale and belted out Sounds of Silence and Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and got an actual appreciative round of applause. That gave me the confidence to break into a couple of more S&G songs that they really liked.

As is sometimes the case here I got a “review” from the main guitar player from the violin piece. He said I was “too weak” for Scarborough Fair but really came alive for the other songs afterwards. Chinese people are often this frank and I do appreciate it, especially in this case.

There was a bald bloke (I think another guitarist) who got really drunk and then just leant forward and fell asleep as you would I suppose, but no-one batted an eyelid. Well this was a really unexpected afternoon, which normally, due to work I wouldn’t have taken up. But I’m very glad I did, strangely to hear the criticism more than the praise. I got home at 4pm.

I stayed up to have the luxury of watching City beat Huddersfield 6-1, and David Silva was a peach. I love many of our players but he will probably always be my favourite, despite Aguero scoring a hat-trick. But Man U lost to Brighton which made the day that much better!

Nice bonus watching us win convincingly

Muslim beef and meeting Chen Again

Up a bit late and took the kids to the Muslim place I took Xixi last year for lunch. While we were making our way through some beef some boss entered the establishment and I recognised him from somewhere recently. He chastised me for eating so late (it was only just gone 1.30pm). He too was eating with his son and a few minutes later as he left he shouted out that he had paid for my order too. I tried in vain to reject this but knew there would be no availability of avail. I wish I could have thanked him by name….

The beef was gorgeous and the kids had quite a bit despite it being a little chilli. The kids ate a fair bit of the hand-made noodles too. Then Leilei decided to try eating some cut-up chilli on the beef and spent the next 15 minutes in agony trying to stop the burning and finishing my water...we couldn’t understand how the beef was so mild with those chillies all around it. We had to doggy bag the rest of the noodles as I couldn’t bear wasting it even though I was nearly certain it would find itself in our bin within hours.

The kids enjoying some beef at the Muslim place

Although the rainy season appears to have left us for the sun, and it was blisteringly hot once again, we went for a ride around until we could feel that the sun was doing us a disservice and stopped at my favourite watermelon juice place. The girls I remember as mere tots were now serving there and seemed to remember us with a smile, as they told me they’d just run out of watermelon and would honey melon be ok? Yes it would, and Leilei took a zhenzhu naicha too before getting back on the dian dong che and knocking over a standing bicycle. Whoops sorry.

The best watermelon drink place in Pingguo...I first came here when they were literally half the size (the girls not the drinks)

We stayed most of the rest of the afternoon in the sanctuary of our air-conditioned flat until Tan went out to see friends and then Chen pinged me to say we’d meet at 蚝门螺吧 at 6.30pm. I didn’t really understand the Chinese as it looks like Oyster Door Snail Bar, but I didn’t care as it was really close to our house and nearly next door to Tian Yang Po’s, Tan’s favourite bbq that we’ve been going to for close to 15 years….

We ended up having a great meal for me, but not so much for the kids but they had their various sweet drinks so they were relatively happy. And I was sensible with the beer.

Great meal with Chen

Xixi "sort of" enjoyed it - Chen waving...

The toilets warning it is forbidden to poo

Later I went to a bar with the waterman and bar owner but I didn’t stay as long as I might have done due to paternal duties and tiredness. But it was weird that when I left I had to take a fairly heavy woman home and I worried that I wouldn’t have enough in the battery to get her home but thankfully I just about made it.

Just for historical reference I'm checking on how many km the dian dong che is doing between charges...not amazing but don't need to change batteries very soon

Mario Land and a lizard

I took the kids to A Xia’s place but in the end they wanted to stay with me which I didn’t mind at all. As we were getting back on the bike a shiny white car bibbed me and nearly hit me then the window wound down and I noticed it was my mate Chen from a couple of years ago, the bloke married to the Nanning dancer with a son who likes to smile a lot but talks in a way I find very difficult to understand. Well we hadn’t met up last year so he invited me to a meal tomorrow. I didn’t think I had anything arranged so I said it should be ok thank you, and we exchanged WeChat details as his last one was no longer in use due to him forgetting his password. A slightly dubious excuse as these days you can get your friends to confirm who you are if you forget your password...but I certainly wasn’t going to enquire.

I noticed this pasted at the ground floor. Annoyingly at the time of taking it I didn't understand it, even though I could read 40% of the characters - progress of sorts, but lots still needed. Must do better.

I took the kids for a ride in the afternoon and found a really weird place with concrete holes like Mario Land. We stood there for several minutes trying to work out what it was but were nonplussed. Later, back on the road, we noticed a lizard crossing the road and made sure we missed it, but then turned around to see where it was going.This was actually more fun than expected and it dodged death several times and miraculously made it across to the other side of the road. We thought we’d lost it in the bushes but we found it again climbing a tree. Several minutes amusement for us to the bemusement of anyone looking. The kids then ordered me to take them to a shenme dou you shop… Leilei nearly bought a set of wireless headphones and tried them on and they looked a bit silly but I’m glad he did. Xixi bought some face mask stuff as she doesn’t seem to be able to leave a shop without buying something....not sure where she got that from..

The weird Mario Land-like holes in the ground

Modelling the face mask she had to buy...

Some other dubious wares in the shop I'm glad they didn't see...

The lizard that survived the crossing of the road and gave us more enjoyment than reptiles should normally do

I went to Haiwei’s for tea as his son was around and wanted to speak English and Spanish. I couldn’t tempt the kids to come with me though. Of course it was a nice meal and we had a couple of beers but nothing silly as I had to get home for a meeting at 8pm. It went better and quicker than planned but there was no point going back to Haiwei’s as his son had gone to his mum’s to sleep - he’ll be going back to school tomorrow at 6pm...grim.

I had to do more work later before deciding to do some guitar practice before realising I didn’t have my capo. Google translate makes the Chinese for “capo” look really bad but Li Kun understood and said I could pick it up. I came over to his place and there were loads of people there playing music. A guitar was thrust into my hands and I spent the next 20 minutes playing Scarborough Fair with Li Kun. Then I took my leave and called Haiwei, who had been calling me for the last hour. As I was checking the map location he sent me I saw it looked really close and then I heard a shout “Tom!!” and of course it was him and a couple of mates. They were right opposite Li Kun’s place! The next hour or so was quite a fun session of cai ma and talking about how lucrative being a middleman between China and Canada could be.

I offered Haiwei a lift as he was obviously pissed but he pointed to his car, so there wasn’t much I could do. I made my excuses and left for a relatively early night except I played World of Tanks with Mat for more time than I should have.

Rats

Up 10ish, so before the kids, and decided to get up rather than lie in. It was a bit late for breakfast so took the kids to go to lunch at 12.53. We went to the underground car park to unplug the charging dian dong che to find out it wasn’t plugged in anyway. The security man was shouting something to me about electricity so I feared the worst, but on turning it on I found it seemed to be full. So we all got on but as we tried to mount the slope to get out it gave up and I accepted that we had no dian. However, on further inspection it turned out to be a flat tyre. The bloke who had just shouted at me then told me there was a place that would fix it just around the corner so we started walking there. But as soon as we got to the waterman’s place just 30 seconds later the drizzle we’d been having turned torrential and we were stuck so we took advantage of this and went to the jiao zi place to eat. Leilei ate all of his plus one of mine and added some chilli sauce which made me happy. Xixi had a portion of bao zi and managed all but three which wasn’t bad. The rain eased off and we walked the dian dong che to a small place with tyres outside and woke up the man lying there. He checked the back wheel and straight away identified a buckled rear wheel and got to work straightening it out. Five minutes later it was working again. He said “wu kuai” and I tried to give him 10 but he would not accept and pushed back five kuai into my hand. I was really grateful though not surprised and knew it could have been a lot more in a different place.

Checking the mileage on the clock

The buckled wheel

Fixing the buckled wheel

Lunch of bao zi

We were supposed to go to A Xia a yi’s but popped home first to do the important job of putting fizzy drinks in the freezer so they would be solid by the evening. Mama was still there so ordered a di di che to take them to A Xia’s. This is the equivalent of Uber and is incredibly efficient and cheap. We’re talking about 5-6 kuai for most rides, so undercutting san lun ches and not to mention they’re air conditioned etc. Sadly for me this really could be the death of san lun ches here, but it is simply a sign of market forces in action.

As soon as they were gone Haiwei called me to remind me to go to his office and drink tea. Well it was 2pm and I wasn’t going to get a sleep so why not? When I got there I bumped into Boss Huang and first had some tea in his office with his wife and kid and some other bosses. Then Haiwei came and we moved to his office, just the two of us. It appeared he wanted to talk business. Over the course of the next hour I learnt that his new job is at an aluminium factory, except it’s not actually aluminium that they will produce but some sort of fluoridised version that can be used for extracting pure aluminium from alumina during the electrolysis process.

Haiwei was very serious about this and kept writing down terms with a pen in Chinese characters that I couldn’t understand (quite frankly I couldn’t understand the English versions most of the time). He had to keep writing on my Pleco app so I could see what he meant but at the end I understood he wanted me to become a middleman between his company and foreign aluminium factories that would be interested in buying this flouridised substance. Of course I had many questions and posed these questions as coming from a potential client rather than trying to sound critical. Why wouldn’t other companies do this? How good is the quality compared to what they are using etc. It boiled down to the “fact” that the environmental impact of producing this substances is considerable, and many countries won’t allow it.

As I’ve been going to Canada quite a lot recently he wanted to give me some samples to show to prospective companies. As if I could just step out of the office and walk up to a factory owner and do this. To be fair Canada is the world’s third biggest aluminium producer after China and Russia. Then he said there’d definitely be money in it for me and when I said that wouldn’t be necessary he nearly took offence and said it wasn’t up for question...if I managed to help a sale of course I’d be recompensed...no option. He was already talking about bringing prospective clients here and showing them the factory and taking them out to eat and drink, and the factory won’t even be operational until November.

Then we leapt into his car and 15 minutes later we were at the factory grounds, where it was in the process of being built. We entered an office and met his boss (with whom he’d worked about 15 years ago in a similar business). They then talked shop for the next half an hour at a pace I found difficult to keep up with, so I buried myself in my phone and started studying the aluminium production process. Maybe I have a low threshold for this sort of thing, but I found the process fascinating; pure aluminium doesn’t occur naturally on this planet as it requires huge amounts of electrical energy to separate it from other chemicals. Typically, alumina is first extracted from bauxite, before being hit with very high currents of electricity at a high temperature so it can be sucked away from the other elements. It’s a very complex process that’s been used for over 100 years, though there are constant efforts to refine it, one being to get rid of carbon anodes in order to avoid spewing out a load of CO2. But once the aluminium is made it’s very clean and more recyclable than other metals as it doesn’t corrode.

I still need to understand properly where the fluoride stuff fits in in the last part of the process, but if nothing else I hope to learn some more chemistry here. This is how education should be done; instead of going to school and learning ionic and covalent bonding in order to pass a test, then instantly forget it, we should first identify a need, then work out how we fulfil that need. In this case the need is for a clean metal that is currently mixed with a load of stuff we don’t particularly want. So we need to break the chemical bonds by using other chemicals and energy - kinetic (crushing), electric, and heat. When you have the context of this need you have a much stronger drive to learn. I’m really trying to find these contexts for the kids to make their learning better grounded instead of just going to school because you have to. I don’t expect it to be easy but there must be some way to make then find a need to learn algebra. I’m going to make a concerted effort to be more aware of this during everyday situations. I wonder if I could have used the dian dong che’s wheel as an example. The man had to let out air then use some metal pincers to bend the metal...so much maths and chemistry there, from the angle and length of the pincers, to the pliability of the metal wheel, followed by the pressure from the machine to pump back air into the tyre and the spraying of water over the fixed area to check no bubbles were coming out. Why can’t the kids be so fascinated by this?

Anyway, we eventually left the factory office and headed back to the bosses’ place to drink more tea. Haiwei said he was going to play ping pong this evening and I said I’d join him with the kids. But when we got back to the office one of the kids pointed to a yellow bag and told me to look. Inside were two giant frozen rats, each the size of a sturdy man’s forearm. They were on their backs with their front feet sticking up in a begging position. Nice.

So 6 o’clock rolled along ushered in by more tiny cups of tea and finally we were all told to eat. We went into the room that the bosses usually drink red wine in to find a table with two trays of meat on it, but no rat, at least yet.

Two frozen rats

Two non-frozen rats

 A non-rat dish that was fine

Soon after the red wine and beer appeared, followed by lots of cai ma. I actually got a bit tipsy on the beer so at 8.30 I made excuses and went home to pick up my guitar to take to Li Kun’s to practise, but not before the rat appeared, thankfully in small non-rat-like chunks and I did try some - not bad if a little tough.. I spent a couple of hours at Li Kun’s drinking only tea and practising Scarborough Fair with him on the flute, focusing on the timing mainly. A couple of mates dropped by and then a woman appeared with beer, and then some food arrived and I realised this is where I would be for a good hour or so.

Haiwei called me a couple of times to come back to the bosses’ place and the third time Li Kun answered and and shouted that I was over at his for the evening! Eventually though I did head back to the office but Haiwei had already gone - well it was after 1am.

Wrong Boss Zhou

Managed to get up at 10.30 and grabbed a shower before going out and getting the kids some food as the lazy sods didn’t want to go out but I felt the need to. Back home and fed I chatted to Mat for a bit trying to sort out getting World of Tanks to work but we couldn’t find each other online, until he worked out that I’d downloaded the American client while in Canada, and we should be on the EU one. What? Surely that is just a config thing? But no, a new 5GB download was on the cards so maybe we’ll manage to play this evening...poxy (not proxy) shit in this day and age.

Cute baby at the beef soup place opposite ours...I think it is Lu Wen's new daughter

Took the kids out for lunch...something tells me they are getting a little bored of jiaozi

Managed to get a 1h45 wushui and got up before 6pm. I didn’t eat tea as I was going to see Uncle Yellow at 8.30pm, but before then I had loads of work. Then I had to go to Boss Zhou’s but somehow I ended at the wrong Boss Zhou. This was a little embarrassing but I made humour of it as one must, but was a little late for Uncle Yellow. Of course being late for mates here is no big deal. Uncle Yellow was there with his pisshead mate I’ve known for 10 years now, who’s now got a one year old daughter and a wife who doesn’t seem to mind them getting pissed with mates. I can only imagine they only do it for a few weeks a year while I’m around but that is quite a pompous thought. We ate great insects and pork and beef stuff...it really was the best meal I’ve had this year. They drank 22% white alcohol and I stuck to beer, though at 2.5% still gets to me. As things do sometimes happen, I ended up sitting at another table and some woman started singing to me to me in the local language.. I was really embarrassed but had to stand there and take it while of course I’m being filmed.

More nice grub(s)

My life here could be some sort of Black Mirror episode. No need for cameras on every street; everyone has one on their person and it seems at least one person has one trained on me at any one time. People almost have a real-time feed of what I am doing. The need for some privacy may be important for many but it seems a luxury I no longer have when not in a house.