Ledong, More House Maintenance

April 11^th Our next scheduled trip to Ledong for the ongoing repairs. I sometimes wish Huan had bought another apartment in Wuzhishan instead of Ledong. It would certainly have made our lives easier! Anyway, as per the contractor from last time, some holes needed to be filled near the door frames. Here they are being filled.

Now you may wonder why the Prime Minister is doing this job and not the Minister of Labour. The simple answer is that Huan is better at filling holes in walls than I am. I wasn’t idle though, my job was the bathroom. As you can see the seat is off, it was filthy and is drying on the balcony. The toilet was filthy too, outside and in. Another reason for Huan doing the wall is that she really doesn’t like sticking her hands down the toilet. Being an ex squaddie I have no problems. I didn’t think you’d fancy pictures of that though! The bathroom is fairly clean now, one wall left where we had to fill some more holes. We’ll be back for our next visit when we can arrange the plasterer.

Back in Wuzhishan and walking back home after our dinner I decided to take this photo, the school observatory and clock, for Jake’s World Street Photography page. At one time this small observatory would probably have done a very good job. Now I would guess that with the growth of Wuzhishan and the corresponding growth in light pollution it won’t be so good.

April 12^th No water for a few hours, scheduled tank cleaning. No problem, another lazy day, a little shopping, a little learning, a little typing and a little sleeping!

April 13^th Stuck indoors all day again so more character learning. It’s not easy!

April 14^th Back to Ledong again. You can’t phone the workmen before you go, you have to be there and hope that they will be available that day. They said around lunchtime or three o’clock! Hanging around with nothing to do, and too early for lunch, just took a few pictures. This one is the view from our kitchen and bathroom over the builder’s property. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t mind a roof garden like that. I would probably use the pool for its intended purpose though rather than an aviary for chickens and other large birds!

After we’d had a nice long walk along one of Ledong’s main streets we returned ‘home’ and awaited the arrival of the workers. Sure enough, they came at lunch time, took a look and then told us they would be back at 5 o’clock. I wonder why?

I had a little doze on the ‘broken’ bed settee (something else the last tenants managed to do), while Huan wasted time cleaning floors. I say wasted time because all will have to be done again when the work is eventually finished.

We decided we’d better go out for a takeaway so as not to miss the workmen so went to the ‘walking street’ centre. I guess we were a little early as there weren’t a lot of people around.

We were waiting for our pizza to be cooked from Do & Me, which, by the way, has the Chinese name of 多美丽 (Duō měilì) meaning “How beautiful. How they decided on the English name I’ll never guess. Anyway, the walking area has quite a lot of statuettes around including the famous little boy from Belgium, Manneken Pis. Now you can’t see in the photo but someone has broken the end off his ‘John Thomas’. I wonder if that explains the expression on Do & Me’s chicken?

Back to the flat and our worker turned up around 5:30 carrying a big bucket of plaster. Here he is doing his bit.

He did an excellent job but we will still need to have him back in a week or so to give us a finish that will be good enough for us to sand and paint. Only after he had left did I realise why there is always vagueness about their availability, and why this one carried a pre-prepared bucket of plaster with him this evening; they must be on a job elsewhere and we are just casual fill-ins. My brain must be quite slow, it took me over two weeks to catch on to this! Still, as long as the work gets done.

And that was it for today, just managed to snap a couple of photos of the sunset before driving back into the mountains and home.

April 15^th Another lazy day, updating this and reviewing the hàn yǔ (汉语) that I was supposed to have learnt! Not too bad but I appear to remember more words from longer ago than the more recent ones. More practice needed!

April 16^th Miserable weather today. In fact most of April has been overcast so far. I don’t understand why, when #1 son was here last year, the first two weeks of April were glorious! Still, it gave me time to review more Chinese.

April 17^th Last night we had a call from the plasterer telling us he would be available this evening, at 7 pm! That gave me more time on Memrise this morning and I managed to recapture my position at the top of the weekly leader board! We drove through the rain to Ledong, early enough to have our dinner before waiting for ‘the man’. No photos of his workmanship this time but I have to say, he is good. By 8 pm we were back on the road to Wuzhishan again. As the plaster would take two or three days to dry before I would be let loose with the sander and the paint there was no need for us to hang around. Now I don’t know how you feel about night time driving, I don’t normally mind. Chinese drivers are getting better but some still need to learn a) to drive with lights, and b) how to use them! I can cope reasonable well with them though, the biggest bugbear I have is the ‘camera gantry lights’. They seem to be designed to blind you and that is even before they flash to take your picture!

Just to make both our hearts skip a beat we also came upon the “cows who seem to have forgotten to go home”! Luckily the road and the rain had kept our speed down. The screenshot shows our braking speed but we were coming off a bend so we weren’t travelling too much more than that.

We had one last ‘flash’ right before our apartment complex entrance and then we were home. We did have one minor problem though, which will only get worse over time, no parking space! We had to go and park outside the gate.