photos and china life

---

Ben's Chinese friend 'Sury' took us to play Mah Jong in a posh Mah Jong resaurant. There, a casual conversation about the weather (whether or not a typhoon was coming) led to Sury telling us that her dad is a Bomber Pilot in the Chinese army. She told us that she sometimes goes for rides in the plane with him, and this was followed by a prompt offer for us to go for a ride in the bomber plane. When Chinese people make offers like this in English, they use a tone of voice that makes it sound like the most normal, every day, logical offer to make at that time. I'm not sure whether it's because of tones transferred over from mandarin, or because the thought of three British students going for a 'ride' in a Chinese bomber plane actually seemed like a everyday occurence that wouldn't raise any eyebrows with the authorities...

As exciting as the idea sounded, we guessed that it was probably just one of those things people say. We did, however, get an enthusiastic invite to visit Sury's house and family that weekend. Unsure of how formal it would be, we put on trousers for the first time since coming here, and brought a gift. Sure enough, her mum, dad, and nanny put on a great meal of traditional Hainan food, liquor with chinese medicine put in and left to brew for two years, and expensive festive cakes bought from a five star hotel to celebrate the upcoming 'moon festival'.

Communication was difficult as the parents couldn't speak any English, and I think they were very confused by us in general, because they had never had foreigners in their house before. They were very intrigued about why we were in China and wanted to know if Europeans all thought bad things about China, like they had heard. Obviously we told them what we found exciting and interesting about China, and the evening generally had a friendly atmosphere. Because our mandarin conversations were so slow, the humour had to take the form of Mrs. Bomber Pilot peer-pressuring us into downing cup after cup of chinese tea until we were about to explode. She also tried to make me eat a whole chicken. Mr. Bomber Pilot then gave us kind guidance in our Mah Jong playing as we tried to beat his mastermind daughter at the game for the rest of the night. Sury seems like a great person.

In other news, mine and Hannah's newly bought bikes got stolen from right outside the classroom when we were in a lesson - the bastards.

I learned the hard way that Chinese Pay as you Go Sim Cards go into minus credit without warning, so I now owe the company £50 for a call to England. They have none of my details, so everyone is telling me it's possible to just throw the sim card away and not have to pay them back. Presumably that means that Chinese people can just keep buying sim cards and throwing them away without ever paying a penny for their calls? Incidentally, a strange thing about mobiles over here is that people literally go around from shop to shop, haggling to buy the phone numbers that sound the best or have the most 8s in them (Chinese lucky number), from a massive list of phone numbers displayed in each shop. It seems to be the most important thing to them when buying a phone.

Everyone here also walks around with umbrellas on the driest of days, purely to stop their skin getting tanned. They're determined to get whiter skin, so much so, that it's impossible to buy suncream without skin-whitening agents, and even the face scrub I've been using all along has stuff in it to give you whiter skin. Sunbathing simply doesn't exist, so parks and beaches are a completely different sight.

Next entry will be photos and story about the AWESOME adventure we took camping on a 20 mile beach with no civilisation except a village with no electricity. We even cooked a freshly caught fish in a bamboo pole over a fire :-)

---

Photos

dog market
you can make out the curly tail! dog really is everywhere, being butchered. we didn't go looking for any of these four places, just stumbled across them when walking around.

Comments

[Dad]

Humph
Rather doggy! Making sure Molly doesn't look. The campus looks real posh - what contrasts. Scary stuff on the streets, looks like a scooter/bicycle display team.

[izzzzzy]

This is so so yukkkkkkky! Must be hard getting used to their different tastes... x