November 12th Rain stopped play, at least
for me. Huan was OK because today’s singing was at the government’s old people
school, hence indoors. The rain had stopped by the evening but I was too lazy
to get dressed. I did read a lot today though, finished another “Le Carre” and
started a “Wendelin Van Draanen”. I’ve read all the books in my bookcase before
of course but it’s been a long time and I read books in the same way I watch
movies, it’s all forgotten within a very short time. Guitar and Chinese were
not forgotten either, but for those I wish my memory was better!
November 13th There was no long walk
today, no fast walk or hill walk either. Huan woke up with a toothache so it
was off to the dentist for her and I could hardly let her go alone could I. However, I did insist that she went to the ‘new’
dentist this time, he’s only been here two or three years which shows how often
we go to the dentist. This is a posh one; it has doors that separate it from
the street and air conditioning too.
As you can see, there is no
divider between the surgery and the waiting room. Luckily there was no drilling
today, not for the lady in the above picture and not for Huan in this one.
It seems she has a problem filling which will require two more
visits to sort out, the next one being in ten days time.
On our way home Huan decided we should go and
pick up our medical results from a week ago. It would appear that I am still
fine apart from my ‘fatty liver’ but that Huan has a problem with her “blood
being slow to return to her heart”. The doctor prescribed “BuChang NaoXinTong
Capsules” but only for a few days. Of course doing a Google search for that
gives us all kinds of scary results such as, “to prevent the onset of strokes”.
The doctor said more along the lines of preventing a heart attack. What puzzles
me is why the medicine only needs to be taken for a few days.
Tonight it was the turn of “The Secret Seven” to go dancing in the
town square. Yes, the numbers have gone up, a few more snowbirds have returned.
I also found out that I’m not the only husband whose ears are being assaulted
all through our waking hours, but I do seem to be the only one who has been
woken up in the middle of the night by a “wailing wife”!
November 14th Well, we all got it wrong this morning! Huan and I looked at the sky
and thought the rain was imminent, Water Lily and Fish checked their apps which
said rain was imminent too. Consequently, when they went to school I stuck to a
walk around the river, never too far away from shelter. Guess what? It didn’t
rain. How far did I walk? To be honest, I’m not really sure. The GPS went crazy
this morning and had me starting the other side of the river, on the bridge to
nowhere and then walking in the opposite direction to the way I went. After
about four hundred metres I got my “notification for 1k” and then about eight
hundred metres later I got the ‘2k’ one. I did try and make sure I got more
than ten; my statistics say that I did just over thirteen. Checking the map,
the first three are definitely wrong; I completed them in twenty minutes!
However, the last ten look to be mostly correct so I think I made something
around eleven, maybe. Now, because we all thought rain was imminent, I didn’t
have the Fuji
Our new downlights arrived
yesterday so I was tasked with replacing the old ones this afternoon. As always
when I do any work in the house, Huan went crazy with the phone and took almost
forty photographs. A lot of them had a very visible belly so they have either
been cropped or deleted. Here’s a cropped one.
And here’s a couple of the
finished job. The boss was suitably impressed!
November 15th We both thought rain was on the way again today, although my PC only
said cloudy. Check out the clouds and also the already wet pavement.
Consequently, I took almost the same route as yesterday but with a
spur for length at the beginning and not at the end. The GPS appeared to be
behaving today, checking the map it shows where I actually walked and the
distance of ten and a half kilometres looks correct too.
This next one is to show you the difference from
the flooded river of four days ago.
And the last one, because
they have given us a small walkway over the top of it now, is the inflatable
dam. You can see that today they are allowing a bit more water over and how
powerful it is by the ‘natural’ washing machine in the second photo.
As you can probably guess, the rain stayed away again today. Let’s
hope it stays like this for tomorrow so that I can drag Huan on a long hike
through the countryside!
November 16th We were blessed today with a nice day for walking, sunshine, but not
too hot. Giving Huan her choice we set off through the countryside for a nice
long walk. I only took two hundred and seventy photos today! However, quite a
few of them were in ‘continuous mode’ to try and capture movement. I whittled
the ones I will keep down to sixty four but of course I need to whittle even
further for you dear reader. I still think today may have more than usual. To
start with, not far away from the house, we had chickens running towards us instead
of away, I guess it could have been around feeding time and they thought we
were the bringers of food! Here’s the one who got the closest.
We walked down the river on
the way to the ‘countryside’ and next up was a ‘trip’ or a ‘tribe’ of goats. (PS
I looked up the collective noun for goats on Google, otherwise I would probably
have said a herd.) It took me a while to get this photo, every time I clicked
the shutter he either looked away or put his head down.
From the river we walked
back up and alongside the irrigation canal where we espied a very lonely duck.
He wasn’t an ugly duckling though was he? He appears to be daydreaming; either
that or he thinks the water’s too cold!
Next up was a very happy
farmer threshing his rice the old fashioned way. I wonder what he was thinking
about as he went through the motions.
Now when we say the
countryside, sometimes we mean roads, sometimes we mean tracks and sometimes we
mean both. Today it was both; this was on our way out. Spot the track, spot the
road and spot the “high” way!
This is where we turned
round today, in the future, we will go further and have lunch at one of the
little villages before coming back. I don’t know about you but we think we live
in quite a beautiful part of Hainan .
On our way back, just
before we left the road to back into the ‘real’ countryside, we came across
these fellows mixing concrete. It looks like they were using some kind of
plough to do that. I certainly don’t think this machine was made for what
they’re doing. It seemed to work just fine though.
I gave Huan the choice of
taking the road back or going via the medicine factory, she chose the latter.
It’s a good job this next photos was not ‘alive’ or she may not have been so
happy. We see a lot of dead snakes. In fact, I think we’ve only seen three live
ones in the four years we’ve been walking here. That’s just as well because I
don’t like them either! As you can see, this one wasn’t such a small one.
We took a few photos in the medicine factory, you’ve seen most of
that place before. I took Huan to the small pond that I showed you on October
24th and we spotted a lovely white, long legged bird. Unfortunately
it was a little too far for the lens on my camera. I must start dropping hints
about Christmas presents!
This walk is one of our favourites, the sounds
of the city are not audible, the sounds of the country are. The air is fresh
and the scenery is wonderful, just look at it!
Finally, not long before we
reached home, we came across someone threshing in the more modern way. Spot the
‘spotter’ out in front, presumably looking for obstacles such as stones, bits
of wood or dead animals.
A lovely day’s walking but, I think tomorrow I’d better leave the
big camera at home! Being Saturday, we had our usual full English lunch and
then, after we’d had our much needed OAP nap, we had an international tea. This
comprised of German bread, Swiss Emmental cheese, Chinese ham, tomato and
cucumber, Australian butter and for me, American mustard. How did it taste?
Lubbly jubbly!
November 17th Having swamped you with photos yesterday, I left the camera at home
today. We were late getting out; I slept late, something to do with waking up
in the middle of the night freezing, having somehow removed all the bed covers
off my tender young body! So, I took Huan on her favourite ‘short’ walk up and
down the scenic mountain route. I did take the Nikon with me to show our video
viewers our new route to the famous crossover bridge. If you want to watch
that, go here. - https://youtu.be/FFyZjRj2FTA.
Towards the end of the video, we met some snowbirds, one of whom was telling me
how his grandfather fought the British and seven other nationalities in his
time. All I can say is his grandfather must have been very old! Anyway, this
chappie liked a bit of a laugh and was using his walking stick as a gun so I
grabbed it off him and did a few British Army drill movements with it. Huan
took a few stills with the Nikon but the sun was really in the wrong place and
they didn’t turn out so well. I did convert one to sepia so here I am doing a
bayonet charge!
Of course, I had to have my photo taken with both of the men. I
wonder why they insist on doing this but then never offer to share the photos.
They said they would walk down with us but we soon lost them, they couldn’t
keep up. They were all younger than Huan as well!
As for us, we had had a phone call from the post
office in the morning to tell us ‘we had mail’. We popped in on our way home,
which gave us a good distance of eleven kilometres today. Now I thought the
mail would have been Huan’s birthday card, sent by one of my sisters weeks ago,
but it turned out to be two Christmas cards. One was from the same sister and
her family and the other from one of my brothers and his family. We are now
displaying very early Christmas cards!
There then followed a very lazy day…
November 18th Before Huan started having
music classes five days a week, Monday was always a rest day from strenuous
exercise, such as walks. I’ve decided I need to go back to that routine, unless
of course rain has stopped play too much in the week before. So, this morning
after she had left and I’d finished my nice relaxing after breakfast coffee I
decided it was time to take the car for a wash. Now I know some of you will be
saying “Why don’t you wash it yourself, you lazy good for nothing!” The answer
to that is of course that we live in an apartment on the seventh floor and I
haven’t got a hosepipe that long! The car, which has no name yet, even after
four years, was also the next item on the agenda, top up the fuel tank while I
remember.
Next up I thought I would get some of today’s shopping out of the
way so set off for the local supermarket. I should have guessed by how many
cars were in the car park that it was a bad idea. Obviously, a lot more
snowbirds have arrived. Once inside there wasn’t a sign of a trolley anywhere
and the ‘up’ escalator was crowded. I did a rapid U-turn and went home.
I still found something to do though, I put myself on ‘latrine
duty’, I think that’s what we called it in the army. Both toilets, both sinks
and the bath were given a good old seeing to. The C-in-C was most impressed
when she came home!
No afternoon sleep today because I had failed with my shopping plan so
we had to go out and do that instead. Being within the Hainan
lunch hour, (11:30-14:30) the supermarket was easy, hardly any people at all
and most definitely no crowds.
Evening time I decided I need to do a lot more
concerted practice on just one song and one set of chords or we’ll never get
our Christmas song done. Why is the ‘F chord’ so difficult?’
PS If anyone can think of a name for the car, you can put it in the
comments. It’s official name is “Dongfeng AX7”. There will be no grand prize,
only the honour of being mentioned in next month’s blog.
November 19th The weather was very overcast again today so I left the big camera at
home. I shouldn’t have done, it cleared up as I was making all my dog’s legs
around the town to get the requisite ten kilometres. Ah well, c’est la vie!
Even though I only had my phone I still took a few pictures. One of the things
I love about nature is how, if it’s left to its own devices, it soon springs
back to life. This is a place we haven’t walked for a couple of years, maybe
three, and when we did last go there you could see the ‘ground’. Just look at
it now.
Having walked through it my
boots were a little dirty so what to do? Well, what any normal person would of
course, stand on a small weir and clean them! You don’t want to see my boots
again though so here’s a picture of the weir.
As expected, I was home
before Huan so I had the first of three practices on the guitar today. It’s
really not easy! I’ll keep trying but the Christmas song may well be delayed, or
lost on the internet! At least my practicing is only short periods, you can’t
play guitar all day until you are pretty good at it. Her Ladyship’s practicing
is a different matter completely. I just told her I’m moving out to a hotel for
some peace and quiet. The time is nine thirty in the evening. What was her
response? “The other husbands are complaining too”!
November 20th this
morning, I felt like an old man when I woke up, didn’t fancy getting out of
bed, didn’t fancy walking, even having a wash and cleaning my teeth was a
chore. It may have had something to do with Huan singing until midnight! I
don’t think she really wanted to stop then either. Trying to get her to
understand that she was not only likely to damage her vocal chords with so much
use, (she doesn’t believe me), but that her brain would be getting very tired
too and hence prone to mistakes, was a lost cause. Despite me showing her
singing tutorials on YouTube, translating articles for her and generally trying
to help her, she thinks she knows better. I tried…
I did get out of bed
of course and I did go for a walk. It wasn’t long, there were no hills and it
wasn’t fast. Not a great deal to show you except the empty shopping centre
which is still empty. Why do they build these places I wonder?
Before
I went out I had practiced on the guitar and I repeated that again when I got
home. ‘Cooked’ Huan’s lunch for her, strange woman that she is, sweet potatoes
with nothing else. I think it reminds her of when she was young. Another guitar
practice was done in the afternoon. Personally, I don’t see a great deal of
improvement yet. Maybe a listener would.
Having not walked
enough his morning I joined the ladies on their walk to the town square, having
a good old gripe on the way about Huan and her homework. I may not be alone,
the other husbands are not over impressed either, but I am the only one who has
to listen to it until midnight. The same notes are sung over and over again
before they are recorded and then sent to the teacher via their WeChat group,
within a deadline. Thank God we didn’t have all this technology when I was at
school. Anyway, back to the dancing girls, there were seven when I left them,
“The Secret Seven” and eight when I got back. The internet is failing me with
“famous eights” except for the US Gang of Eight which is not really apt, so I
think I’ll settle for “The ‘Orrible Octet”! I did take some photos but none of
them were very good so you can have a street lamp against the sky instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment