Phone-shop-man follows me home

It's the last day before the National Holiday week and I have to cancel my pay-as-you-go contract with Chinacom. Yes I know. "Pay-as-you-go contract" makes no sense.: "Because China."

Anyway. Into the phone shop, sit down and start the process.

"You need passport" says phone-shop-man

I've seen it happen where you just say that you don't have your passport with you and the seeming document necessity evaporates.

"I don't have my passport. It's in my hotel" I said looking phone-shop-man in the eye.
"You need passport to cancel phone" phone-shop-man replied, sticking to the passport rule and holding the gaze.
"You in Rayfont (my hotel)?" asked phone-shop-man.
"We cancel now and go with you" he added before I could confirm my hotel situation.
He was actually offering to send one of the other phone-shop-men with me to my hotel.

That was an unexpected bit of lateral thinking. I would see where this would go.
Probably my hotel.

The sim card was disabled within 30 seconds.
I was refunded 63 Yuen and phone-shop-man grabbed one of the younger phone-shop-men and sent the two of us on our way.

I walked the ten minutes to my hotel.
Phone-shop-man#2 followed a respectful 10 feet behind me.

Into the lift and up to the 36th Floor.

Phone-shop-man#2 waited outside the room while I retrieved my passport, at which point he realized that he had forgotten his phone, so I took a picture of my passport with my phone.

Second point of failure: I remembered that phone-shop-man#1 had disabled my sim. No dice there.

VPN was the next choice, but because Hong Kong was "definitely not" having any political problems at this time, that wasn't working either.
Finally, I added phone-shop-man#2 to my WeChat friends and was able to send him the passport picture.

WeChat by the way is China's answer to SMS, Facebook, match.com, and uber-taxi all rolled into one.

Contract cancelled.

TL/DR:
You really do need your passport for some things in China.
Phone-shop-man#2 is now my WeChat friend.
I have a weird sense of closure.

The Last Supper

A whole bunch of people from work came out for a meal on the last evening. It was a Chinese muslim restaurant, so a lamb was killed, cooked and some lettuce stuffed in it's mouth:

It was then taken out the back and made into more manageable pieces. It was very good.

Here's me enjoying a foot of lager:

And various scenes of merriment.

Arun, Wei, Jing, Kurt, Evan and Nafees

Andrea and Qiong

Mike, Xavier, Haijing and friend:

Same:

Jing and Wei. Wei gets us stuff from the internet:

And classic Evan. That's the British two fingers. Not the Asian two fingers.

Chinese Visa card

Here is everyone gathered in the character TD area. Dominic, who is pointing at something is trying to get his Chinese visa card activated. He ordered it 6 weeks ago. A few weeks before his trip to th US. Jing (who is concealed behind his head) is pretending to be him on the phone as she speaks Mandarin and Dominic doesn't. The gathering was successful: the card was refused, despite Jing pretending to be a bearded Englishman speaking fluent Chinese.

KTV. A miracle in three months

This is where we went for lunch 2,3, and sometime four times a week. KTV is a karaoke bar and this is outside. 

When I first started going there the set menu was in Chinese, so we memorized two selections (burger, and spaghetti). This also came with a soup

Evan would often point to the soup he wanted for the set menu on the English normal menu and would inevitably get just the soup. Ten minutes later he would get the set menu with a different soup.

We'd also unwillingly play lunch roulette, where one person would not get any lunch.

Three months later. Here is Dominic helping correct the English translation of the set lunch menu. "'Parma' should be capitalized since it is a proper noun!" Explains Dominic in a helpful but firm tone.

Evan and Danny are happy to have the menu in English. There was stuff like fish and duck on the menu all along.

Been back a week

Mildly racist comments have been kept to a minimum.
I've stopped myself commenting loudly on people's ambulatory styles.
I've let people out of lifts before entering.
I pretty much know the name of everything I eat.
Starbucks: coffee is waiting for me before I get to the counter.
It's no longer blue-coffee; only coffee.
No-one wears pyjamas in the shopping mall.
A cross-walk is really a cross-walk.

Anyways, there's a few more posts that I will try to finish over the next week, including closure on phone-shop-man.

Also, we eat a sheep.

Saturday morning at school

All dressed in weekend-white this time.

But still singing the same songs,

and marching the same marches.

Evan makes Schnitzel

Sunday was a "vacation adjustment" day. This week was the National Holiday that stretched from Wednesday 1st October to Tuesday 7th October. Two of those five days were not really holidays. Instead, the whole of China had to work the previous Sunday and the Saturday that followed. These days were known as "vacation adjustment days". 

In the evening Evan made schnitzel and potato salad around Dominic's house.

Here is Evan "Knocking the China" out of the chicken.