February 13th Against my better judgement SWMBO convinced me that we should go shopping this morning instead of waiting until after lunch. Fortunately, she made a good call! Baijiahui was busy but nowhere near as bad as it can be when it’s full of snowbirds.
After lunch there was no nap for me, but Huan thought she needed one. That meant I could go out for a solo walk, nice and peaceful it was too. Within minutes I had found a lizard! In fact I found two but the second one disappeared when it heard me talk to it.
I took a few photographs just to show Huan my route when I got home. She had no problems with the first two but the third one needed some explanation.
Here we are in the year of the dragon and I think I found one.
This next one fooled the boss too, mostly because it is quite a large crop.
There was a reason I was sat there, the reason was feline. I gave it a meow and it came right to me and sat down. I left it while I went and bought a sausage but the kitty wanted nothing to do with that at all. In fact it seemed to want to go home with me. I suspect someone may have left it out over the New Year while they went home. Eventually I was able to escape leaving the little mite with the bits of sausage.
Over the months, nay years, of this blog we have shown you people fishing with nets, with rods, with catapults and with electric shocks. Today I found them fishing another way, this time with pumps. They were draining the water at the side of the river and finding the fish left behind, even the ones hiding under rocks.
February 14th One really should not go back to sleep if one is the first to awake in the morning. This ‘one’ did of course. I was awake before Huan wondering whether I should get up but in my infinite wisdom I decided that doing that would disturb Huan and probably wake her up. What happened? I dozed off again and woke up after nine, too late for a nice morning walk. No worries, we had one after lunch instead. In fact we had the identical walk that I took yesterday. The first reason was to show Huan and the second was to double check the fitness data. Huan found the lizard today; in fact it was the same one as yesterday. She is now convinced that it knows me and hence didn’t run away!
Before long Huan had me bending under trees to try and get into a position to capture birds that were, as always, too far away. As always, I dutifully obeyed orders!
No translations needed for today’s car art, I just liked the car. To my surprise, Huan wanted me to take a photo of it because it had a shovel hanging on the side!
Yesterday’s cat was still there and still wanted a bit of love. Today though we also noticed that there was food and water out for it, which was probably why it didn’t follow us home.
While Huan paused to watch a little girl try her best to win something on a New Year stall, by throwing hoops, I gazed through the jeweller’s window. I had seen these four ‘creatures’ before but only today realised that two of them seem to be sad.
I thought that would be it for the day, I never expected to see anything else on the way home. I forgot that I had the boss with me! “Look at that!” she said, so I did, I looked with the camera.
As if that wasn’t enough she then found another, even smaller spider.
That was it for our walk. To Huan’s surprise we had walked 10.3 kilometres, without heading off into the countryside. I was also pleased to see that the route map, and the distance, were identical to yesterday’s. We had smiles all round.
At home, Huan’s smile grew bigger; it was my turn to play chef
today. In fact I had done most of the work last night, all I had to do this
evening was prepare two large potatoes, boil them and then slice them.
Yesterday’s pot was reheated, the ‘lumps’ were then transferred to a large oven
proof dish and the juice was reserved for the gravy. What was I making? It has
all sorts of different names depending on where you come from in the
February 15th Our weather is back to playing games again, the sun was on holiday behind the clouds this morning. We needed to get out though so we went down the main road to come back via the riverside, maybe Huan would spot a lizard. Today is also the sixth day of New Year, the “farewell to poverty day” or “farewell to bad luck day”. I wonder if these snowbirds had any of this on their minds while they were happily cavorting.
Although the sun was in hiding, the weather was still good for walking.
Huan’s desires were met and she found three lizards. She didn’t even have to worry that we were seeing yesterday’s lizards again!
On our way home Huan stopped to chat with her old class leader from her singing classes. To while away the time I tried taking a photograph of a flower, while trying to hold the flower still and turning the focus ring at the same time. In the end I gave up trying to steady the flower.
February 16th This morning we
ignored the weather and forced ourselves out for a stroll. I asked Huan if she
wanted to go the ‘hard way’ round
Shortly after I picked up a hitch hiker who Huan insisted on photographing. Unfortunately she didn’t quite get near enough with her phone but maybe you can still identify it.
We keep being told that there are not so many visitors this year; I think the figures are wrong. We saw a lot of snowbirds this morning but we also saw that many had young families with them. Everyone was happy and smiling, except for one Mercedes driver that we saw later. He was just rich and grumpy.
This is a walk where we think we have shown you all the ‘hard parts’, the numerous steps in the past, we looked for something different today. Let’s start with a cotton tree, a very tall one.
We’ll follow that with a view through the trees down to the river. I was hoping that the lady down there didn’t turn around and think I was spying on her.
More views, the first one is a remarkably empty stretch of the river. People do like to sit on the stones a lot. The second is a hairy seed pod which a snowbird was very interested in and which Google was not much help with, you will have to do your own research I’m afraid. The third is one I was able to snap between groups.
Now then, what was I saying about sitting on the rocks? Unusually, in this particular scene, there are not many umbrellas and people hiding from the sun.
Over the bridge rich people were washing their cars again and children were making the most of it and playing with the water. Oh to be young again!
Just to give you an idea of how busy it was today, there were cars parked both up the hill and down the hill. Nearly all of them had mainland registration plates.
Sometimes we look back on our first walks around
Huan’s day was made by finding two more creatures, a bug on a leaf and a lizard on a plank. The bug is called “Aspidimorpha sanctaecrucis” or the name I prefer, a “Golden Tortoise Beetle”. If you enlarge the photo you can see the legs inside.
We may find our walks a lot easier than when we first arrived but we still need those afternoon naps. It has to be something to with being OAPs. After naptime it was chef time again, no photos for you though it was only belly pork noodles. I say ‘only’ but we were both very impressed with my cooking today. I wonder if I will be able to repeat it in the future!
February 17th Today we must give you our most humble and grovelling apologies, so sorry! Why? Well we didn’t take a single photograph for you today. We did go out, it was Saturday and market day and we needed a duck and some salad stuff. Thinking that I would be going out again later I only took the phone and saw nothing of any real interest. I was very pliable after lunch and didn’t argue when the boss decided staying in was better than going out!
February 18th Laziness was banished and we set off this morning for a landfill walk. That sounds terrible doesn’t it? In reality it is a wonderful walk, quiet these days, only the occasional rubbish truck, and there is no smell from the landfill at all. Anyway, to Huan’s surprise when we got home, I showed her what I had caught as we left our building. Even I was a little surprised because I had only seen one bird perched on the top of the tree. Needless to say this photo is very heavily cropped otherwise you would see hardly anything.
It felt good to be heading out of town again.
As the photos show, we had a good day for it today.
Just to show you everything, here’s a view of one of the landfill entrances, this one is closed.
Now, how about two more birds, crossing the road. They wouldn’t tell us why though.
This next one is just a nice scene.
Followed by another des res. Would you like to live here? I told Huan she could be the farmer, collecting eggs from the chickens, catching fish between her teeth, slaughtering pigs for dinner. I would be the general layabout and part time cleaner.
Soon we were over the top and on our way down the other side where we tried for another selfie. This was in a slightly different place to usual, the second photo shows where. Note how we are still not looking where we should be!
On our travels today we had seen probably four lizards who had been far too fast for me or my camera. Luckily for Huan she found another one and took far too many photos. For a change, here I am chatting to the lizard and not snapping a photo.
I did make sure I got a good pose from the subject.
All too soon we were back in town where this rather scruffy decal caught my eye. It’s a tiger but we have no idea why it also has cameras, dollars, beer and a star. It says 嗷鸣, Áo míng which only translates as ‘howl’.
We thoroughly enjoyed our hike today and then after lunch enjoyed our little nap almost as much!
After the last salad dinner of the weekend we heard the distinctive ‘horns’ of emergency vehicles, in this case ‘Fire and Rescue’. One went past the front of house going who knows where. A few minutes later Huan heard another one, this time inside our compound. Up to the roof we went to find out what was going on.
It would seem that not a lot was going on. First off there were no signs of any fire or other emergency anywhere. Second the fire engine was unable to go any further due to a car badly parked on the corner. Eventually it had to reverse out. I suggested to Huan that they were probably doing either training or inspections or both. Whatever it was, we can expect some new parking instructions to follow shortly!
February 19th There was no morning walk today, we had been summoned to lunch with Yú, Zhaode and their daughter who will be leaving in a few days. No complaints from me, I like to get out now and again and have a little alcohol and a fag! Here is the crowd, sans moi.
I was giving Huan some gyp because the restaurant next door has free ice cream but, I have to say the food here was not bad at all. I would prefer British black pudding to Chinese blood sausage but other than that it was all delicious.
Huan came outside after the dinner to catch me ‘in the act’. I edited the photo!
Her day was then improved by finding the last lizard of the week.
Just to make her even happier, and because I have been threatening to do it for so long, I climbed into a storm drain at the side of the road, not yet installed I hasten to add.
I have to say that getting in was a darn sight easier than getting out!
I was safe, no need to call our Fire & Rescue teams, and within minutes we were safely at home. No further action was required today, no cooking, no cleaning, only updating this post and then sleeping. Have a good one! See you next time.
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