Recovering Playboy, Needle, Walking Again

April 1^st April Fool’s Day today and as usual I have done nothing. One of these days I must really try and get one over on Huan. So, it’s also Monday, which means it’s our weekly shopping day. Guess who was still on duty when we drove out? I’m sure you guessed correctly, the ‘old’ maintenance company is still ‘in situ’.

Rain stopped play! No photos of the ladies with their dresses and pigtails I’m afraid.

April 2^nd Early morning meeting for Huan, with Jilin woman, in our living room. It would appear that the gas man, God rest his soul, has passed away. He had cancer, which obviously progressed very quickly when he left for his home province. All this time we have been saying things about him, I feel a little ashamed now. His family is coming back, perhaps to sell the property they own here, and also to maybe sell the gas business. One good thing is that we believe they have a map of the pipe layout which means we should be able to get things moving with the government again.

Worrying gossip from the meeting, the bosses of a construction company are trying to find out how many ‘owners’ we have in our complex, and how much land is involved. It looks like they want to try and pull a fast one, get our buildings knocked down and then rebuild and sell for more money. New building is not allowed, but, rebuilding on an existing site can get around the rules! If that did happen, we must by law be either, compensated with cash to the value of existing market rates or, provided with another place at least one and a half times as big. We won’t worry just yet.

We were housebound again this morning due to the rain and Huan was bored. She decided to play with my hair, telling me how my bald patch was getting smaller. To counter my disbelief, she even took photos! According to her, there are hundreds of small hairs where before there were none, and in fact they are slowly growing. Needless to say, my doubts remain. What do you think?

Still housebound in the evening too, no dancing for Huan and no small walkies for me. There is one advantage though, with me sitting down most of the day, yesterday and today, there have been no ‘dribbles’! (Sorry about that, but I’m sure some of you will be interested in how long it takes to go really back to normal after a prostatectomy.)

April 3^rd We woke up to a nice day today and after a quick check of the weather decided we ought to get out early. Rain will stop play later! Being early, we walked a little further than we have been doing recently, 10.7 kilometres in fact. We took it fairly slowly but I was still wilting when we got home. It made a very pleasant change though, a little way out of the town, peace and quiet of the countryside with of course, some photos for you!

You can see in the second photo that if someone doesn’t come along and clean up the paths we won’t be walking that way for much longer. Around the same area, although not quite close enough for us to get in and have a good look around, were some more ‘ghost villas’. You’ve seen some before, Hainan has a lot. These may not get much sun in the morning but the afternoons should be fine. Notice that they are all empty as are some of the apartments behind them.

Quite a few ducks, chicken and geese around today but this is the one that took my fancy. He even has his own ‘duckline logo’!

Sometimes I wonder how Huan lived through her childhood! If I wasn’t with her she would be tasting almost every fruit she sees on the trees. Now I don’t know whether these fruits are poisonous or not but unless I am starving, I am not going to try them. They are about the size of a fingertip, soft inside with hundreds of small seeds. I forgot to take an internal photo, sorry!

The last photo on our way back was taken of what I think used to a durian fruit. How it got into this particular tree, I don’t know. What I did see was it had been there a while and that the ants had found it. Here’s a cropped version of the photo. They appear to be trying to get that ‘tree trunk’ into the hole. This would have been a good day to have a macro video camera.

Back to Huan for the final photo though. Something flew in front of her and landed on her hat. She was too busy to really notice so didn’t panic too much. It wasn’t anything dangerous though, just one of the bugs we have reported on previously.

Evening time and the ladies thought they would do their dancing, with their dresses as previously planned. Being the dutiful husband, I accompanied Huan, as far as the ‘guard room’, where we all turned round and went home because – it was raining!

April 4^th Out early(ish) this morning to make the most of the weather. The forecast is rain again in the evening. I decided to make it a Fuji day and take a few photos for you. How does 187 sound? I did manage to prune it down to 111 but I guess that is still a few too many for the blog. Let’s see if I can narrow down the field. I quite like this one, converted to black and white with Picasa, of one of the street cleaning trucks disappearing up a side street.

And for the next one, how about rabbits sharing a meal, and chopsticks? Well, I suppose they weren’t really using the chopsticks and of course have no idea that in a few months they will be on the receiving end!

Now Huan insisted I put this one in. She seemed to find it amusing that I was stood under the Playboy sign knowing full well that those parts don’t work at the moment!

I saw quite a lot of my four legged friends today, dogs, goats and cows, even some six legged ones, ants, but I’ll only show you one. Here’s the cobbler’s dog, not so sure whether he should eat something from a stranger or not. The sausage was provided by the cobbler but the little pooch was still not so sure.

Last month we showed you how dry the river was, well, they must have opened one of the upstream gates to allow the recent rains to flow. As you can see, the water level is back to ‘high’ and a lot of greenery has been carried down with it.

Another ‘creature of the forest’, this time a snowbird, quite a melodic one in fact.

There were also a lot of photos of flowers taken, but I’ll only use one, and I’ll make this the last one for today.

As for the evening, the weather forecast was spot on and rain stopped dancing!

April 5^th Nice weather again, and I had a plan, to take the Fuji out for a walk again. So that’s what we did, starting off a little earlier than yesterday, but planning only on going around the town. I wanted to pop into the Chinese medicine shop. Unfortunately the plan went a little awry. Someone, who shall remain nameless, (but he is the author of this missive), forgot to take a spare battery. Yesterday I experimented with ‘continuous shooting’ which drains the battery a little, and I started off with one like that today, only double speed. Many of you may have read the nightmare stories of Chinese parents, many of you may in these modern times almost keep your own children on a leash. Well this is quite normal here, a nine year old boy and his seven year old sister flagged down a motorbike taxi, on they got and off they went. We do actually know these two and this is not an unusual thing for them to do.

Another regular sight in China is loads of people ‘mainlining’, or on a drip anyway. Quite a lot of the time the people who are on the receiving end seem quite healthy, although I know looks can be deceiving. I never look ill when I feel I am. However, some people do use the drips as a preventative medicine and not a curative one!

I took a few more black and white photos around the town, a video of some mealworm, still alive and wriggling. That one I posted on FB with the comment “Anyone for dinner?” Then I had another bout of continuous shooting of Huan buying the weekend’s lottery tickets, we live in hope…

As you can see her face is well hidden, she is not a big fan of having her photo taken at all. Mind you, I don’t particularly like posing either. When we got to the riverside Huan wanted me to take photos of the ‘hanging roots’ to show you. You have seen them before but Huan thought you might like to see them with this camera. You guessed it; this is when I realised that I should have brought the spare battery! I was kicking myself even more a little later when we spotted a guy with a much bigger one than me, (lens, you bad people), focussing on a bird on a stalk in the river. It was quite possibly a kingfisher but it wasn’t quite near enough for my eyes to make out and the Nokia, despite it’s good cropping capability, couldn’t give me a clear enough picture. Better telephoto lens in my future I foresee!

Rain stopped dancing again, it bucketed down all afternoon, but it eased off enough for Huan to join the ladies for a trip to the market. She wants to practice her WeChat wallet. Yes, she has learned how to buy things only using her phone. I tried, and failed. I think it may be because my phone is Windows, and I have WeChat International.

April 6^th Another nice day and another town walk, this time sans Fuji. Here’s a good one for you, a new shopping precinct, you know Gucci, Boss etc, except those shops will never actually be here. Look at the escalator, covered with a blue tarpaulin. In the sales blurb for this precinct there are two escalators shown leading to the RHS of the ‘beige’ balcony. As you can see here, there is now only one, the other one is at the other end of the precinct which, you guessed it, should also have had two!

Nothing else special from the morning. In the evening the rain held off today so the ladies went off dancing. Due to a lack of communication between them they weren’t all in skirts, (or dresses or trousers), and they hadn’t synchronised their hair styles. They promised me that would be tomorrows plan so I skipped taking photos of them today except for the ‘march to the town square’.

On the way home, it was a lot more B&W street shots which I won’t bore you with, one of my local cat friends who I like to have a chat with now and then, and just as I walked into our complex, a sunset. I hope I did better with this one for you. What do you think?

April 7^th Another Fujiwalk day and a good one it was too. Loads of photos taken, B&W street views, plants and flowers, guys fishing, people playing music etc. However, I think I’ll just show you the wildlife, I was very lucky today, neither of them moved away from the camera. I only took one of the dragonfly, a lot more of the lizard, but I like this one where he appears to be coming back for another look at me.

And as the ladies promised yesterday, they were all wearing dresses today, and all had their hair in pigtails. As you can guess I took hundreds of photos, especially as I used the camera on continuous shooting a lot. Today is San Yue San day and there is a show in the square this evening. One of these days we’ll go to it but it’s usually so crowded we’re giving it a miss again this year. You only need one photo though don’t you? Here are the ladies posing in front of the San Yue San show poster.

April 8^th Up very early today, in the middle of the night in fact! I woke up at ten past four for the usual reason but as we had to go to Haikou today I didn’t go back to bed. I decided not to disturb Huan but even so, we were on the way by half past six. Here’s a screen shot from the dashcam.

“Why did we have to go to Haikou?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s been a month since my first ‘female hormone’ injection so I was due the next one today. We had an uneventful journey, which was probably just as well; because when we got there, I was soon getting grumpy again. We went to the usual ‘check in’ where you pay to see the doctor, which I had to do to get the prescription, only to find out that everything has changed. We had to go to a different place, the same cashiers that deal with all the prescriptions. As it was Monday morning, this meant long queues!

Once we had our ‘piece of paper’ we headed off to the doctor’s surgery only to find out we were number 44 and they hadn’t even reached 20! Huan did her bit by going around and pestering various staff and we ended up jumping the queue, because we only needed a prescription. It’s not really the right way is it? I was happy enough but I would imagine a lot of Chinese people were not so happy seeing a foreigner go to the front of the queue. I should point out that ‘jumping the queue’ is not at all unusual here anyway.

Anyway, once we had the prescription it was back to one of the cashier offices again to pay for the ‘needle’. At least that was cheaper than we had been told, ¥1,700.00 instead of ¥2,000.00. Once we had paid we had to wait until someone called out my name so that we could collect said needle. Well we heard my name, but with no window number. There were six windows, so we tried all the ones with a man calling out the names. Success! Here’s what that particular cashier’s office and pharmacy looked like, Huan is in there somewhere waiting for my name to be called.

Having the injection was no real trouble, only the usual cold sweats and panicking from me. I wonder what the nurse thought of me closing my eyes and plugging my ears. Even I’m not sure why I do that bit! She wasn’t as gentle as the ward nurse had been but she was OK.

Once out of the hospital a trip to RT Supermarket was called for, it’s the only place we can buy decent bread. Haikou is full of one way streets and as usual the Sat-Nav led us astray. We don’t visit Haikou enough to know the traffic system so well which means that every time I drive there I’m convinced I’m getting points and traffic fines galore! We’ll find out in August, our next visit to the Traffic Police.

It was a great relief to eventually get back on the road, and after a stop for fuel and lunch, we eventually arrived back in Wuzhishan. The first thing we noticed was how quiet it still was today, maybe everybody decided to take an extra day’s holiday. Here’s another dashcam screen shot of us arriving home. We were two very happy bunnies!

Huan did her usual dama dancing this evening and I got busy with a lot of dashcam work. If we don’t both sleep well tonight there’s something wrong!

April 9^th Well, aren’t we the lucky ones? We did both sleep well, me till gone seven, Huan a little less. Today is Tuesday but, as we weren’t here yesterday, we had to go shopping today. You know, you read a lot about unemployment in the world, mostly in the western press but it is not that uncommon in China either. Life’s not always that sweet, even these two poor souls were left on the shelf recently!

I spent the rest of the morning finishing my dashcam work and then had a lovely old people’s nap in the afternoon. I did make up for it though; I went for a ramble around the river this evening, while Huan was doing her ‘Dancing Queen’ impression. I managed a few decent photos with the Fuji but it’s obvious I still have a great deal to learn. I’ll leave you today with a couple of shots of the moon, taken with a 16-50mm zoom lens, not one of the best.

April 10^th As it’s four weeks since we came back from the hospital we decided it was time to start venturing away from just the town and the river again. It’s quite a long time since we visited the village of Chang Hao so that was the plan. It will be quite a long time before we venture that way again! Since we last went they have begun work on what we think will be the highway off ramp from Haikou and on ramp for Sanya, along with all the road widening that that incurs. As you can see it’s dusty, and it’s also most of the way to the village.

We did take a couple of detours though, mostly just to get away from the dust, to places we’ve been before but are always a pleasure to revisit. As you can see, away from the main road, the scenery is great, the air is clear, the sun is shining. What you can’t see is the Belisha beacon that is now my face!

April 11^th I was all set by half past eight this morning, unfortunately, Huan had the rice cooker on working as a steamer. That meant we were a little delayed and the route had to be changed. We went off past the construction site that we had been told would be the new market area for Wuzhishan. It seemed like a good idea, a brand new place for the fruit and veg, for the fish and meat, with car parking to boot. They lied! We passed the hoardings today and saw this photo. It answers a lot of our questions about just what was going on around the back of the ‘market’. There is no plan to move the market, instead it’s another five tall apartment buildings, just what we need, I don’t think.

Today’s walk was a countryside one, not off the tarmac but around some of the villages. Lots of black and white photos of those taken, they bring back memories for me of when I first started taking pictures, a ‘few short years ago’.

Huan also had me taking pictures of jackfruit, now that we know the difference between that and durian. You, of course, have seen all those pictures before so they’re not going here! Instead I’ll give you another of nature’s marvels, just look how the fruit is protected. A Google image search didn’t come up with any answers for this one, maybe you can try?

Another fruit for you, this time a pineapple. I’ve seen a lot of pineapples in my time, whole fields of them in the Philippines for example. However, I never knew they could be this colour. These were growing wild at the side of the road.

And the last one for you today, a little early for Christmas, is a turkey. He was strutting away and doing things I’d never seen a turkey do before. I guess it was some kind of mating ritual, although he couldn’t get to the female, she was in the coop!

That’s it for today. No dancing for Huan tonight, the teacher fell over a baby last night and can’t dance today. I can just imagine my PTIs in the army giving us the day off if they were injured!! No chance, we’d have still been given the full works no matter how broken he was.

April 12^th Out earlier today and we did twelve kilometres. Lucky for us the weather was not too hot! We saw two more of the same type of lizards that we had seen on the 7^th and again were able to get very close, although I couldn’t quite get to touch them. Coming back through the hillside villages we spotted quite a bit of fauna. Here’s a very protective mother pig with her brood.

Another couple of turkeys were spotted, nowhere near as chubby or as showy as yesterday’s though. Puppies were in the mix too so I got a little cuddle and made the baby of the shop chuckle. His mum was pleased and I have to say I was too. The same shop had three birds in cages, at least one of them was talking, and we heard “ni hao” more than once. I managed to get a couple of decent shots of two of them, even though I had to shoot through the cages.

Your last photo for today is yet another bird, this time a chick, a lovely white one. It seemd to have fallen down from the bank, we could see what was probably its mother strutting around up there. Unfortunately I couldn’t get near enough to give it a helping hand back up. Chicks move almost as fast as chickens. I think it’s only since we’ve been here in Hainan that I’ve understood where the use of ‘chicken’ meaning coward, comes from!

As usual, far too many photographs were taken, eighty-nine in fact, flowers, people, animals and black and whites of village scenery etc. I managed to whittle it down to forty five to keep, still far too many for you, even though I love you all!

Lazy evening for me, Huan off dancing again, let’s hope the teacher doesn’t lose her footing again today.

April 13th Success! My first night of sleeping with no pants on, I thought it was time to try. No leaks! I must say it felt much better being ‘au naturel’ again, especially as the night temperatures are now never less than 22ºC!

The weather was a bit ‘iffy’ today so we stayed in and around the town. I also purposely left the Fuji at home so as not to bombard you with too many photos. We didn’t see much, the farmer’s market was back and the only unusual thing there was what we think was either a ferret’s, stoat’s or weasel’s head. They had obviously already sold the rest of it. I didn’t think you’d want to see that! On the way home we spotted a big spider hanging from a tree and another of those hairy caterpillars. Those I did take photos of, thinking you may enjoy them. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my glasses with me this morning so you don’t get to see them either.

Now this evening’s plan was to go out for a walk when Huan went dancing. I’ve found out why they dance later now, they are worried about the evening sun on their skin! Anyway, my plan went awry, again. This time I can blame a niece who shall be nameless, I doubt she will read this anyway, she’s far too busy. She shared a musical YouTube link and that was it, I was lost for a couple of hours, clicking on all kinds of stuff. YouTube for a music fan must be like computer games for today’s youngsters, definitely addictive for me. Lots of memories brought back, and of course checking my music library to be sure I already had what I was stumbling across.

April 14^th A gorgeous day today, probably a bit hot for Huan, up to 31ºC, but then again she does have her Japanese hat to protect her. It was another Fuji day but I took great care no to go overboard with the photo snapping today. At the rate I’m going my hard disk will soon need updating, again! We strayed away from the town today and went on one of favourite walks but took a detour down to the river. We have walked up this road in the past, but never down it. Here’s a panorama I took at the bottom of the road.

We had to head back up the road, yes; we had to go back as there was no way forward, not without some rubber shoes anyway. On the way we were both wondering where the cows were in a stall and why we couldn’t see them. However, when we got a little closer…

They look very curious but when I went around to the gate only one would come and have a sniff at me and let me touch it, and that was the youngest one! Too young to know that humans are bad news I suppose. Nothing else to report today.

April 15^th You know the routine by now, Monday is shopping day. However, there was a slight change today. Remember the saga of the gas? Well, Huan was leading a delegation of the residents, well five people, down to the government offices to try and get it sorted out. As usual she came back with no good news. It seems we have a pipe that has to be repaired and that after that we may be able to connect to the town gas, which I don’t think is operational yet. It still means we have a damaged pipe and nobody knows where it is under the ground in order to be able to repair it! PS The gasman’s family have not yet returned.

Evening time and Huan went off to her dancing so I decided a walk was in order. Not just a walk, but a faster one than usual was the plan. I succeeded in doing ten kilometres in one hour and fifty three minutes. Now that may not seem fast for you sprogs out there but I think it’s pretty good for someone who’s sixty nine years old and only recently out of hospital. (Am I tugging on your heartstrings yet?) I did learn that it’s not a good idea to walk so fast just an hour after dinner, rambling would probably be better. I also learnt that going faster makes it much harder to control those pesky leaks!