Getting up early this morning wasn’t as difficult as expected. Clearly my brain did its party trick of waking me up well before alarm time so I was showered, dressed, watered and ready by the allotted time of 0850. Jacob arrived dead on time but of course our car was late. Still, it gave me time for a smoke while we waited and chatted.
This is his second and final year as a Peace Corps volunteer and it appears certainly the end of his volunteering days, indeed of ever teaching in China again. I think he is enjoying the experience but at his age he really should start a career with prospects. For the young, teaching in China is great for a year or two to get experience but it’s not something I would recommend as a lifetime pursuit. Plus, being a volunteer, the school gets his services free and he is paid the princely sum of 1900y a month. Nineteen hundred! My bar bill is more than that!
A tortuous trip across the river to downtown ensued, the traffic being no lighter than during rush hour, and Brenda had to be dropped off to collect our new, super-duper ID cards cum work permits. And hey! I am a category B foreigner! Whoopee! I was convinced that my lack of a degree and my age would confine me to a C (points decrease as you get older, not the reverse as it would be anywhere else - experience counts for nothing here!). They look similar to the one the Chinese have but the proof of the pudding will be when we try to check in to 5 star hotels, get a train ticket or board a domestic flight. As with most things here, anything new is interpreted by different officials in markedly different ways because basically they haven’t a clue what to do! Not that I take trains that often but if they work so I can buy my ticket using one of the automatic ticket dispensers then I will be deliriously happy.
Whenever I have travelled with one of my girls they could always buy one online beforehand and collect it from a dispenser whilst I have had to wait forever in the queues to see a human being. Fine when it’s not busy but purgatory such as it was when getting a ticket from Shanghai to Wuhu last month. We shall see!
Then we went to the Public Security Bureau, somewhere I recognised from a year ago, to hand over passports to be sent to Beijing and have new permits affixed. You know, considering they dispensed with the old foreign expert book and simplified it to the card, which has a microchip and one of those things you can scan with a smartphone, it surely can’t be too much of a leap to also include your entitlement to actually reside here? But then, perhaps even after 7 years, I still expect logic to be applied to anything! This of course - and I may be over thinking again - begs the question, will I in fact be able to use the card as previously described if it doesn’t show my entitlement to reside here?
No I never wore the medal today but I did wear my blue Shenyang shirt. It’s the nicest of all the colours I bought and I did ask Brenda if I passed muster, tongue in cheek. However when they took our photos I was called in again for retakes! I was made to put on a smelly old brown jacket to COVER the shirt! Jacob was as amazed as me - he was wearing a different, darker shade of blue but had no such problem.
In total including travelling the whole affair took two hours and we asked to be dropped off outside the sweet pork place to get some lunch. I had told Jake about it and surprisingly he never knew of it, surprising because he walks a lot whereas I certainly do not. I think he will be a frequent visitor, he enjoyed the food, loved the sweet pork and was highly interested in the dry noodle dishes that were ordered in large quantities when the locals started pouring in for lunch.
I clicked on a BBC news link earlier and was greeted with the following
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-41165813
I don’t know why but it seemed strange reading about somewhere and seeing where I was just a few weeks ago.
So a dawn alarm for me tomorrow, school bus alerted to come and get me and then off to see the famous, brilliant orthopaedic doctor to see if he can do anything for me. Janet will be around and will almost certainly sniff out why I have arrived on campus when I have no classes. That doesn’t concern me because she will not divulge my reasons to the school, after all, I am the only one keeping her darkest secret!
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