Wednesday 27th July, 2016                              1600

D Day -5 days

Having recently spent five days in correspondence with my V-P-N provider and having been instructed to do all sorts of purges, configs and other things to no avail, eventually I asked if they could take over my computer from afar. They could and so a technician had a mosey around to try and fix it.

After he pinged and speed tested around the globe for an hour this is what was said:

I think I’ve found the problem, someone locally is throttling connections to Europe.
You mean the university?
Yes.

Kevin thinks the only ones who can do that are the internet providers (in this case I think China Mobile) but I will soon know if when I am in the hotel on Monday the problem has gone or not. If it has then it’s definitely the school. It seems utterly futile to me because I can connect to plenty of countries outside Europe and access all the sites they don’t like. The only thing it does is stop me getting British telly. Well so far it hasn’t, with perseverance I can often get a very slow connection to the UK for an hour or so, enough to kickstart downloads and then switch to Tokyo for some speed.

One of the drawbacks living here I suppose but I can’t really complain, overall I still like it here more than the UK where these days simply picking your nose breaks half a dozen laws.

I have yet to start packing although just now I threw out the suitcase I came to China with. Firstly it had been scratched to death by the cats (only ever used it four times) and secondly the zippers had seized. We had a bit of a fiasco when I got Joan to buy me a new one but I now have one of a similar size and she benefited from the smaller one, as I think I mentioned.

Last night the plan had been to go to Tongling. Trip Advisor shows an Indian restaurant not far from the train station so I asked Joan to call them and confirm they actually served Indian food. The number is defunct and when she searched online on a Chinese site it turned out it is in fact a Japanese sushi restaurant. Well I wasn’t travelling all that way for sushi when I can get it in the business street so I took her to Old Cologne, the German restaurant.

I have been there a few times but not often, simply because the prices are so high. Understandably of course because most of their stuff is imported. In six years I had never tried their steaks so I thought that before I left I would see if they were any good. Go anywhere else in this city and they will serve you with the plastic ones I can buy frozen in RT Mart.

Stunned by the price of 269y for a T-bone, nevertheless I urged Joan to have one as well as me. I never looked closely. The bloody things were half a kilogramme each! I nearly died. Neither of us could finish but I have to say it was the best steak I have had in China. And of course Mum was the most expensively fed dog in town once we got back with a doggy bag.

Joan loved the homemade German cake, I drank German ale, she didn’t like the spiciness of her Bloody Mary and swapped my black beer for it and then I hit her with Kahlua and coke. That she loved. Mentally I estimated the night was going to come in at around 900y, a ridiculous waste of money given my current circumstances but she is leaving on Monday night and I don’t know when we will meet again. I was pleasantly surprised not to have been charged for everything and escaped with a bill of 700y. Sadly Wolfgang for once wasn’t there so I never had chance to say goodbye. I may go back alone before I leave and have something a lot cheaper than steak though!

The campus is noticeably quieter now and I think perhaps most of those students who stayed to work on projects have now gone home to grab the remaining five weeks of holiday left. Certainly I was the only one waiting for the bus when I made a quick shopping run earlier.

I am now trying to get rid of as much food from the freezer as I can so tomorrow will be cottage pies. Some really spicy sausages Joan doesn’t like are going to Mum, as are a couple of big fish I found right at the bottom which I must have bought when Pepsi was alive. I will empty it if it kills me, although I possibly might put the canned food into a box for onward shipment in due course.