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.

The last lunch

Went out for one of my last lunches with the rigging department:

John, Evan, Qiong, Wei, Dominic, Jing and Cameron.

Amongst other things on offer, we had duck tongues and bullfrogs.
Duck tongues on a plate:

The frogs were cooked, not alive.
Here are the little buggers in the supermarket across the road from work.

Starbucks

Just a picture of the Starbucks that makes me wait five minutes every morning for my cup of "Blue" coffee. 

Looks normal doesn't it?

No Entry Shopping Mall

The mall under work opens at 10am and not a minute later. The whole place is surrounded by paramilitary-looking mall guards and fences. Here's my view of one while I sit outside Starbucks having a coffee. You can see the fencing on the right.

Someone is trying to break into the mall. He looks around, ready to stearnly scold the interloper and direct him to the correct route around the outside of the mall.

Sometimes, if you show your work badge and babble in English, the security guard will grunt and let you through.

At 10am a bell rings, the barriers are removed and people can begin shopping.

Right turn on Red

Much like parts of the US, China has the right turn on red law. If the light is red you may turn right. Of course this is completely divorced from any other law like: "Don't run over pedestrians".
Note the green crossing man light. All the lights on the junction are functional, if merely suggestions.

Colonel Kim Jong Un

Here's a take on KFC we saw in Qingdao:

And a close-up of the Korean dictator all ready to dish you up a bucket of them DPRK drumsticks.

Sysyphus with Cormorants

Here are some birds on little bits of chord diving for fish and coughing them back up on the boat. They can't swallow properly because of the bit of string tied around their necks.

The fishing was not particularly authentic as the fisherman kept chucking the same fish in the river for the birds to retrieve. Over and over again. 

A much better water town

Decided to visit a better water town. We got a taxi in Shanghai and an hour and a half later we arrived in Xitang. Getting out of the taxi I was commenting on the skills of google maps, since we used it to adjust the taxi driver's Baidu directions. Thirty seconds later I realized I'd left my phone in the now departed taxi.

What to do?

John called up Jing, a rigger with Chinese skills. John then passed her to a policeman and he explained the situation.

Luckily I had a taxi receipt, from which the policeman could track down the driver by phoning the taxi driver.

There was a lot of Chinese shouting interspersed with "Laowai" sort of impolite word for westerners.

The policeman was really shouting. I think the just was:

"I am Policmeman"

"You took Laowai's phone"

"Bring back Laowai's phone"

"Now"

Twenty minutes later the taxi returned with my phone

Well that turned out well. Thanks Jing!

Here's a picture of the water town:

They filmed one of the Mission Impossible films here. They are very proud of this so there are many Tom Cruise pictures dotted around.

We stopped off to get scorpion on a stick

Then we stopped in at a terrace on the canal. It was basically someones back yard. 

He brought us many beers. 

This made John Happy.

This is Mike in the same terrace. We paid this man 20 Yuen to play us some Chinese songs.
This made Mike happy.

Here we are having lunch. It was not a good lunch, but there was beer again.

The Catholic Church: First to be in China

Religion is technically illegal in China, but the catholic church has done some sort of deal with the Chinese government. China is the head of the Catholic church in China so it's all okay.

Here's a church in Qibao. 

There were a few stain glass windows with Chinese Jesus

And here's a saint with some hoisting-to-the-roof-garb next to a plastic panda: