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I arrived home on Friday night to find there was no water or electricity at the apartment; the whole block had had its supply cut off. As seems to have become the tradition, as I was taking my pants off the landlady knocked at the door. She was holding a bowl of water for me to wash and cook with. I was holding my pants up. There doesn't seem to be any warning before they turn off all power and water here. Great.
I tried to phone my go-to-guy but my phone was not working, I couldn't even receive calls. It turns out that my pre-paid SIM has a monthly charge of 10 yuan so this flattened my credit and here you're charged for making and receiving calls and texts. Super.
What made the evening worse was that my laptop had got a virus. I'd used my flash drive to print off some materials for the students at the university and a virus had snuck on to it. My anti-virus always scans the memory stick as soon as I plug it in but it either didn't this time or the virus was a bit pesky. Nothing happened until I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and then a whole host of rubbish did occur. I was not impressed. I tried to boot-up in Safe Mode and found that the virus had tinkered with my boot file so I was stuck in a continuous loop of restarting and the Blue Screen of Death. Lovely.
At 8am on Saturday morning, there was a tap on my window. This time it wasn't anything to do with any botched plumbing. My landlady, who lives next door, had unfolded a coat-hanger and was reaching from her window to tap on mine. I went to the window to see what it was and she quickly pulled the coat-hanger back in. The next thing I know, she's hanging out of her window waving a small bag on the end of the coat-hanger for me to take. In the bag were 2 apples and a piece of chocolate.
Not long after, Will and Wes were throwing stones up at my window because, with no electricity, the doorbell didn't work and, without credit, I couldn't be phoned. We jumped on the bus to Nan Guan so they could do some meat shopping and I could top-up my phone and find some blank CDs to make a recovery disk.
We went to a hot-pot restaurant for lunch, which was nice. You cook the meats and veg yourself on a hob in front of you. For 3 of us it came to £8 so was really good and the food was not shabby by any stretch. We went back to their apartment and played some Beer Pong because the electricity and water were still not running.
Then, and this was by far the best part of my weekend, we went out with a government tax official! He drove us in his swanky VW to the seafront and we went into this really, really good seafood restaurant. He picked out 4 massive crabs and oysters and ordered a load of bai cai (cabbage) dumplings, chicken wings, fried fish noodles, a fish brew and an egg dish. Oh, and a crate of Tsing-tao beer. We ate, drank and laughed so much it was great. We also came up with a Chinese name for Wes: Xi Shan Yang ('Western Goat Mountain')!
I'm not sure if you've seen the film Around the World in 80 Days with Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan but there's a scene in it that was exactly like our meal. Before we started eating, the tax man held up his glass and shouted Ganbei!, the Chinese for 'Cheers!'. Then we all drank. No more than 3 mouthfuls of food later he holds up his glass again and shouts Ganbei! so we all drank again. Now, the literal translation of ganbei is 'empty glass' so every time he shouted it we had to finish our drink! This went on for the whole meal! Every minute or so we were all shouting Ganbei! and necking our drinks!
I've spent all day today fixing my laptop and doing washing. I'm not at work tomorrow because it's the national 'sweeping' holiday. Every Chinese family has a day off every year to spring clean the tombs of their ancestors. I think an excellent, excellent tradition.
In other news: I opened another letter from Ella, this one entitled 'Happy Easter', and was met with a wonderfully bad song to be sung to the tune of the Oompa Loompa theme. After not having water, electricity, a mobile or a laptop, it really cheered me up - thanks El .
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