Not a lot happening lately other than run of the mill stuff, however there are a couple of things that spring to mind.
One tale from last year I forgot (or indeed have forgotten that I told you!!) to tell you was about Sad Joanna. She was a new freshman who was clearly feeling homesick, so much so that I spent the rest of the evening after I met her feeling miserable myself. I used her for my warm up tale in my classes the following week and Felicity (the girl interviewing me in the video on YouTube) after our lesson asked me for the girl’s phone number. Why? Because she had also suffered thus and wanted to comfort the newcomer. I thought it was a very nice random act of kindness.
A couple of days ago I had to surrender and went to the campus optical shop. I have been having problems as I said with small print and although I have bifocals (somewhere) I can’t wear them as they are scratched to hell and gone where the cats got hold of them a couple of years ago. Anyway, after many “timbudongs” I finally got through to the woman I wanted cheap reading glasses. They only cater for distance vision as apparently most Chinese with sight problems can see close up but that’s it. I didn’t want an eyesight test, just some bog-standard magnifiers. Eventually the woman twigged and gave me some specs, which whilst cheap at 40y, are perfect for close up stuff and fold down into a case about half the size of a mobile phone. Now when someone texts me a number or QQ address I can actually read it. Happy chappy.
Earlier today - which has been slightly warm although it is freezing tonight - I inadvertently performed a good deed. I had decided I wouldn’t cook tonight but would go to town for dinner instead and invited the lovely Chris who has the loveliest legs of any of my students during my tenure here. She accepted and so I went down to the campus shops with Pepsi. With time to kill before picking Chris up I had a couple of bottles. As is often the case there were two stalls outside the supermarket manned by students, one selling pot noodles, the other flavoured milk. With nothing better to do and seeing the milk stall wasn’t attracting any interest, on a whim I decided to drum up some custom. Within a pijou bottle’s shelf life with me all the girls’ sample plastic beakers had been used so I went into the supermarket to buy them some more because I know the usual deal is that they can’t finish until they give away all the free samples and they couldn’t without beakers. They also couldn’t afford to buy more seeing as I think they average about 2y (20p) an hour doing it.
The two girls may not have spoken English but they weren’t stupid. They guessed what I was up to - I hadn’t said anything - and one of them came and prevented me from buying more cups for them. They had been thrilled by me attracting tasters but must have been horrified when I went to buy more receptacles because it would appear the deal they were on with the supermarket was that once the plastic cups were used they could go! I reckon that given their level of salesmanship I shaved an hour off their working day.
After that Chris (who sadly blinked for the solo shot) and I went and caught the bus to go to the Sichuan place. Chris is in the top five of my students (I gave her 90% last term) and I thought she might be a little shy but when we got to the restaurant and were greeted by my fat costumed “brothers” I simply (from behind her) nodded in her direction and made as if I was handcuffed in reference to the rope trick. I didn’t think it would work but it did, as you will see from the photos.
Chris doesn’t like meat so our meal was devoid of any pork, beef, chicken or mutton but she does like lobster, which not only do I but they had some tonight for 168y - which was ultimately more than half the bill! It was nice but sadly far too small, however it did make an attractive photo on the dish - which I wanted to steal but wouldn’t dare as now the staff all know my name!
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