Still Recovering…

January 3^rd So we start a new week feeling exhausted, both of us were up late again, me much later than Huan, again. Just like yesterday though we decided we had to get out after lunch, surely exercise and fresh air has to be good for us. Down at the gate was something new, something Huan has been waiting a long time for. This is an express company home delivery system. The courier will scan the panel, put your item into an empty box and then send you a message. You then pick up the item by either scanning the panel or entering a code received in your message. We will know more once it is up and running.

Flowers have started appearing in various places around the town in preparation for Chinese New Year, it will be early this year, 22^nd of this month in fact. Sometimes I do have to ask myself if anybody thought through the locations.

Today, for a change, I managed to get Huan to do some stretching exercises on the balustrade alongside the river. Unfortunately she then made me have a go!

Finally for today, it’s me again, this time almost eating a perfectly formed baby, no, not a real one you dummies! I found this on the floor next to a jackfruit tree and I doubt very much that it was edible. I certainly wasn’t going to risk it.

January 4^th Nothing to report except shopping and laziness. I still feel completely drained except for my head. That feels as though someone has stuck a one way valve up my nose and then pumped me up with a ball pump. #1 son told me it took him ten days to recover. Seeing as how he is much younger and fitter than I am I reckon ten weeks may be more like it!

January 5th My head felt a little better this morning, Huan’s felt worse. I had taken three doses of medicine yesterday, she had taken only one. She will take three today! An afternoon walk was on the cards, fresh air still needed with a little exercise. Only our phones were taken with us, no camera, so the photos are not very good.

I pointed my phone at things I would not normally photograph.

We had quite a long walk before ending up at the bap market. I was wondering why Huan had not complained about the route at all and then I realised, she wanted to see the ostrich again. She was in luck, she got to feed it and so did I. The second photo shows where I am pointing out to the ostrich were it had pecked my hand!

For the engineers among you, we talked about the river works last week, but we didn’t show you what we had seen. Here are the two diagrams detailing exactly what is being done along the length of the river. You may need a translator!

What would a walk be without a dog or two?

And Huan noticed a gentleman trying to take photos of birds that, for some reason, were not flying away. We both tried from our vantage point, we were further away than him. I failed quite miserably, Huan did a little better than me, there are four birds in this photo.

Did we feel any better when we got home today? We were both quite worn out; although we hadn’t planned it we had walked over ten kilometres. Our heads did feel better though, not quite so cobwebby! Why were we daft enough to walk so far? It wasn’t distance we were going for; we wanted to be at the town Baijiahui by four o’clock to collect some of their baps. Would you believe it, they had none today; they said we were too early. Previously we have been told to be there at four; today they said there would be nothing before five!

January 6^th The weather seems to be as down as we are! The sun didn’t want to show itself today and we didn’t want to show ourselves either. We did go out after dinner, making sure that we arrived at the supermarket after five o’clock today. On our way we passed one of my favourite sights, a bike full of teddy bears.

Our luck was in when we reached Baijiahui and I took great pleasure in telling the sales lady, “see, I told you, if you make many we will buy many”. We almost bought them out of stock, we took twenty four! That’s the freezer sorted out, we can always top up now and then.

January 7^th Saturday came round again, as it does every week, and today we managed a trip to the market, along with quite a few other people.

Today we even took the camera for a walk; we weren’t too lazy to just use our phones. Having said that, we didn’t see too much worth snapping. Huan thought his particular piece of flora deserved saving for posterity. I thought it was some kind of yellow pepper, I was wrong. It turns out to be medicinal, can be poisonous, and is called 五指茄 Wǔzhǐ jiā - Five fingered eggplant. The scientific name is ‘Solanum mammosum’, in TCM it is known as the pentagonal eggplant and is supposedly good for relieving lymph node inflammation. Having read that it is poisonous I will just avoid it from now onwards.

And this was my choice which I have been waiting weeks to snap. We have seen this lady time and time again selling ‘hairy eggs’ (毛蛋Máo dàn) but each time I have looked in to her pans all I could see was eggs. Today my curiosity was satisfied! It turns out that hairy eggs are the Chinese equivalent of the Philippine Balut eggs. Normally balut are duck eggs, these eggs today looked more like chicken eggs, either way they were fertilized eggs. Having eaten quite a lot of balut in the Philippines I had no need to try again here.

January 8^th The sun was under the weather and we were not much better.

January 9^th Our first medication free day! Being a Monday it should have been a shopping day of course but the Minister of Supplies changed the time table for this week. Instead, we headed out for a walk after lunch, to try and beat the bad weather. The first thing we noticed was that our ‘testing area’ is no longer!

We headed out over the bridge to somewhere where I took a slight detour and went and had a look over the edge as it were. Huan didn’t want to follow me, she stayed up top. This was me checking on the irrigation canal route under the new road.

And this was me taking a photo of her taking a photo of me.

This was my view along the bottom; you may notice that while there were stairs to go down there were none to go up again.

As usual Huan took far too many photos of me scrambling back up again and as usual I made a couple of gifs. The first one I made seems to be the one that made Huan laugh the most so that is the one I will share with you. Here I am skipping the light fandango!

Further on Huan took one that I wasn’t aware of; I was heading through the fields.

I was however aware of her sprinting down the road to catch me reappearing at the other side of the farmer’s crop!

Although we were off the meds today we both still felt a little weary, me probably more so than the young commander. In the words of Shakira, “hips don’t lie” but it was nothing to do with dancing. It was more like how much longer will they last? I also had a couple of very brief dizzy spells, one from climbing up the hill, so entirely my own fault.

Because we were still feeling weary we didn’t have the camera with us, only our phones. Huan tried her hardest to snap a bird of prey but she got mostly my head!

Back into town we found some ladies trying to save money by ‘borrowing’ the fruit straight from the tree. Huan had to take photos and ended up with free fruit too.

You might have noticed our little feathered friends in the last photo. I was about to give one of the fruit to them, the boss went crazy!

As for the birds, well the white ones allowed me to snap the pair of them together, the green ones wouldn’t do me the honour.

As for the yellow ones, every time I tried to get into position at the cage, this one insisted on being the only one in the photo. They strike me as extremely intelligent creatures and I did wonder whether or not they remember me from previous visits.

So we come to the end of another week, not such a good one for us, hopefully better for most of you. Having said that, I do know a few friends and relatives who are also suffering at this time. All I can say is rest a lot, take your meds and it will get better! It has for us anyway.

With a little luck we will soon be back to our normal selves, beating each other up every five minutes, scrapping like cats and dogs and generally being very nice to each other! We’ll even try to get out and about a bit more and take the camera with us! Until the next time then, be nice to your nearest and dearest, we’ll do the same here.