Nokia Week, Bank Sorted, Rain, Admin & the Minion(s)

July 20^th Nokia week? Yes, all photos taken this week will be with good old Nokia Lumia 1020, its sensor is bigger than the Fuji S1 we tried previously. I’ve hidden the X-T20 in the cupboard so that I don’t go out with the wrong one.

Huan had her usual Tuesday singing class today so I did the gentlemanly thing and walked her there. My walk was to be a shorter one today, I had a reason to be back early. First I tried a snap off the balcony, similar to the S1 shots we tried first. The Nokia takes two photos each time, today I used the jpeg 5MP and 34MP, where I am showing two the first will be the 5MP and the second a cropped version of the 34MP. You can see that the Nokia suffers from the lack of zoom compared to the S1 but the crop is not too bad.

Next up, just the normal 5MP view from the balcony, the crop on the high resolution photo was not so good, perhaps my hands weren’t steady enough.

Next we took us a selfie, not too impressed with this at all, the front camera definitely shows its age, we bought it in 2014.

I was pleased with these next two, or should I say four. I cropped the high resolution photos right down and gave them a black and white effect. I think that worked quite well.

Next up some floor tiles, although they look more like kitchen wall tiles. I think someone had some free tiles they didn’t know what to with so these two ended up in a footpath. In this case I have used both cropped versions, between 50% and 60% I think, because I like the detail that shows up in the resulting photos.

I did a fair few more comparisons between 5MP and 34MP but I won’t bore you with them here. Instead I’ll bore you with the straight from the camera panorama, which looks pretty awful. However, that is not the fault of the phone more the fault of the operator! The phone does take excellent panoramic shots but you have to choose your subjects area better than I did today!

My walk was shorter so that I could get home and prepare dinner before Huan came home. We weren’t having an early dinner but we were going to Sanya after lunch to see what the bank problems were. The new highway certainly takes the effort out of “just popping down to Sanya” and we arrived just as their lunch break was finishing. It seems that all they wanted to know was what “State Pension Payment” meant. They had tried translating it with their phones but if their phone is anything like mine it will only take one word at a time. Doing that “state” does not translate correctly, which is maybe why she wanted my ‘registration’. In fact entering the words on Google Translate when we got home, “State” brings up a Chinese word meaning “Status” but that changed when I added “Pension Payment” to be the correct Chinese. The lady concerned is a new member of staff which makes me wonder why she didn’t just look at last month’s incoming remittances and get the information from there. Perhaps to make sure they weren’t missing anything they also took a copy of the letter from the Government advising me that my pension claim had been approved and the amount to be paid. That letter is from 2015 when my pension began to be paid into the bank in Sanya and I am fairly sure they already have a cope somewhere. It’s amazing that in today’s modern world we still rely so much on old fashioned paper. Anyway, the problem is solved.

Back to Wuzhishan, finished cooking, or warming up, our dinner and then conned Huan into joining me for a walk. Not much conning required though as she wanted to visit her bank to see if the camera money had been deposited. It had so we returned home with smiles all round.

July 21^st Today I decided to try a different setting on the phone, it would take a normal jpeg, although the filename is raw_jpeg, less than 2MB in size and a RAW, filename raw_highres_dng, approximately 40MB in size. To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement! It seems that dng files, whilst they can be opened by Picasa, would be far better off opened with something like Photoshop. As our photos are primarily for us I have no wish to buy and then learn Photoshop, Picasa does quite a lot, and very easily. Out of all the raw files I cropped I kept only two, one of them was this little butterfly. I think it was struggling to fly as by now the rain was on and off quite a lot.

Taking photos to try and show you the rain was also an abject failure. During a lull, I used the ‘smart’ feature on the phone which takes a load of photos and melds them into one. Supposedly this gives good results. Again I wasn’t impressed and neither was the boss, this one can’t even be cropped very well. Huan doesn’t like it at all!

Our walk took us along the riverside again so I tried another panorama, this time I was further away from the wall, but the results are still too ‘bendy’ for me.

In fact I prefer the one I made with the stitching software when I got home even though, if you look closely, you can see some dodgy stitching due to my camera movements.

Remember the rain? Well Huan had a hat on, she was slightly protected, I had nothing. The first photo is cropped from a normal jpeg, it’s the one Huan wanted me to show you, the second is the other one I cropped from a dng photo. This doesn’t look too bad, makes me wonder just what I was doing wrong earlier.

Needless to say, by the time we got home we were both soaked to the skin. Hot showers were needed before dinner!

July 22^nd After getting so wet yesterday afternoon we decided to try a morning walk today. SWMBO first had me taking photos of her plants on the balcony, she was especially proud of the one that had flowered so that got a close up. The phone was back to normal today, a normal jpeg and a high resolution jpeg, cropping was much easier.

The results were much better as well, take a look at this flower we spotted somewhere along the road. (We avoided the riverside today.)

That was the sum total of Nokia photos for today, miserable weather an no decent subjects. Huan took three or four me along with a little friend but she used her phone. Our phones are pretty awful at taking pictures but this crop turned out better than most of the crops I tried yesterday.

Our timing was perfect today, we’d been back in the house less than ten minutes before the heavens opened up again. Chef duties for me, after we both had a nap, mine much longer than Huan’s. I blame the mattress!

The rest of the day I spent looking at cameras again, down Youtube wormholes, getting lost on Taobao, even on Amazon. Sometimes I yearn for the days of real shops!

July 23^rd “Listen to the pouring rain, listen to it pour.” Can you name the artist? It’s someone I saw live in Hong Kong many years ago. Last night I was doing just that, listening to the rain and by golly it was pouring. We had to go out this morning and lucky for us, the rain eased off for long enough. We had enough time to walk to the phone shop and the supermarket, about a three kilometre round trip, not enough! On our way home we spotted this car, and I would normally create a collage for you. However, with having fewer photos this week I thought I would show you some individual ones. You can share them with your children, or your grandchildren if you’re an old fogey like me. I had to do some Google searching, I had no idea who Stuart, Kevin and Bob were. Mind you, I’ve always known I was a minion!

Right outside our house we saw something we haven’t seen before, four horses in a truck. There weren’t four horsemen riding them so I guess we’re still safe for a little while longer. Because of the bars on the truck I couldn’t really get any decent pictures. I did try, honest!

We timed our little walk well and beat the rain again today. It did start again, not long after came home, and persisted for the rest of the day. At least we live in the mountains and are not likely to face the problems other parts of China are having.

And that’s it, all the photos for today. Well, I did take a photo of the Chinese on the side of my breakfast milk bottle, I could use WeChat to translate the image text. It seems it’s not as healthy as I thought, it contains sugar and other strange chemicals. I guess I’ll have to go back to semi-skimmed milk. I wonder if I could hide full fat milk in the fridge somewhere and convince Huan that I’m still trying to stay healthy.

After lunch, and in the middle of my internet surfing looking at cameras, Huan found a repair shop on Taobao. ¥200.00 was the minimum price quoted before inspection and quotation. She thinks we’ll pay no more than ¥1,000.00 for the repair and service, I think it will be twice that. In a few days we’ll find out who’s right.

July 24^th Market day today and a nice surprise for me, Huan didn’t have her usual singing class so I had the pleasure of her company. If you’re a regular post reader you will know that I have taken some pretty good photos of little crawling creatures with the X-T20. I tried today with the Nolia, the worm is not so good but the caterpillar came out well. We thought it had been battered a bit by the rain although we have no idea how it lost one of its feelers.

Next we passed another of those advisory notices, for ourselves I cropped the high resolution photo into six individual ones. You will have to make do with your Chinese friends, the local Chinese restaurant or some other kind of translation. Sorry!

Huan was quite surprised to see how busy the market was today.

We stopped to take photos of chicks, ducklings, goslings and poults, of varying types. There were also some Jakes and Jennys I think. Are you confused now? Check here, I had to. https://environment.arlingtonva.us/2015/11/turkey-tidbits/ We were ambushed by the stall holder who said he had his photo taken with me last year and he wondered if this year it could be his wife’s turn. I chose two of many to show you, the second showing him taking photos with his phone. My phone is in my hand, these two photos were taken with the commander’s phone.

“Where are the pictures of all those avian creatures then?” Sad to say, I failed, not a single photo was clear enough to use. Maybe there was just far too much movement in the crates and the phone couldn’t find focus.

Our last photos from the market are loofahs. Remember them? I thought you might like to see them in their natural state. The ones I cooked were ‘babies’, like the ones in the first picture. In the second picture they have begun to expand, eventually the inside will look like the ones you use in your bathrooms.

I wonder if any of you remember ‘modifying’ your cars in your younger days, perhaps changing the wheel sizes, adding go-faster stripes or such like. Maybe one or two of you even splashed out and installed dams and spoilers. This driver did the latter although I don’t think he will see much downward force as a result!

We didn’t beat the rain home today but as it came whilst we were in the market we were able to keep dry until it eased off again. Once we were safe and dry in the house, the rain came back and just like yesterday, stayed all day, although not quite so much. Were we bored? Not really, Huan practiced almost everything; I think she missed the taodi, and I cooked this weekend’s stew. Huan chose again, chicken stew made with drumsticks. I cooked and de-boned them yesterday. There was an omission in my ingredients though, for some reason I forgot to buy potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams. Rice was substituted so we had a very lumpy rice soup, very yummy too.

July 25^th Rain stopped play so we played ‘characters’ instead. I was Onslow sans vest and Huan was Hyacinth but playing instruments as well as singing. That was our day apart from doing some admin, using Folder Match to synchronise Huan’s PC with mine and then making sure her Windows updates were up to date. I did get worried and started searching the internet for “update stops at 20%” but I needn’t have, it all updated successfully.

July 26^th Rain stopped play again today, no problem as today was shopping day. Luckily for Huan the rain stopped long enough for her to go from the car to the fish market and back. We could have gone for an afternoon walk but we were both too lazy.

I did some more admin though, this time sorting out my desk and bringing all the filing up to date. Here are the before and after photos. How long will it stay neat and tidy this time?

So that is the end of “Nokia Week”, what did you think of it? I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the Fuji pictures are much better. An update on that is that the repair company have received the camera. In fact they phoned Huan this evening to ask her if the screen was broken before we sent it? Efficiency at its best, there was a note with it explaining all the problems. It’s now been sent off for testing before they tell us how much it will cost. Wish us luck!

As always, we’ll be back in a week, in the meantime stay safe y’all, and take care!

Back to X-T20, Anniversary, Rigsby Changes Tack, Ledong, I Hate Banks (Again)

July 13th It was back to singing class for the boss this morning so I did the usual and walked her there. A couple of birds were spotted on the way, just a little out of reach of the camera though. I dropped her off and she gave me explicit orders not to walk too far. Did I listen? Well I only did seven and a half kilometres today, that’s not too far is it? My only plan was to take a few photos with the X-T20, to restore my faith in it, apart from its zoom capabilities of course. This area is part of the landscaped gardens around the complex Huan goes to.

A couple of flower macros came next, nothing that you haven’t seen before though. However, this is a view I don’t believe we’ve showed you before, this is our main shopping street, one of my favourite streets. I love the trees growing over the top although I do wonder how long they can last before someone takes a saw to them.

I tried playing with the different photo qualities on the camera today, ‘normal’ jpeg (compressed a little), ‘fine’ jpeg (a bigger file, not compressed) and RAW. To be honest I couldn’t see a great deal of improvement even using RAW and the entails different software to process and convert the photos afterwards. Professional photographers would probably be able to get much better results than me. As our photos are memories and stories rather than art I can’t be bothered with all the extra work. Having said that, I may keep a RAW setting for occasional use. These next two panoramas were created from converted RAW files, using Microsoft’s ICE and then tarted up a little in the ever so easy to use Picasa. They look different because of the ‘stitching’ method, the first used ‘cylindrical’ and the second used ‘perspective, and the sepia effect applied in Picasa.

The next three show our restaurant, not really ours, we own the premises and rent them out to the restaurateur. None of these were RAW, they may all have been fine, the second is a crop of the first, the third was given the sepia effect for ‘atmosphere’. If you look carefully you can see the reflection of my knobbly knees!

I took one more just to finish off the walk, in fact I took three from the same place. No matter what I did with the RAW file though I couldn’t really improve on this.

Was I happy with today’s results? As we are not professional photographers and mostly take photos for our, and our friends’ and families’ pleasure I would say yes. All we have to do now is try and get the X-T20 repaired. Apart from cooking dinner, I spent the rest of the day trying to find a tutorial on how to replace the LCD display, with no success. I wasn’t able to find one for sale on Taobao either. Well, that’s not quite true, I found two or three supposedly for our camera but they all looked different! In the end I bookmarked Fuji’s repair shops in China, I’ll get Huan to call them sometime.

What did I cook today? The plan was noodles, chicken, red and yellow bell peppers, garlic, onion, yoghurt and cheese. Our shopping trip yesterday didn’t yield either of the peppers we needed so I bought a red jalapeno pepper, (not hot) and needing more colour I saw a long green vegetable and asked Huan if we could use that. No problem she said, it will go well and it’s also good for you. After dinner, which worked well, and while I was writing this post I asked what we had eaten. The answer was丝瓜, (Sīguā) which translates as something you might use in the bath, a ‘loofah’. Googling loofah told me that, as usual, the head chef was absolutely correct. Had I known in advance I may have taken some pictures for you, maybe next time.

July 14^th Huan has an easier time of things at the moment; she doesn’t have classes every day. That meant we could walk together today, just a walk around the river though. I thought the camera was set to RAW so I tried a few photos but getting home I found it was only set to ‘fine’. Not to worry, here’s the first macro.

The second one is an insect, I wonder if you can tell me what it is. Is it a cricket, a locust or a grasshopper? Huan thought the lump on its back was something trying to eat it. When it landed in front of us I took the photo and then tried to get it move again by gently touching the back end. It didn’t move a muscle so maybe Huan was right.

The route we took was one where we have previously seen a lot of lizards. Huan said we had to walk that way today because I wanted to take pictures of lizards! Translation, Huan wanted me to take pictures of lizards! Of course I was in trouble for missing the first one which I refused to take as the irrigation truck was bearing down on us watering all the plants. As it was I kept the camera dry but I got soaked. These two were less of a problem though.

Being the good commander that she is she then had me take these two photos on the grounds that ‘we haven’t showed people this street before”. That’s true; we haven’t showed you the street down at the far end of the river, again a pleasant shaded area to stroll around.

Our last one for the morning was a fisherman as we approached our house. Although you can’t see it well, he has caught at least one, he’s carrying it in a plastic bag in his left hand.

Lunch was some of that lovely Xinjiang bread with cheese and salad, plus red cabbage for me. We do like to make sure we get our ‘five a day’ you know. Following that we both had to have a little sleep. Most people would blame it on our ages but we blame it on the weather and the heat!

Another shopping trip was needed before dinner, a solo one. More coconut milk was needed for my daily breakfasts, no fat content, better for my cholesterol, or so they say. You’re probably wondering why we didn’t buy any on Monday, our normal shopping day. It was on the list but they didn’t have any. Despite our two large supermarkets being the same chain it’s often the case that one has product when the other doesn’t. The one I went to today had only four bottles left on the shelf so I nabbed two of them. Walking home I heard music behind me and hurriedly put the shopping down so that I could use the phone camera. This is something that happens a lot here, shops carry out advertising campaigns using various vehicles and PA systems. Today’s was for electric mopeds, they’ll give you ¥338.00 for your old one and the new one becomes ¥1,199.00. That’s pretty cheap and a lot safer then those scooters we keep reading about in the UK media.

My additional walk gave me additional kilometres so the daily target of ten kilometres was easily reached. This could be a better way of doing it, easier for me and it keeps me out of the house at NAAFI break time, when I would usually stop for a coffee and a fag.

July 15^th Today was another joint expedition and my plan was to do some playing with the camera. I set it take RAW and ‘normal’ photos at the same time which I could then compare when we got home. In theory the RAW photos should have been much higher quality then the ‘normal’ jpeg files. Crossing the island our first photo was of the damaged road in our complex. I cropped both photos by over 50% and there is no major difference. If you tried what they call ‘pixel peeping’ you may be able to see some difference but for normal work, full screen views (27” monitor) and printing (A4) ‘normal’ is absolutely good enough.

Huan took a lot of photos of me stood in front of a little waterfall on the road up to the scenic mountain walk. Only one turned out to be worth keeping and that wasn’t very good either. The shutter was opening longer than usual, I suppose RAW files need more detail and thus more light. The converted RAW file was no better than this normal jpeg.

When we reached the bridge to start our downward trek I decided to take enough shots to create a panorama when we got home. Having both types of files allowed me to create two panoramas, one from fifteen normal files, each about 8MB, and one from fifteen converted RAW files, each about 23MB. The results were not special; again the panorama created from the larger files was not noticeably any better than the one created from the normal files. That one is here.

This next one, which Huan spotted, my eyes are nowhere near as good as hers any more, the RAW file actually seemed worse than the jpeg. The RAW file was binned!

Next up are two vertical panoramas where I went through the same process as before but I’m sure you know by now what I’m going to say. You’re right, no need to mess around with additional software and file conversion, the jpegs are definitely good enough.

Next I took a lot of photos of a posed Huan, the results were much more of the same. I can’t show you though, I have been forbidden from sharing what I kept! Our last photo of the day, the last one we are sharing anyway, is new to us. Just as we were coming to the end of the mountain walk we came across this dietary advice sign. Here you can see the whole sign; I also took photos of the individual segments, cropped them at home, and got Huan to translate them for me. I’m not going to write all that here, you can either ask your local Chinese restaurant or Google image translation, whichever you prefer. Suffice to say that, according to the advice given here, we both eat healthily enough.

Did I say last photo? Well there is one more, but taken with my phone. I am a member of a site called “Food Tribe” and today someone asked us to share photos of any unusual glass or tableware we might have and how we came by it. I shared these lovely little egg cups, but I have no idea where I bought them from other than the fact it wasn’t in China.

Being Thursday I was on chef duties again but I cheated a little today, all I did was fry up a little minced pork in some olive oil and then add a previously frozen vegetable soup, once that was bubbling away some dried noodles. Huan had to go out before I cooked it, more committee stuff, but it was ready to serve when she returned. I added some parmesan cheese to mine, Huan as usual, emptied her plate and decided that instead of being a glutton and emptying the pan as well, she would have noodle soup for breakfast again tomorrow.

That was my day done but ‘er indoors’, no today she decided to some Percy Thrower on the balcony. Now if you know who that is you are definitely showing your age!

July 16^th Thirteen years ago today, way up north in Dalian, we were married. Today we celebrated by doing absolutely nothing all day, just stayed home and watched TV for Huan and PC for me, and we enjoyed every minute of it! We did go out this evening though; here we are on the balcony prior to setting off. PS I managed to get my wedding ring on today, the first time for three or four years. Hopefully it won’t constrict the blood flow too much and lead to my finger dropping off!

I gave Huan a conditional choice of where to go, the condition being it wasn’t to be the ‘frog’ restaurant where we went for Christmas. She chose the “Beijing Hotpot” restaurant, previously recommended to us by our good friends from Haikou.

First we had to have our photo taken by the orange tree at the door.

Then I had a look around while Huan browsed the menu.

As the menu was all in Chinese, with no pinyin, Huan ordered for us, our ‘ingredients’ were then delivered by robot.

I’m not a huge fan of hot pots but as it’s been such a long time since we had one I really enjoyed today’s, and ate far too much of course, especially meat. Here’s the pot bubbling away merrily very near the end, you can see that there are no more ingredients left to add to the pot.

As you can see, Chinese hot pot is very different to Lancashire hot pot or any other UK variant. If you want to try it then find your nearest Chinatown and ask for 火锅 huǒ guō, they will guide you as to what ‘broth’ to use in the two halves. Usually one of them is quite spicy, today Huan asked them not to make a spicy one. Try it, you’ll like it. Just imagine it as a Chinese fondue! In this particular restaurant there was also free ice cream so Huan had a cone and I had a small bowl of (free) tinned fruit and ice cream.

Well we enjoyed our anniversary, we also walked to dinner and back so despite having a lazy day we still got almost five kilometres in. Our day was completed with a lovely Skype call with one of my Aunties, one of her daughters, two of her grandsons and a great granddaughter. Where would we be without the wonders of modern technology?

July 17^th No breakfast for me today, I think I ate too much last night! After my cup of coffee, with a spoonful of sugar for a change, I walked Huan to singing class before setting off for the Saturday market walk. Lots of the moped / motorbike shops seem to be having sales at the moment as well as refurbishing their premises. Here’s one having a grand re-opening, all the staff are to the right of the inflated orange archway.

Passing by the new shopping centre building I stopped to read the English on the signs. The first one has me completely flummoxed especially the “not against corruption” part. The second one has no great language problems and the sentiment is laudable, I like it. The third one seems to be some sort of advert for a new dictionary, an online one, with twenty million words! One thing missing though is the URL to tell you where to find this huge dictionary.

My route to the riverside took me past the front of our apartment complex so I thought I would give you a different view of the river, the island and one of the bridges.

Last night Huan and I both thought that there a lot more people around than usual, that feeling was reinforced for me today. Bear in mind that most of the snowbirds are still away and won’t return before September or October.

Once I was in the market I found that some of the new food places have started opening up. This one is a bakery but unlike ours back in the UK. I must admit to missing real cream cakes, freshly baked bread and sausage rolls etc.

I couldn’t find anything else of interest in the market today so I began a roundabout route back to Huan’s singing class to make sure I didn’t arrive there too early. I decided to have some breakfast on the way, a not very chocolaty chocolate ice cream.

My timing was good, I met Huan and walked her home and then, believe it or not, I didn’t have an OAP nap today. Well, it was my turn to cook again and Huan had requested duck stew this weekend. That took me most of the afternoon.

After dinner I conned Huan into going out with me for a ‘short’ walk to reach my daily total of ten kilometres. With 9.4 this morning and 2.9 this evening I think we can consider the target met.

July 18^th Rigsby was on the road again, this time to Ledong. However, this was a different type of Rigsby. Instead of visiting the tenants to find and/or fix problems it was a benevolent trip. The boss, or should I call her “Miss Jones”, had decided to visit bearing gifts, 饺子 (jiǎozi) aka dumplings, 糭子 (Zòng zi) aka sticky rice dumplings, potted plants and a water lily. Our drive there was an uneventful one along the highway.

After we left we decided to have a little walk around the neighbourhood, where we spotted our first subject. "Nothing special here" I hear you say. Well I beg to differ. Huan and I helped the owner, a property developer, to buy this by giving him our well earned money when we bought the Ledong apartment from him. He drives a British Bentley now and I drive a Chinese Dongfeng. C'est la vie! No complaints from me, just a little envy perhaps.

Huan chose the park walk, very near the apartment, via the sports stadium.

It’s a pleasant park with lots to do for the children, climbing frames, the usual slides and stuff and things for the adults too, the outdoor gymnasium, quite a big one, and of course table tennis. We decided though to show you part of the walk.

From there we went down to the lake where they have a water feature show in the evenings and serve some pretty decent food. At the time of day we were there the restaurant was not yet open but to entice you to visit, here are a couple of panoramas.

The swimming pool should have been our next subject, it’s usually very busy with lots of children having fun. However, it was all closed up, whether permanently or not we don’t know. Instead we headed back into town, found ourselves a cheap buffet style restaurant and had lunch. Can you guess whose is whose?

Our last subject is one of our little friends again. Today this one jumped onto Huan’s water bottle first before I enticed it onto my hand. We were so engrossed in what we were doing that the people working in the hairdressers came to find out exactly what we were doing. Of course they also had to know where I was from, for some reason they never believe “Wuzhishan”!

Our return route was not the highway, I wanted to go via Maoyang and the mountain roads. My reasons were to check the distances and whether or not buses still travelled on the road between Maoyang and Wuzhishan. If we were to walk from home to the rest stop, uphill all the way, it’s twelve kilometres. There are no more buses on this route so to go home would either be another twelve kilometres back the same way or fourteen kilometres downhill to Maoyang from where we could get a bus home. Twenty four or twenty six kilometres half uphill and half downhill, Huan thinks we’d need a full day, she’s probably right!

July 19^th And so we come to Monday, our restful, relaxing shopping day. It was to, at least to start with. There were no other plans today so we could take our time. All I wanted to do was to snap a couple of pictures on the escalator which I managed to do on the way down from the food section to the household section. The first one puzzled me, 小心碰头, Xiǎoxīn pèngtóu which literally translates as “be careful, bump head” but all together means “watch your head. How do they get “carefully meet” from that?

The second one had me puzzled too but with my ‘brain the size of a small planet’, I did manage to work it out after a couple of minutes. 禁止逆行, jìnzhǐ nixing, literally character by character, “ban, only, inverse, row”, in pairs, “prohibit retrograde” and all together “no retrograde”. What they mean is “don’t go the opposite way the escalator is going”. Of course I had to break the rules quite a lot to get this photo and the one above!

We were just coming to the end of a nice week, no real problems, and I was feeling good about life, when my phone rang. It was my bank in Sanya, again. The young lady spoke a little English but found my question “How do I know you are really calling from the bank” a little difficult to answer. She was also having trouble telling me what she needed from me, I could hear her using her phone for translation, and also speaking to her supervisor. She needed me to provide some sort of “registration”, which I suspect is not quite the correct translation. We went through all this last year and I told her as much. She said she was new and needed it all again. By now our conversation was showing the limitations of her English and my Chinese and with me pacing around the house trying to find Huan, the call either dropped or she hung up. She probably thinks I hung up. Unknown to me Huan had popped out for a few minutes to a local shop. I guess we will have to take another trip to Sanya this week to sort it out, again. How business people cope with moving large sums of money in and out I have no idea, it’s certainly not easy for us little people with our paltry amounts.

Enough of my grumbling, I’ll sign off now and let you know next week what happened. My guess is that it will be exactly the same as it was in August last year. In the meantime, take care, stay safe and remember to greet everyone with a nice big smile every day! Au reservoir!