Penny keepin' it real fairy style.
We have been struggling with the Chinese version of e-bay. Its called tao bao (dig treasure/find treasure) and is huge. Its main difference from e-bay is that instead of buying from Cheryl in Eagleby you are buying direct from a factory in Shenzhen. So as you can imagine the prices are low and the range is staggering. So anyway it should be easy right, just choose what you want and buy it...well no this is China. So we had to set-up another bank account as our account (with the Bank of China, the biggest in the country) is no good. So we head off to the Industrial and Construction Bank of China ICBC and get a new account. It even comes with a USB stick security check (you can only buy online after inserting the stick to verify that you are the account holder...weird huh?) and about 4 different passwords. So anyway we have struggling with browser problems, bank accounts and the whole language barrier for about a month now and are still yet to purchase anything.
Penny and I were a bit sick last week, some kind of stomach bug which had Penny vomiting a few times and me with gut clenches. We both came down with it after a morning out with Emily, her friend Roy, his wife and their son Tian Le (happy everyday a popular kids name it seems) who is a little older than Penny. We went to Emily's home and then onto a restaurant just off the campus. The restaurant was in a big tent with bamboo walls that were planted with creepers. At the time we were there they had just planted the creepers so the bamboo walls were bare. I'm sure it would be a lovely place in summer and spring. Penny and Le le (his nickname "happy happy" basically) had fun tearing around and looking at all of the animals (ducks and geese in cages and wandering dogs) around the farm that the restaurant was part of. It was nice actually, there were fruit trees planted around the tent and a pond stocked with fish to catch and cook in the restaurant. The food was good too. We had some enoki mushrooms and pork, a kind of lichen/moss/fungus and garlic, some lotus root stewed with pork ribs and lots of other yummy stuff.
Darren, Penny, Emily, Le le and his mum at Emily's pad.
The tent restaurant with bare bamboo walls.
We also had a dinner to welcome all of the teachers and celebrate the beginning of the new semester (only took 7 weeks to do it). We had a dinner banquet in the guest house (hotel) which has been renovated since we were last here, thankfully. I attended as Michelle got to go to the national day banquet a couple of weeks ago. It was a quickfire event, we arrived the food was served toasts were made beer was sculled and we all left. So althogether it lasted about an hour and a half, or two hours tops.
My table at the celebration dinner. From the left of the picture -Steve, Victoria (both Canadian), Mr Gao and his daughter (from the Uni's International office), Crystal (US) and Wang Zi (her Chinese husband), Adam (UK), and Ryan (US) and his Chinese wife Maggie.
The group portrait, and yes I am in the photo...at least my eyes are.
Work has been ticking along since then so not much else is happening really. I guess that we are starting to get into the rhythm of the place.
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