Electric san lun che

Despite the horribly late night I was still up at 9am thanks to Xixi coming and telling me "it's morning time!". Well, I couldn't ask for a lovlier alarm clock. Quieter, maybe. It was a bit of a chore again to get Leilei up; they'd both been up late last night yet again...something quite expected when they have a siesta for two hours at school - not that I can complain about that!

I found that Tan had already gone when I got the kids clothed - she had another morning driving lesson. So the kids and I walked to the normal breakfast place and I managed to get them to eat some less sweet pancake and some bao zi, along with the quotidian dou jiang. As Tan had taken the dian dong che (electric bike), we took a san lun che to school. This differed from other san lun ches I'd taken before in two important ways. Firstly, it had a small bench facing the bench where you normally sit, meaning it could take 4-5 passengers legally, and three generations at a squeeze, as opposed to the normal one bench/generation. Secondly, it was battery-powered. This I found most interesting as I know petrol has gone up in the last couple of years from 5 to 7.5 kuai, and everyone is moaning (not complaining) about it. The kids are now fine to drop off in school and they run off eagerly to draw and play with their friends. On the way back home I struck up a conversation with the driver about having a bigger, electric san lun che. Basically it all made sense - only the second such conversation this year! Yes, these bikes are cheaper to run, break down less, and carry more people. To add to the win they cost the same as petrol-driven bikes new. There had to be a downside - I asked how many kilometres he got on a full charge and he said 80-90. Not bad. I suppose the downsides are that you cannot work more than x hours a day as at some stage you have to recharge, and every few months or year or so you'll have to change the batteries at a fair expense. Still, I told him I expected to see a lot more electric san lun ches on the road next year and he said he thought I was right!

Leilei and Xixi going to school on the electric san lun che

Once home I rested for one hour with Tan, as she had also just got back and was tired after mastering reversing into a garage.

The rest of the day was pure work, interjected with a smidgeon of sleep which was rudely interrupted by a bloke coming to finally finish off fixing the bottom of the new door and the skirting boards. Thank goodness I brought some decent coffee with me. That kept me up after work, when I decided I would go to the seafood place I frequented last year a lot, and this year hardly at all.

When I arrived, the cook's wife waved to me with one hand as the other was holding her mobile phone. Apparently she was trying to call her husband (Huang Chang) as she didn't know where he was. She gave up and asked me to call him, which I did...the phone rang until an electric bike pulled up behind me and I received a hearty slap on the back accompanied by an "A Ming!". He had just turned up with a mate and bade me sit down at a table with them. And then more, and more, and more mates turned up, all happier than they should have been to be sitting with a foreigner. They were mostly half cut so I was careful about not drinking too much. I stayed for an hour, during which I made polite conversation, but really these blokes, as nice as they were, were a bit too drunk for me to be comfortable. One bloke was particularly the worse for wear and kept trying to gan bei with me, so much so that even the others tolds him to calm down. The cook noticed my slight unease as I made my excuses, and led me away from the table as the others tried to grab me back. I thought he was leading me to another table where there were more blokes waiting to gan bei, but he lead me straight to the bike, and told me to drive safely. He is another of those people I consider to be a real friend here.

I had eaten at the seafood place, but not much. So I stopped off to buy a little bbq on the way home at midnight. I could have joined some people at a table for beer but decided against it, and instead on the way back stopped off at a little shop to buy batteries for our fan's remote control, and a rechargeable torch just in case we get any more power cuts. These are just some of the domestic considerations that have to be made living here.

Celebrating Mr Li's new "hotel"

So much for a lie-in after my late night – I was woken at 9am having my side poked by Xixi's legs.
A Wu rang at 9am telling me I needed to come and be present at his friend's opening of a new hotel. I didn't have the energy to argue and he picked me and the kids up half an hour later and took us to the breakfast place where we got the kids a sweet pancake each and a cup of dou jiang. He then took them to school before taking me to Mr Li's new hotel, or restaurant as it appeared to be. As it was, all we had to do was light a couple of rolls of bangers that took all of 30 seconds to burn loudly. Then he took me for breakfast of nice juan mian, where a blanket of noodle paste is rolled around some meat and greens and it tastes very nice. Then I was taken back home for 11am in time to do some work before the inevitable siesta! During the drive A Wu complained about the two rolls of bangers costing 130 kuai each and taking only 30 seconds to burn. For once I agreed with him wholeheartedly.


I promised him I'd be around for a meal at the new restaurant around 5.30, and after a few calls I finished my meetings before 6pm and he picked me up. He'd been telling me to "hurry up!" all the time he'd been ringing me, and when we got there we waited for at least twenty minutes for his friends to turn up. Totally typical of all foreigners I know! We met some more bank bosses at the meal and we ate well until what I thought was the end of the meal. Then the beer came...I explained that I was working so managed only half an hour of gan bei'ing before making my excuses and leaving.

Though dreadfully tired due to lack of sleep, when I went to bed I found Leilei in my place. Rather than disturb him I went to sleep in his bed but couldn't sleep until gone 4am. I really hope this doesn't turn out to be a habit.

睡懒觉 – Shuìlǎnjiào – lie-in
爆竹 – Bàozhú – bangers (firecrackers)
尊重 – Zūnzhòng – to respect
热裤 - Rè kù – hotpants (may be too literal a translation but I love the way they are the fashion here…)
Sod it. I can’t think of five words I don’t know just now – I’m going to do this on an ad-hoc basis. The main problem is when people speak to me and use words I don’t know…I’m going to have to start recording them or write down these words….

City win 4-0 and I learn 5 words

I was grateful to wake up at 10am today. I was willing to take the kids to school as I hoped to be up late tonight to watch City kick off their season against Swansea. However, Tan said she'd get them breakfast and take them in. I didn't argue as I've done this 90% of the time so far. As the game wasn't until 3am my time I was hoping to be able to take a kip first. No such luck it transpired. I had a lot of work to get through and managed a very productive day. But as a manager was back it was important for me to attend a late meeting again.

No worries I called home and France and had a chinwag with the parents and siblings, by which time it was getting on for 2am. A couple of small gin and lemonades kept me up till the time of the match and I found a reasonable stream online as my satellite doesn't seem to have the channel that provides football unfortunately. After half an hour we were the second best team by a mile. But we finally clicked and it was only a matter of time until we scored after 57 minutes. That opened the floodgates and we won easily 4-0 thanks to Aguero coming on after an hour...here's hoping he's going to prove as influencial in the coming years. I missed the last couple of minutes as Leilei woke up at 4.50am and I needed to tend to him. Finally got to sleep after 5am.

Apart from my meetings, and Tan on the weekends, and the kids, and of course teacher Lu, I've realised I've hardly spoken English. This should mean my Chinese is improving but I've noticed no particular difference. I'm in a rut, language-wise. It happens when you know enough to get by, and the mistakes you make rarely affect the meaning of your communication, so no-one corrects you. In fact the only correction I've received this year is Tan telling me when I've used the wrong tone, normally in front of everyone at a meal. Maybe it is considered rude to correct someone here, as I suppose it is at home too. One of my least pleasant experiences here (not involving poorly tummy) was two years ago when Andrew was here and we went to the you er yuan (kid’s nursery/school) to pick up Leilei. The teacher remembered me from the previous year and we had a conversation as you do after not having seen someone for nearly a year. Then at the end she said my Chinese was worse than the previous year. Crestfallen, I was.

So I'm going to try to learn five useful words per day, based, if possible on my experiences of that day so that they have a bit more meaning and will therefore stick in my mind:
杜松子酒 - Dù sōngzǐ jiǔ - gin
奎宁水 - Kuí níng shuǐ - tonic water
怪不得 - Guàibùdé - no wonder!
水龙头 - Shuǐlóngtóu - tap (as in water tap)
纠正 - Jiūzhèng - to correct

Awful stomach again

Woke up at 8am to the sounds of Tan's loud salsa ring tone and heard her saying I wouldn't be taking the kids to Nanning this morning as we had a late night. Oh yes, A Wu was taking A Ni and A Da to watch Transformers 3 (or rather A Ni was because A Wu can't drive out of town I understand). I was fine with that as I felt terrible as well as tired. I managed to doze until around 10 when I had an emergency tummy moment and had to rush to the loo. This continued for a bit until A Wu rang me to ask what time I was coming. There was no way I could be separated from a toilet for more than one minute so that was that sorted. I said I'd see, but had no doubts as to where I would be staying today.

This is the worst attack I've ever had, and I happily took the "la du" medicine that Tan had. As well as a lemsip I'd thoughtfully remembered to bring. By 1pm I was confident enough to go out and buy myself some small dumplings as I was famished and Tan was going out to see a former colleague from the bank. I got them from a really close place, that I'd been to before, and just wanted something simple. I was fine until coming back and a few yards away from our building when the tell tale signs emerged again. I did manage it to the lift though, and even though we are back down to one lift it was on the ground floor so I spent another 35 seconds of agony waiting to reach floor 14 and rush in again as Tan was leaving.

That was my last excursion of the day and I laboured under nasty head and neck pains all day, swapping between lemsip and ibuprofen until Tan came back in the evening with some chicken and rice that I wolfed down. The pain gradually subsided during the the late evening, but I'm not going to that fancy KTV place again in a hurry...

Birthday at KTV

Happy Birthday wife! Presents and cards are not the done thing here, so instead I booked out a room at the KTV place we went to the other week to celebrate in, er...style. Actually A Wu booked it as I met him for lunch at some place I hadn't been to before where I had relatively meatless meal of Lotus root soup and egg fried rice. We met Boss Hu there too and invited him to eat with us and to the karaoke that night.

We spent a fair amount of the day with Waipo in Er Jie's house as she has recently come back from Bangxu, and we ate there at 5pm as you do on such occasions as "Gui jie" I checked out the translation and according to google it's "hallowe'en". Weird. Maybe that's too much of a literal translation as "gui" means ghost. So it could be to do with a festival of the dead.

I was very embarrassed to read Handy P's comment from a couple of weeks ago when he suggested the wild chicken I had photographed was actually a pheasant. I've been coming here for eight years so I should know what a wild chicken looks like. It turns out I didn't. I don't have And's ornithological skills so wouldn't know a pheasant from a lesser-spotted tree-tailed French pigeon. But "Orni Andy" as he's known turned out to be correct after all. I'd never thought to translate "ye ji" as wild chicken fitted perfectly. Google confirmed that it is actually "pheasant". Now I am worried about the other "ye" animals and plants I've eaten. Is "ye ma" actually a hippopotamus rather than a wild horse? Actually it translates to "mustang" so I must started checking some of the others...

On the way to the karaoke place I stopped off at a lingerie place to get a present for Tan. The assistant told me to get something red on such an occasion, which I did, but had no intention of showing it to her in the company of her friends. We arrived at 9pm and Tan and the kids were already there. I was shocked at the price of the beer and food, but realised that it incorporated the price of the room hire and service. Well various people came and went, and many songs were sung at a high volume. I was taking it easy on the beer, but quaffed a couple when it became my turn to sing my party pieces. This time A Wu filmed them....

View from our KTV balcony during Tan's birthday party

Some of the lovely food on offer at Tan's birthday bash at the KTV

Tan in full flow (lucky it's not a video)

Ladies enjoying themselves at the sing-song

The kids were taken home to sleep at 10.30pm and we continued till gone midnight. There were plenty of nighttime snacks, as is the norm here, such as duck tongues, pig penises, dried squid with wasabi and other delights. I even ate a fair bit of everything and we needed to order more food a couple of times. We finally left at around half midnight after I'd bitten my tongue while shelling out the 1249 kuai for the evening. Well, to entertain in the region of 15-20 people for an evening it's not really that bad.

Ladies in the back seat on the way home from the birthday bash

Back home Tan wasn't too keen on the colour of what I'd bought her, but I was prepared for this and had the receipt for a return tomorrow. When she got to sleep I sneaked out to watch the second half of the Arsenal - Newcastle match. Hooray! Football is back. But I found out that our first game is against Swansea on Monday night...3am here...hmmm...sleep or no sleep?

Red wine and black car

Bugger. Woke up to no electricity again. I dressed into my swimming shorts and a tee-shirt and went to go for a shower and a few minutes after Tan did the same. The kids had slept with Jiuma again so they were ok. As I was passing the lifts I noticed that their lights were on, suggesting electricity. But on re-entering the house there was nowt. After my shower around 11am I got a call from A Wu who said we were going to have lunch together. I thought 11am was a little early, and I was right as he picked me up from Er Jie's house and we first went to drink tea at the place opposite our building. Luckily it was just tea as I'd been told we were going to drink red wine. Boss Hu was also in the car, and when we'd had our tea he was presented with two bottles of French red wine. I realised I was hardly dressed for a lunch with a boss, so I nipped home to put on some long trousers and a shirt first.

Apparently today is "Zhong Yuan Jie", or "Gui Jie", depending on who you talk to. Maybe one is today and the other tomorrow, hence the school being closed for two days. But that was the reason for going out for a meal. And I guess it was the reason that as soon as we got there - the place that does great goose - we opened the bottles straight away. I had been hoping for a normal day in the office, and then not have to attend the 11pm meeting, but this was looking unlikely as A Wu poured us each half a beer glass of wine. Quite restrained, I thought. For about ten seconds anyway until he filled up the glasses with the contents of the other bottle. It didn't take long for me to work out that one bottle was room temperature and the other cold so we would have a cool drink. So far French people would have turned in their graves at least twice; once for the beer glasses and again for the used of cold red wine. Worse was to come. The first ten minutes of the meal were quite civil; Leilei and A Da had turned up, together with A Ni and a couple of her friends. We had been sipping the wine slowly, always touching glasses before each sip as is the way, until the glass was half empty, when Boss Hu said "gan bei!". So the three of us (the others weren't drinkers) had to down the rest of the contents in one. Now the wine was one of the better ones I'd had here, and it appeared to be genuinely French, but downing a large mouthful of the stuff wasn't a pleasurable experience at all. However, it transpired that eventually it was palatable. I'd chosen to only have the room-temperature bottle, and as soon as both had been finished A Wu magicked one up from somewhere (probably his new car). Luckily there were no more after that, and after having drunk around a whole bottle I fairly easily fell into a siesta till half four.

Cold French red wine

It got better after a couple of glasses

Ah yes, this was the first time I'd seen A Wu's new car. He needed one if he wanted to impress bosses, as his clapped out Nissan Cefiro was not giving the right impression. So now he has another large black saloon car. Unimaginatively, it is a Toyota Camry. Maybe they're made here but they do seem the de facto boss-car here until one is able to afford a German one. Anyway, it's streets ahead of our 406 estate in the UK and has a rear camera and monitor so you can see who you're reversing into. But the car alarms here are all like they were in the 90s in the UK; whenever you turn it on from the remote control it makes a high-pitched squeek to let you know you've done so.

Due to my luncheon, the rest of the day was spent working diligently until gone midnight when I said "sod it" and took myself out for a bit of bbq, on the auspices of getting Tan five duck feet. I met some mates and had a little beer with them until they had to go, then sat down with a couple of gentlemen more my age and had a little beer with them too. They drove me back at around 1.30am when the bbq had arrived, but Tan was virtually asleep, so I non-greedily put them in the fridge for tomorrow.

Teacher Lu's school again

Tan didn't want the kids to go to school today for some reason but I did, so I drove to Er Jie's and got them there a bit later. I'm glad I did as the teacher told me school would be closed tomorrow and the next day for a festival I didn't quite understand. As soon as I got home karma set in as I saw that teacher Lu was calling me. He had tried to call me yesterday but I didn't pick it up so I decided to face my fate.... In fact he wanted me to have my picture taken with another of his English classes. So I said "ok" in order to do my penance and popped around for 11 as agreed.

Once again I had to shake hands with every child, and ask "how do you do?" and "what is your name?". I didn't really mind - it's probably very very rare that they get the chance to put their spoken English into practice with a genuine mother-tonguer, and the beaming smiles made it worth it. They were around 14 years old. There were four rows of desks, the front three occupied with four girls each and the one at the back by three boys, similar to as you might expect in the UK. However, the boys' English was far better than the girls', which is not what you might expect. I put it down to the shyness of the girls compared to the boys who couldn't wait to show off what they'd learned from American films.

Me with some of the kids from teacher Lu's school

Thankfully, the rest of the day panned out with electricity, so no more trips elsewhere to work. At about 4pm I called Lisa P in le Pago to wish her a Happy Birthday, except ma answered to say she was the only one up! Luckily, I got the chance to speak to her and And a bit later...sounds like they were having plenty of fun 5000 miles away too.

Patchy leccy but fixed wireless at Waip's

We woke up rather warmer than when we had gone to sleep. There was still no electricity and it was warming up. It was getting beyond a joke, but luckily I had the foresight to leave a wireless router at Er Jie's house last year, so I packed up my stuff again and trundled over there to see the kids and get back to work.

They had stopped using the router there for some reason...maybe it had disconnected and they didn't know how to reconnect it. I don't know but Chuan chuan had a laptop that probably hadn't been online since we left last August. So I re-setup the wireless so we now had three computers surfing happily as I got back to work.

Finally, at around 2pm I found we had electricity again, so moved my work stuff back home to continue working without kids to disturb me. And then we had the rematch from yesterday at 6pm. Splendid lightning struck up again with its accompanying thunder and downpour. It's quite exciting to watch, actually, if you don't see this all the time...but the "tick" that happened soon after was not exciting as the house plunged into twilight and we were without electricity once more.

As I was with Tan and the kids we went out to get some grub again. The rain had subsided somewhat so we trekked the 13 floors down only to find it had changed its mind and it was torrenting down again. To make matters worse I'd forgotten to bring the brolly and I wasn't going to soil my clothes by hiking up to our place again, so we got slightly less soiled by walking along the base of the house to shield us from a little of the rain, and I went out and commandeered a san lun che to take us back to Er Jie's house to eat. Once there I checked back every half an hour until the leccy was back on around 8.30pm. Phew. Tan and the kids stayed with Jiuma at Er Jie's house as they didn't trust that the leccy would stay, but I took a chance and went back to finish my work. Then I was able to go for a quick bbq at 12.45 and be back in bed by 2.

Geeking for wireless after storm halted electricity at home

I had a productive day at the office, and all was going well until around 6pm when darkness descended an hour or so earlier than usual. I then noticed that one layer of dark clouds was galloping along from the east to the west, and another, darker and lower was cantering in from the west to the east. They locked blades and sparks flew - a moment later there was torrential downpouring of clear blood washing the streets below. The rain lasted around half an hour but had the undesired effect of killing the electricity supply to our building. Annoyingly, ours was the only building within eyeshot to be affected. After a while of doing what we could with our bare eyes as the last light drained away, we left the place to get a bite to eat. I brought my laptop and other work bits and after eating went to Number 5 cafe as I know they have wireless Internet there.

I asked the bloke for the wifi key and he gave me a phone number - that seems quite normal here. But it didn't work, so he kept telling me to try different variations of it, with no variation on the success front. So I put on my geek hat and went to his computer where he was watching some American cop programme. I opened up the command prompt and typed in "ipconfig"; ah, the gateway was at 192.168.1.1. So I opened up a browser and navigated to that address to be greeted with a username/password dialog. On my second attempt I cracked it (not hard, really, it was "admin/admin"). My next hurdle was the User Interface in Chinese. I looked for the character for "wu", as in "wu xian" (without cable), and found it on the left hand side. Upon clicking it showed me all the wireless details, including the SSID so I knew I was connected to the right place, and then, lower down, the password "12345". Phone number my arse.

So I was connected, but it seemed incredibly slow. I just hooked up to the VPN but still couldn't get emails. I changed name servers to the google ones and this helped a bit as I was able to surf slowly without the VPN but it was no good for work, other than to IM colleagues I wouldn't be able to make that day's meeting. I gave up at midnight and went home. Tan was there and at least because of the moist atmosphere it was not hot, and we had a cooling breeze through the bedroom. The kids, though, spent another night at Er Jie's house in one of the air-conditioned bedrooms.