Chinese Doctor, Western Medicine, Shrinking Violet, Where’s the Water

June 9^th Practice day today, singing for Huan and walking for me. She spent an hour and a half doing vocal ‘exercises’ and then the rest of her time going over the song that drove me mad before Covid-19 came along! I followed both doctors’ orders and kept my distance and speed down. I took this picture to show you the old dam just outside our building. There used to be wooden sluice gates here but we have no idea what they are doing now. Are they going to block up the holes, clean them up and leave them open or install new sluice gates?

Sometimes, when you are limited to how far and how fast you can walk it can get pretty boring so I do try and vary my routes. Today, I planned to meet Huan and Yu around the time their class finished although they didn’t know that. I took a route behind the old hospital and then a little side road to the outside market. As you can see, life is definitely back to normal here.

And here’s one that in some ways reminds me of what the UK used to be like, way back in the fifties, so I decided it should be black and white.

And now a different view of the local high school observatory.

Followed by some Chinglish, although I do have to say I have also seen this particular error in the UK. The most common error there though was the other way around, and normally because some graffiti artist had squeezed an ‘i’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘l’ on a rental sign. It’s quite a pretty public convenience isn’t it? We are blessed to have quite a few here in Wuzhishan and most of them are manned and therefore kept quite clean.

I managed to get a bit nearer to one of our feathered friends today. This one was worrying a worm or a caterpillar, that photo didn’t turn out so well, neither did the one where it realised I was there and turned round and had a good look at me. Still, this is not such a bad photo.

This Blog was started in 2017 although it covers the period from 2007 onwards. Many of you may wonder where I was and what I did in the fifty seven years before that. Well, my last job before I came to China was with an international telecommunications company and when I see roofs like this I am always reminded of some of the places we had such antennas.

So, just after this I stopped, bought myself a nice cold bottle of coffee and then hid myself so I could drink it, have a fag, and wait for the ladies to pass by. It worked; I sneaked up behind them and at the top of my voice bellowed “Good morning ladies!” Huan is quite used to me; she did jump but nowhere near as much as Yu. I was then ordered never to do that again, Huan explained that Yu has a dodgy heart.

We dropped in on the printer doctor on the way home; they told us “It’s working but not finished yet”. I’m not quite sure what that means.

Evening time, as promised, I was duty cook again. Today we were off to Italy and the dish was “Chicken Bacon Broccoli Alfredo”. It wasn’t perfect; I added extra milk as our chicken breasts seemed so much larger than I could see in the recipe picture. I also wanted to be sure the broccoli cooked and thought the extra milk would help that. That wasn’t the worst mistake though; the worst was putting the lid on while it simmered. Because of that, the steam condensed into water and dropped back into the sauce which didn’t help it much, in fact it watered it down a bit. We live and learn don’t we. Next time I will par boil the broccoli first. The recipe said it would serve two or three people, it was wrong; we will be having it tomorrow again! Despite my mistakes, we did both enjoy it and licked our plates clean!

June 10^th Well there isn’t much in the way of photos today, my plans went awry again. It’s been just over a week since we visited the Chinese Medicine Hospital for my chest problem so today was the day for the return visit. I had planned to do that first, then fill the car with fuel ready for tomorrow and then visit our new favourite coffee shop again. Pictures would have included a cappuccino, more than likely.

Where did we go wrong? Well the hospital wasn’t busy at all so we were in to see the doctor within five minutes of arriving. For the last week I have been putting some kind of black gunk on my chest which does seem to have been working. The raised ridge above the open sore has just about disappeared. I thought he would prescribe another week of the same which I would have been more than happy with but he seemed to think there was no need for it. Instead I now have a purple liquid to paint on twice a day which will supposedly cause the skin to heal. I’ve no reason to doubt the doctor; he succeeded last week where Western medicine barely touched the surface. A quick Google search tells me that what I have now is “Methylrosanilinium Chloride” which you probably know better as “Gentian Violet”.

By the time we had bought the medicine and filled the car, the coffee shop was still not open so my plan was foiled. Huan was happy, she preferred to go home anyway. I couldn’t leave you without a photo today so I took a screenshot of the dashcam, now down to 1280*720, unfortunately still @30fps. Children in Hainan learn about motorbikes and mopeds early on in their life and have no problem sitting behind their parents, check this out.

More OAP sleeps in the afternoon and some dashcam work and that was it, another day over, and a reasonably early tonight for tomorrow’s trip.

June 11^th Do you sometimes wish your alarm didn’t go off? We actually never use one except for my Haikou hospital trips when we have to be up much earlier than usual to avoid the queues. Today I dragged myself out of bed, before the larks, in fact early enough to see three little pigs going to market, on the back seats of three motorbikes. They were dead of course. We saw some beautiful skies on our drive up to Haikou but I’m afraid this new dashcam is nowhere near as good as previous ones. Here’s one of the screenshots.

Another reason for being up so early is that, as you may remember, hotels will not accept my custom at the moment because I don’t have a ‘health check’ on my phone. That means we need to do the trip in one day. My phone, as you also may remember, is a Windows phone. I wonder if I could get the Chinese government to buy a new Android or Apple phone for me.

At least the hospital was back to its normal routine today, no problems getting in. We were very early, right near the front of the queue, but still only managed to get #6. Why? Because other patients had arranged their appointments by WeChat. I can’t do that, not because of my phone, but because the hospital computer software has no way of accepting a foreign passport number in place of a Chinese Hukou number. Still, we were all finished and out of the hospital by ten to nine and on our way to “The Grocery” for some of the essentials. While we were there we had the great pleasure to bump into a very famous person, Neil Armstrong and his lovely wife Yang. I must say he looked pretty good for someone who has not only been to the moon but has also shuffled off this mortal coil, quite a few years ago, 2012 to be exact. Could this be Neil Armstrong Jr then? Well no, not really, this one is Canadian and much, much younger than the moon roving original. We spent an interesting few minutes chatting to both Neil and Yang before we both decided our shopping was likely to melt in the heat and said our good byes.

From there we headed off to the wholesale market which I don’t think we’ve showed you before. Here’s a couple of views of the way in.

You might think it’s not very busy, you’d be right. It is in fact much busier earlier on in the morning, not at ten o’clock when we arrived. We don’t use it for much, mostly bacon and sausage, both of which we had run out of in the last week or so. We never have trouble getting bacon there, sausages are another matter, finding one that we have liked before and not ending up with something much worse. This was the shop we tried today, as you can see it is mostly freezers but they do have other stuff available to order.

Our request today was for “Rou Duo Duo” which roughly translates to “meat much much”, “meat many many” or “meat a lot a lot”. On our last trip up to Haikou we stopped on the highway on the way home and tasted these sausages, they were not bad at all, good enough for a full English anyway. I also had a photo of the packet on my phone, just in case. The seller didn’t need the photo; he knew what we were asking for straight away. Unfortunately, he only had one pack of ten left! Still, that’ll do for a month.

From there it was a short drive to RT Supermarket for the best toasting bread in Hainan and some fish fillets without bones. And that’s it, our shopping was done and back on the road we went. As usual we stopped at Tungshan for drinks and leaks. I think we may be stopping there for lunch next month, the whole place has had a makeover. Not today though. Huan thought the car was a little hot when she got back in. I hasten to add that the A/C was on in the car and what you see there is the outside temperature.

By the time we were home and the shopping had been unpacked, and the dashcam work had started, we were both fairly knocked out. No cooking for either of us today, just a trip to a small hole in the wall restaurant where we could choose what we wanted. It was a new place for us, we were too early for our favourite buffet place, but the food wasn’t bad at all. Here are our two dishes, mine has the egg plant and chicken, Huan’s has the rice noodles and tofu. These two meals, two bowls of rice and two bowls of soup cost us the princely sum of ¥24.00, which is less than three pounds sterling.

So another trip to Haikou is over, another month before the next ENORMOUS syringe gets stuck into my belly. How will I pass the time? Certainly not in anticipation, that’s for sure.

June 12^th Oh no, more lockdown! Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with Covid-19, it’s orders from the Boss, SWMBO, CMO etc. She tells me that this new medicine needs time to dry out my skin so that it will heal and ‘fill the gap’. Consequently I’m not allowed out because it’s hot and humid and I will get all sweaty. No showers or baths are allowed either, at least for a few days. I just let her have a good look at my chest and she is convinced it is healing. I’m not so sure, here’s a photograph of what it looks like now, the dark patch is where the new skin has to grow.

How to fill in the day when you can’t even do indoor exercises? I started off by going through my Gmail account and deleting hundreds of friends and thousands of emails keeping only those that I think I may need. Secondly, I cleaned up my Facebook timeline, something I do fairly regularly anyway. Thirdly I went through my Facebook friends’ lists, snoozing the odd one or two and unfollowing one or two. That got me thinking, what do you do when your friends pass on? Somehow, I feel guilty about unfriending them so I have more than one like that now. What do you think, what would you do?

Huan came home with a duck tonight, she bought it, alive, for ¥25.00. Luckily she had the sense to not actually bring it upstairs; instead Yu’s husband was given the job of doing the dastardly deed and despatching the poor thing to its maker. Huan went to help with the plucking and brought it back for the next two day’s dinners. Here is the poor little mite when they bought him.

June 13th An unusual Saturday in that we had a full English for breakfast and not for dinner as we usually do. I was duty cook for this because Huan had a whole duck to cook later on. Her choral group had a meeting this morning, it seems they are going to learn a new song before the next Chinese holiday. Consequently she was in a hurry when she played Nurse with my chest. Just a little of the gentian violet went off course!

She went off for her choral appointment and I stayed home, still under orders! Because we were having a cooked breakfast and a cooked dinner, both fairly substantial meals, lunch was just milk shakes. Years and years ago, I remember travelling from Waddington in Lincolnshire down to St. Athan in South Wales and at one of the rest stops Mam asked us what we wanted to drink. All my siblings asked for cordial of some kind, they knew the value of things and what Mam could afford. I had only been with them a year, had no idea of the value of things or what Mam could afford, asked for milk shake. It was probably the most expensive drink in the café. Needless to say, I didn’t get one!

Our duck was simply wonderful, too much of course and we will be having the same tomorrow. Huan cooked it over a period of hours in a saucepan today, the English stew way, and I think she was quite surprised at well it turned out.

In the evening I did some more binge watching of “The Saint” which again reminded me of being in RAF St. Athan. Once our younger siblings were off to bed we got to watch TV with Mam and Dad and good old Simon Templar was one of them. Others I remember are Route 66, Sentimental Journey, The Prisoner, Crane and Z-Cars. I could probably think of more if I really tried but then maybe your memories don’t go back that far.

June 14^th As I write this we are surrounded by clouds, it’s been raining a lot of the day and we are happy about it. “What?” I hear you cry. Well, we have been having a lot of water problems for the last two or three days and last night we found out why. Wuzhishan is running out of water! So far this year has been drier than usual but you don’t expect a semi-tropical island to run out of water do you. The authorities are allowing water in different areas of the city in rotation, hence the problems we’ve been having. Now we’re hoping for a few more rainy days!

June 15^th Our last day of the week started with a full English, aren’t we the lucky ones? We had no water yesterday morning so just had cereals. Today we have had rain from midday right through until bedtime so it looks like our water problems may be over, for now anyway. I’m still not allowed out, except for shopping, today is Monday after all but I did take one photo for you. It’s the view from our bedroom balcony this afternoon, not long after the rain had started and for a change, we were pleased to see it this way.

Let’s hope next week brings more than just me at home, Huan is going to let me out again on Wednesday. She won’t trust me out alone tomorrow during her choral session, she thinks I’ll walk too far! As if I would ever contravene the CO’s orders…