August 25th Another admin day for me, dashcam overnight work failed so have to do again. Also last week’s Blog needed uploading, getting quite cheesed off with my internet connection these days. I wish one of the big players in the internet world would work out a way for people to be able to connect wherever they may be.
Those of you who know me will probably know my fondness for excel for all sorts of purposes including looking after my finances. Banks don’t give statements any more, one reason why I like to have a passbook, so the way I keep on top of it is to enter my ‘spends’ at the time and then when the passbooks are updated, include my pension and any other incomings such as interest payments. The latter are very small, but I like to be accurate. So, another part of this morning’s admin was bringing those excel files up to date. For BOC, no problem, once the small interest payments and pension incomings were added our figures agreed as did the number of transactions. For ICBC it wasn’t quite the same. The passbook doesn’t show all my transactions, in fact it shows nothing at all for five months and then an ATM withdrawal far higher than I’ve ever made. Even adding up my known transactions leaves me ¥1,000.00 short. I’m sure the mistake is probably mine and that I have lost an ATM receipt somewhere but it doesn’t say much for their IT system either does it? This is not the first time this has happened, on that occasion my ‘transaction numbers’ and the book’s ended up being ten different. Following this latest book blunder they are now nineteen different. Sometimes I despair.
Nothing else to report or to complain about, Huan went singing, we both went ‘Monday shopping’ after lunch.
August 26th Well, we had a plan, to go anticlockwise up to the scenic park bridge and come back the same way. So soon after the last time? Yes, we were going to take some food with us to feed one of our four legged friends. She usually comes when we call her and last time she looked very skinny. The farmers told us that she was fine, only thin because she had just given birth to another lot of pups but we thought a little extra grub wouldn’t go amiss.
As you probably guessed, our plan didn’t work, rain stopped play again today. It was raining when we woke up and continued until well after dinner. Apart from Huan nipping across the road to buy lottery tickets we never left the house. Still, we both got more music practice in!
I decided to cook dinner early just in case the weather changed and we could get out in the afternoon. Today it was “soup noodles” as Huan likes to call it, something she often has when we eat out. Normally I would add yoghurt and cheese to this but for three months I’m trying to avoid things like that. Here it is bubbling away merrily, doesn’t it look healthy?
It is quite healthy, no oil at all used today. I started by having a little water boiling in the bottom of the wok then added the garlic and onions. Next came the chicken and a dash more water with a little seasoning. Carrots and green bell pepper were next followed by celery, that’s what you can see in the picture above. Once that was cooked enough I added some sweetcorn and of course the noodles I had cooked earlier. (I have to cook in stages sometimes because, as you know, we still have no gas!) The final result was up to the “Executive Chef’s” standards so I guess I can retain my position as “Commis Chef”.
August 27th The weather caught me on the hop again. Yesterday the forecast was
cloudy and it rained all day, today the forecast was rain and it did, around
three o’clock in the afternoon. Still, I managed to escape in the morning for a
nearly seven kilometre walk. The ladies were happy, I walked them to school.
Leaving them I visited the Bapman where my luck was in, I got his last nine,
they should last a week or more.
Carrying on I thought I would take some photos to show you our English sky! Unfortunately, due to me thinking I’d get caught in the rain I had left ‘Freddy’ at home, he doesn’t like water. ‘Marvin’ was with me, he can hide from the rain in my pocket, here are his efforts.
Huan liked this one, nearer ground level, showing how close the clouds can get sometimes.
Marvin did get one thing right today; I found a lonely flower, put him in ‘macro’ mode and took a few shots.
Now a few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two, I showed you some of the graffiti under the main bridge in town. Today I found some new stuff, underneath a viewing platform at the side of the river. This is a ‘stitched’ panorama, not as good as I would have liked but you can see all the ‘paintings’. At a rough guess I would say that the one on the left is international and dates from time immemorial. Sensitive souls should keep their eyes to the right. I bet you all took a sneaky look to the left didn’t you?
Nothing else leapt into Marvin’s lens, at least not until after dinner. I was the cook again today, and being home early I did it in the morning again. It was a little unhealthier than yesterday though. I had a little sunflower oil sizzling in the wok before I added garlic, onions and a little salt. Minced pork was next then some paprika and a dollop of tomato sauce. After that had cooked for a while, just like yesterday carrots and green bell pepper followed. Celery and parsley came after them. The final ingredient may surprise you; it was eggplant, one of the smaller and more expensive ones (here) without any seeds inside. Come dinner time I cooked the noodles and reheated what was in the wok. This is what it looked like on Huan’s plate, mine of course was a little unhealthier because I had to have parmesan cheese with it!
Finished the day with more admin,
we received the insurance papers from Sanya today, so all had to scanned and
filed. That’s a whole month’s worth of my pension gone this year! All of you
youngsters take note, think about the future!!
August 28th Lovely weather today so off we set to feed our four legged friend, as usual taking thousands of photos on the way. Here’s another view of the local bridge.
They have started putting the wooden slats on now, not so easy to see, they’ve also put another aluminium hoarding in the way. I did get a couple of shots but we’ll wait until it’s progressed a little further. Just to show you the difference in the weather, here’s a lovely view across the river.
It was quite a hot day and before long we were both ‘perspiring’, Huan like a lady, glowing, and me like a slob, ‘sweating buckets’! Luckily, the anticlockwise scenic mountain park walk provides a lot of tree cover.
We always pass a small nursery on the way which, for some reason, now has a new sign. The white writing reads - 温馨提示。內有恶犬，禁止入内，未经主人允许擅自进, 入一旦咬伤概不负责。(Wēnxīn tíshì. Nèi yǒu è quǎn, jìnzhǐ rùnèi, wèi jīng zhǔrén yǔnxǔ shànzì jìn, rù yīdàn
Onwards and upwards, through the forest.
Finally we reached our destination and after a few handclaps and whistles our friend turned up. Huan put the food on the concrete base of the bench and we stood back. She ate the lot, rice, fish aspic I suppose you’d call it, vegetables and even the garlic. What impressed me though was that she didn’t wolf it down. She was obviously hungry enough to eat it but just as obviously she wasn’t starving. Snowbirds often feed her through the winter months so hopefully she’ll start putting some weight on before too long.
Last one for today, Huan found a leaf and had me take her photo with it, I took three or four, and a photo of it leaning on a wall, I took two. I was going to show you the best of Huan’s but she insisted that she preferred me to use this one! You can’t gauge the size here but it was probably the size of a large serving plate.
After lunch we should have started packing for our trip tomorrow.
Huan had been out early this morning to pay, ¥96.00 each for two nights,
visiting a ‘fragrant flower park’ and some kind of aquarium in Qionghai. Our
IDs had been sent yesterday, always needed when going on tourist trips. This
one didn’t involve any ‘factory’ visits; they were trying to advertise long
term stays in
August 29th Normal day, school for Huan and walkies for me, first of all escorting the ladies of course. Before we even reached the gate the camera was out, look what they’re doing to our only bit of green land! It’s not for car parking; they’ve made sure of that by moving all the concrete benches and exercise equipment to the kerbside. They say that the old ladies need an area to dance, seems like a feeble excuse for me.
And what about the ladies? Here they are just about to go into school.
My plan today was just to walk down to the river and come back through the market. On the way I passed this little garden, I wish our ‘back yard’ could look the same.
The market was much the same as normal, only one or two wearing masks though.
Just to my left, (your right), in the above photo there was a man roasting a pig or maybe just the outside of one, I’m not sure. I know in the
I was home, as planned, by NAAFI break, so that I could cook our weekend’s dinner before Huan came home from school. No recipe for you today, just a photo of all the ingredients, less some fresh ginger, you can work out the order it went into the pan.
And here’s the resulting healthy bowl of stew.
August 30th Huan asked if we could go through the country side on the other side of the river, a walk we haven’t done for a while, so that’s where we went. First off, our disappointing back garden is now finished.
Still, we do have our lovely river walk, even on the way to this walk across the other side. Not only that, our river walk has now been named.
This walk takes us over another bridge to nowhere which, because it doesn’t go anywhere yet, provides a perfect place to practice your music without annoying your neighbours. With the right car you can also sit in the shade and easily see your music.
This route will, at some time in the future, be a bypass. Mind you, at this end it meets the main road near the last bridge before going through part of the town and at the other end we have no idea where it will cross the river to achieve its aim. At the moment, it seems to wander towards Nansheng village which is nowhere near the Wuzhishan to Sanya road. Here’s a view from the finished part of the bridge showing the bypass to the right and a track up through the trees to the left. We didn’t fancy the right hand walk, especially in the hot sun, so we took the left.
A little bit further up the hill and you can see why we quite like going this way, at the beginning anyway, the incline is not too steep, there’s shade, the air is fresh and the view is fine.
When we come out from the cover of the trees and back onto the ‘hard stuff’, you can see why only the beginning is pleasing. In this photo we have come down the hill from the left and we are taking the centre road to the villages. We will reach tree cover again but this is the part we like to get through fairly early in the day!
Just before we reached the bridge to cross back over the river and make our way home we spotted something ‘playing’ in the grass. At first we thought they were chickens, we often see those in the forest or in the vegetation. Ducks are more often seen in the fields looking after the crops but there were definitely not ducks. When we got closer we realised they were 火鸡. (Huǒ jī), the literal translation of which is “Fire Chicken”. You and I would call them turkeys.
Back in town we found someone else playing in the undergrowth, well Huan found it first. I couldn’t see it all, blind as a bat, so Huan took the camera and took loads of photos, then I saw it, grabbed the camera and took loads more. In Huan’s photos, I couldn’t see anything alive at all and in nearly all of mine it was way out of focus. However, one photo worked quite well before the subject scooted off and changed his facial colour to something else. Aptly, if my Google search is right, this is an “oriental garden lizard, eastern garden lizard, bloodsucker or changeable lizard (Calotes versicolor)”
Something else has been breeding locally, we spotted the first ones a day or two ago but suddenly they are being seen everywhere. Today we found a whole row near one of the high schools. Yes, rental bikes have arrived in Wuzhishan! As you can see from the photo, they have batteries included, I suppose they thought nobody would rent them otherwise; we even hills in the city. They are very cheap, ¥2.00 an hour, and you rent them by using an app. Who knows, we may give them a try one of these days.
August 31st Monday, shopping as usual, not much else. I do have a “Passion Fruit Progress Report” for you though, one either didn’t grow at all or took a dive to the bottom of the building, the other, although small, < 2cm, is still there.
And we’re still here of course, and we’ll still be here next week, see you then!
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