Settling in

Thankfully yesterday was a lot better than the day before. We headed into Nanchang to secure a bed for Penny in a nice new air-conditioned Buick people mover. Very nice, very comfortable and very cool. We headed to a store called Metro, which turned out to be awesome. It was a store that had everything including food and better still it had western food and meat. Lamb, Veal, beef…it was awesome we bought some towels and kitchen utensils however the beds were a bit crappy so we headed home to put Penny to bed and I headed out into Nanchang with director Chen and the driver to hit some furniture markets. After a couple of hours we ended up with the perfect little bed for the girl and headed home.

This trip gave me an insight into why Chinese beds are so hard. Each time that Michelle and I have visited China we have wondered how the Chinese can sleep on such rock hard beds and have complained about them to all and sundry…well mostly to each other. Anyway you get the picture right…beds, hard. One shop I was in had a cross section of a mattress, like the types that you see in bed shops in Australia that show the inner springs etc. The Chinese version basically looked like a big Weetbix. It was a compressed natural fibre that looked like coconut husk, dog hair and dirt. I’m sure they aren’t though, although perhaps they are made from the compressed leavings from the floor of a breakfast cereal factory. Whatever they are comfortable they aint.

It’s Saturday today and we managed to get a car to head out to some thousand-year-old villages about an hour away. We headed off early after a good night’s sleep and drove through the hazy countryside. As the morning wore on the haze lessened a little and we arrived by around 9:15 or so. The villages are made up of 3 small groups of old buildings each clustered around a maze of thin alleyways. We headed off up one alley with a few Chinese tagging along behind goo-ing at Penny. One old man latched onto us and turned into a real pest leading us around and even at one point carrying Penny up some stairs (which made her burst into tears). At first it was interesting and he showed us into some museum type dwellings. They are 2 storey buildings with elaborate wooden framework banisters and screens with each dwelling centred on a central atrium or courtyard.



Creepy old guy in the background ------ karma, karma, karma creepy old dude.



The annoying guy just got more and more annoying and after we saw a 1700-year-old tree near the first village and he started to crack onto Michelle’s mum we decided it was time to leave. So back we came to Nanchang. A pox on annoying lecherous old Chinese men who make a nice wander through some lovely old laneways into a anxious experience. Oh well I’ll fire some appropriate karma his way----- by the way, those little lines are bad karma ;p