Saturday 20th September, 2014                    1300

The rain has all gone now and we are set for a reasonable week in the mid twenties, long may it continue - at least until my little break.

Further news on the campus shopping centre: The fruit shop is not actually open, the chap must have just been there with the doors open to collect something when I looked, so all we have are the supermarket and post office at present. It would appear the new leasing firm have shot themselves in both feet by (from what I can gather) virtually doubling the rents. Most of the businesses have opened up in new premises just off campus (and by new I mean brand new buildings) for a considerably lower rent than is being proposed on campus. The biggest of the restaurants, MeILe, opened a week ago, unveiling a motorway service station type walk through place and very nice it is too. It’s akin to Ke Bi Wang but with lovely décor and furnishings. Yet the owner also wants to reopen on campus and have two places but he is holding out (as are all the others) so the landlords will be forced to slash their prices or kiss goodbye to their investment. I really hope the little people win. It doesn’t mean much to me because I have my bike so it’s no problem travelling a little further but for the students it is a hike. In fact the only thing that affects me is that office number one is no longer available.

Speaking of offices, I seem to running out of them! The sweet pork place has been closed for the past week and I am now becoming concerned that they have packed up as well. I am down to just office number three near the fish shop, although in the event of total catastrophe I think there could be office number four a bit further up the road. This all means of course that students are denied the chance to have a social chat with any of the foreign teachers in which they can practise their English or French in an informal setting. I am even using the outside supermarket (owned by the same people as the campus one) now because to go out for air I am leaving school anyway. The only thing I use here currently is the cashpoint.

I am not happy at the moment. Yesterday BBC iPlayer tried to access my computer with something and Chrome told me it could be malicious. Accordingly I told Chrome to always refuse it and that has had the effect of preventing me from downloading or streaming anything at all from the BBC. Even Kevin can’t solve it so I am now awaiting a response from the BBC. The last thing I want to have to do is a factory reset!

Oh, nearly forgot. I did have a crack at making chips on Thursday night. I made far too many but had them with a chicken curry pie and very nice they were too. They weren’t perfect but they were certainly the best I have had in China. No doubt with time I will make them even better so that would appear to be 600y well spent. When pineapples become available again I can defrost the gammon steak that’s been in my freezer forever and actually eat it!

That’s it for now, shower time and a trip to town for shopping and an early dinner.

2030

The trip to town was uneventful, however on my return when I took Pepsi out shopping locally I spotted a door to the sweet pork place open. After buying my drinks in the supermarket I went there, only to find the husband and wife leaving with a takeaway. Presumably they had popped in to make their dinner and were now going home. Needless to say I couldn’t get a beer but I did ask (the conversation was entirely in body language of course) whether they had finished for good. It looks like they are so bang goes office number two. The good news is that they are going to open up on campus although quite where I have no idea. Kevin thinks it is probably on the 3rd floor above No. 2 school canteen and if so, whilst good for eating nearby, will be useless as an office. If they are taking one of the vacant shopping centre premises then that will be excellent, especially if they start selling fresh fruit as well. Theirs was always so much better than the guy who was on site. I will find out in due course but until there is somewhere here where I can get a beer and sit and have a chat then it will be the outside supermarket for me because there are no huge queues of students at the various rush hours after lessons and at least at office three she can sniff around.

Apropos the BBC downloads, I had a flash of inspiration. Kevin has come up with a reasonably drastic solution but until Aunty replies I will hold off. Instead what I tried was, because Chrome is blocking iPlayer, using IE (which wasn’t). It worked. A pain in the backside not only because I hate IE but every time you open it it tries to change your settings.

That’s it for now, hopefully some of my favourite programmes (New Tricks - annoyed with Waterman leaving - Hotel India - would love to stay there one day - and others) will finish downloading so I can once again watch some.