After the handful of grenades lobbed into my life yesterday, although I had no problems falling asleep before midnight for once (aided by not just fatigue but jing jo), I found myself awake whilst it was still dark this morning.
Try as I might to return to slumber, all I did was doze for a few minutes and experience bad dreams. It’s bad enough being alone in a strange place (and not on holiday!) starting a new job - hopefully as long as the work visa and foreign expert certificate don’t go south - but the unexpected outcome yesterday was of course financial. Just to put the boot in, it sounds as if I have a whole family staying next door who, despite being a yard away from each other, insist on bellowing to be heard.
I was confident I had saved enough money to keep me comfortably cushioned, otherwise I wouldn’t have booked first class flights and yet now suddenly the trip to Hong Kong is a certainty. If I was still employed in Chizhou it would be no problem, everything I needed was there and no need for hotels. There shouldn’t be a need here if truth be told, if only communication worked. Or I had been told the truth.
Forgetting the fact I had hoped to buy some transport later - not now I have seen the place first hand although perhaps in time I might pluck up courage and money - I was mentally totting up the additional cost HK will be. Flights, trains, hotel, visa cost etc will probably amount to 4,000+ yuan. Add that to more nights in this hotel, probably another thousand and of course I have to live!
I am living reasonably frugally, three beers each at lunchtime and in the evening, eating just once a day at night and spending most of my time in my room on the internet so I am keeping subsistence down to around 150y plus 250y a day for the hotel.
It should NOT have been cause for concern but now it most certainly is. I am going to end up with no parachute. It may well be that I can exist comfortably until the first payday but I will most certainly be approaching the school to try and get assurance they will assist with money if necessary. It’s not their fault any more than it is mine so I hardly expect them to pay (nice if they did though!) but the guarantee of a sub should it be needed would give me a bit of peace of mind. I would like to be able to say I have learnt a lesson here but I haven’t, I stated quite categorically that as long as a run to HK wasn’t needed then I had ample funds to stay for a fortnight in this hotel prior to leaving Chizhou. I was not told “Whoa! Stay put for a while.” How can you learn from it when you confirmed something and nobody said boo other than never, ever to believe a soul again?
But then why should now be any different to the rest of my life? Adversity is my constant companion and she is a hard taskmaster. I will survive and hopefully, as the Yanks would say, on my own dime. For someone who like to plan meticulously though, my life never turns out right!
The photo on the wall of the restaurant is not of Peking duck despite several waitresses having previously said yes it was. My electronic translator elicited the truth from them, albeit they couldn’t tell me what it actually is. I reckon it’s pork, pancakes, cucumber and spring onion with some form of sauce. I opted for the sweet and sour pork which as I said I thought it was before, was in fact sweet pork. The “sour” presumably was the vinegary tang it had. Nice enough, far too big but with no vegetables or fruit in it I had to go and buy four bananas on the way home.
I went again a couple of hours ago purely for beer and a change of scenery. Whilst there I asked where the nearest laundry was, only to discover there is a washroom in the hotel. The drawback is that the two very small machines are top loaders and I don’t think there is a dryer. And of course you have to get lucky and go at a time when nobody else is doing their laundry.
A big problem so far in Lanzhou is that hardly anyone speaks English. It makes Chizhou seem positively bilingual and although normally I can use body language to great effect, it has thus far proved to be far less effective than anywhere on the planet that I have been!
This odyssey had really better have a happier ending than I am imagining.
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