Good Samaritans, New Sandals, New Boots, New Dentist!

May 4^th Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, etc. It was a very nice morning and we were both up and fed early enough for a nice long walk. Our route was to take us into the countryside through the villages of Bàobā cūn and Zàbiéfēnghǎo cūn in the reverse way to the one we had found before. Upriver we headed where I decided that you needed some art to start off your week with, a cobweb and a leaf that we presume is dying.

We were headed for what we used to call the road to nowhere, but now we know it is going at least as far as Nán shèng cūn and maybe even far as Shuǐ mǎn xiāng. The first part was easy enough, as you can probably see; the second part was just a little warm.

Luckily we were soon off the heat magnet and into Bàobā cūn.

Up until this point Huan had the utmost faith in me but as we turned left after the village and headed into the countryside, her faith began to waver.

Soon we came across a man in the ditch. What was he doing? Why, following a goose of course! At first we thought he may have been trying to catch his dinner but we soon realised he was trying to rescue the goose which was having trouble getting out of the ditch. Just after the second photo he succeeded and the goose went on its way.

Perhaps that was a lesson for us because further up the road we spotted a frightened chicken in the ditch. The water flow was quite strong and this little creature was young, too young to fly out as chickens usually can. The first photo shows Huan trying to get it to stand on a palm leaf so she could lift it out, the second where she had lifted it by ‘the scruff of its neck’. The second photo shows where she had put it down, looking as if it was going to try the ditch again. I realised we had put it on the wrong side of the road so I picked it up and put it where it could find its way back to its family, once it dried off.

Around this time Huan realised that she had been on this road before and that I did know where I was leading her. Our next destination, Zàbiéfēnghǎo cūn soon came into view.

Another bird was spotted here, but this one didn’t need rescuing, not yet anyway. I imagine it’s probably destined for the dinner pot sometime in the future, today it was happy sitting on a stool keeping an eye on me.

Was there a village name stone here? Yes, but we only saw it on the way out. Here’s a view over it from behind and the stone itself from the front.

Round the corner, a few metres more, it was snowing. It wasn’t snowing snow of course, it was snowing seeds, very light ones. Huan tells me that they do use these for filling, pillows, coats etc.

Before long we passed the ‘old way home’, before the road was destroyed by the construction of the new road you saw earlier, and spotted the kindergarten, our cue to turn right and head home.

Soon a welcoming sight was in front of us, only another kilometre or so until I could hopefully find a shop with some ice cold water!

Huan even managed to find more lizards on the final stretch, I only caught one in a photo. That photo is on the PC but not here, I think you need a break from lizards, unless we see any special ones that is.

Both of us were quite worn out when we reached home, we had walked 14.6km, definitely enough for one day, no more walks needed after lunch or dinner. One of us had to have a nap after lunch, yes, you guessed right, it was me.

Being a Tuesday it was my turn to cook again, here’s the recipe.

Ingredients weren’t a problem with the exception of chorizo which isn’t available here. As I always do, I substituted it with Làcháng, a Chinese dried, hard sausage usually made from pork and pork fat. It is normally smoked, sweetened, and seasoned with rose water, rice wine and soy sauce. This is what it looks like.

We had it with the suggested salad and some of Huan’s leftover flat bread. Here is Huan’s plate before a little mayonnaise was drizzled on the salad.

May 5th Huan was off to the OAP university again this morning so it was a solo walk for me. As I was wearing my new sandals I kept to the town, meandering a lot to get some distance in. My old sandals had packed up so a new pair was sourced from the spare bedroom. There is still one pair left, when this new pair has expired, I will use the last pair and order two more.

I left Freddy Fuj at home today, I didn’t intend to take many pictures, in fact I only took three. The second was a macro of another flower, taken just after I had dropped Huan off at her class.

The third was a selfie, taken while I was waiting for Huan to finish. In fact it was a number of selfies but Huan chose this one.

After lunch we headed off to my favourite place, (NOT), the dentist. He wasn’t there but his brother was, the first dentist we had seen. I asked Huan to tell him politely that I preferred to wait to see his brother, rather than alternate between dentists. He seemed happy enough with that and told us to come back tomorrow.

That was out day, apart from a little shopping, A4 paper which Huan is having me use a lot of to print songs for he class, and coconut milk for my breakfast.

May 6^th My sandals were road tested yesterday and my new boots, not to get left out, had their first road test today. Here they are, raring to go, note the pristine surface with no wrinkles at all, I do hope they will bend!

Today’s route was to be the Changhao countryside walk, no real big hills, lots of trees to shelter us from the sun, for most of the way anyway, and, one of our favourite walks. Walking out of Wuzhishan the first thing we pass is a restaurant, they’ve even cleared the foliage so it can be seen from further away.

The name is Yī hào zhǒng yǎng nóngzhuāng which translates to an almost nonsensical name for a restaurant, “No. 1 Planting Farm”. Above the gate you can see two ‘phoenixes’ and on the advertising hoarding you can see the various items that would be on the “bill of fare”.

After the highway turn off and just past the big new hotel construction that seems to have stopped, could be for the holidays or it could be that they’ve run out of money, we turned off through a small village that we don’t know the name of. I spotted an enormous cobweb then Huan spotted an enormous spider eating its breakfast in said cobweb.

Once we are through the village and see this bridge, we know the best part of the walk is soon to begin and our spirits are raised.

Just around the corner I clapped my hands because I knew there were a few dogs behind a gate. As always, the barking began, but this time there was a new pooch who allowed himself to be stroked and didn’t run away barking. He was over twice the size of the others but made a great deal less noise!

I led Huan off the road and through the woods to a spot that I knew that she hadn’t been to before. I wanted to show her this view. Don’t study it too closely or you’ll see where the panorama stitching didn’t quite get it right!

It may not be obvious in this next photo just what is going on but I had a guess and I was right. It’s a still and the farmers are making home made rice wine. Huan was wondering if we should have had a taste, I regaled her with tales of home made hooch gone wrong!

Next we passed a school for ducks with the teacher keeping a close eye on the students.

After we had passed through Caoban village we found the village sign. If you enlarge it you can see that there is a map of the village and a good write up.

Turning towards Changhao, still off the main road, we were now on a stretch where there weren’t so many trees. Huan was wearing a low backed top and her hat was not shading her neck enough so off came my shirt, just like Sir Walter Raleigh!

Next up was the weir, a place that we can sometimes cross the river at, today the water was a bit too much for Huan’s shoes and probably too slippery as well.

We had a chat to a few water buffalo who had their wary eyes on us before stopping at the head of the valley to turn around and take this photo.

Arriving in Changhao we had walked 8.4km, Huan suggested continuing towards home to make it up to 10km before catching a bus. Were it not for one reason, I would have agreed, but, there was a bus right there, just waiting for us to jump on it!

When the bus driver appeared Huan asked the fare, it was ¥8.00 for the two of us. While she was trying to sort out her Wechat, (I didn’t have enough change), I yelled down the bus that I had ¥7.00. Huan repeated that to the driver and he agreed! We’ve never haggled on a bus before!

Walking back into our building we were happy to see the list was working and also happy to see that we had a visitor.

No naps for either of us today, we had another trip to the dentist. However, it was the same result as yesterday so we decided to give up on them. Tomorrow morning we will head off to the dentist in the town hospital.

Being Thursday it was my turn to cook again and having some goat’s cheese left I decided on the following recipe. I cheated by buying ready made meatballs and I also had to make my own passata. That was a first, but it was also very easy.

Now if you follow the link or enlarge the picture you will see that the dish looks quite nice. Ours didn’t look like that when it came out of the oven and then serving it on a bed of Huan’s mixed rice didn’t help the presentation. However, I’m pleased to say that it tasted far better than it looked and I would heartily recommend you giving it a try. PS I had more meatballs and less rice than Huan.

May 7^th We were early enough at the hospital to be #1 in the queue for our dentist, somehow we still didn’t get in first! Second wasn’t bad I suppose.

Here’s the dentist explaining something to Huan and a strange picture, I think it’s an X-ray.

Next up we have some strange low speed drill with a vicious looking large drill bit, connected wirelessly to a machine. In this case, your guess is as good as mine!

What was the outcome? My tooth is still not ready to be filled, I have to go back next Friday. He also told us that the tooth cannot be capped, it’s probably not strong enough, instead he will just fill it. If it does happen to break in the future I will have to have a bridge style cap.

Huan was off to hulusi practice again in the afternoon so another solo walk for me. After I’d dropped her off my intention was to continue long enough to make the daily ten. Plum voice required for the next bit. “One doesn’t always plan as one should, sometimes one makes decisions on the spur of the moment.” That’s exactly what I did today. I noticed that a small farm house had been knocked down so went up that track to do some exploring. Far too many photos were taken, mostly so that Huan could guess where I had been walking when she saw them. The route I took up the hill wasn’t so easy and I would have been better off with my new boots on rather than my casual shoes. A lot of climbing over dead trees was required.

It was worth it though just to see this view when I reached my limit for today. It wasn’t the top of the hill but a lot more scrambling would have been needed to get any higher.

Continuing to the right in the above photo, without returning to the main road, I found my around the back of the small village, through the housing complex that used to house the “Lady of the Lake”, to the little stream that runs from there down to the main road. There I spotted a couple of sentinels but I guess they were only guarding the stream; I walked past with no trouble!

Checking my watch meant a very brisk walk to reach Huan’s class before it was too late. I made it in time, a few minutes early. However, when it was time for the class to finish they decided to do some more practice, I was not a happy bunny! I left them to it.

May 8^th “Alone again, naturally.” Yes, Huan was off to OAP university again, this time for singing classes which have started again as the teacher has returned from Sanya. Being market day I didn’t bother with my boots and kept my walk to town only. In the market, instead of food, I found something else to show you. The first photo, so Huan tells me, is for catching and/or killing rats although I’m really not sure how. The second photo shows that in China the use of solar energy is actually very widespread, especially in the villages.

These next two photos show a farmer and his wife coming into town, not for the riverside market but for one of the others. We’ve seen them many times but getting a decent photo has always been difficult. Today I got two, one shows their happy faces and the second gives you a better look at their amazing mode of transport.

I did manage to reach my daily target even though I only went upriver and back. After lunch and a nice Youtube break, it was time to cook lunch, a ‘sort of’ Scotch broth. The recipe is below, although the link in the photo is wrong. Usually I can locate where I got my recipes from, with this one I failed. Even a Google image search didn’t help. However, the link that’s there is exactly the same apart from it being beef instead of mutton or lamb.

Our recipe had to be modified as usual although not too much this time. Instead of nice meaty chunks of lamb we used the Chinese hot-pot slices again, you can see the result in the broth. We did manage to find pearl barley online and it arrived just before the weekend, all 2.5kg of it. One thing we had to substitute was turnip or swede, the alternative was another big Chinese white radish. Had they had a large red one in the shops I may have tried that instead. We also added potatoes which the recipe doesn’t have, that says to eat it with some nice crusty bread. For us, the potatoes worked well enough. Huan liked it so much she had two platefuls and will also have another one, sans meat, for breakfast in the morning. This was my (one) plate, in some ways it reminds me of the broth my Mam used to make, apart from the lamb slices that is.

May 9^th I had a plan today, a good plan, we were going to take our usual clockwise route around the mountain park. However, the Minister of Finance decided that we should go and pay our internet bill on the way! That meant we would have to take the anticlockwise route, definitely not my favourite, too many stairs. By the time we reached the ISP office we had walked 2.3kms and Huan went in to pay. While I was waiting I walked in circles, many circles of many differing sizes so when she eventually reappeared I had reached 4.8kms. An executive decision was made and we went round the river instead, especially as Huan wanted to get back before the maintenance office closed so she could also pay our water bill. During my many circles I took a couple of photos of kindergarten signs, the second one is reasonably easy to understand, but the first one had me stumped. Were they trying to say that the teachers are mean or that they turn out little mean fighting machines or that the students will all be average when they finish?

While Huan was paying the water bill I checked on the dam progress, it looks like it will be high enough for the water to be deep enough for swimming and boating in front of our house, but whether it will be safe enough for those activities remains to be seen.

And finally for today, a smiling Huan, even though she is parting with money! I should have taken her temperature to make sure she was feeling all right.

May 10^th NTR, just a lazy day shopping and watching movies for me with a couple of hulusi practices for Huan, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. I really enjoyed doing nothing!

So that’s it, another week over, hope you’re still enjoying seeing life in China for us mere mortals, let us know how you’re all doing and we’ll be most happy. Bye for now!