distant ruminations

So at about 9 am, assuming my parents and best man are ready, we’ll be jumping in a taxi for Deshengmen then taking the bus over to Yanqing. At lunch today my parents will meet at least lzh’s mum, probably her uncle and aunt as well, and maybe her dad- although her dad might stay in the village to take the sheep out to graze this afternoon. We’ll see. Then tomorrow we get married. Again.

It’s kinda strange, we’ve been legally married for nearly a year now- 11 months and four days, to be precise. Well, if I’m going to be really precise, I’ll have to wait till about 2:30 this afternoon to say 11 months and four days, but anyway…. So I suppose I’m supposed to feel all nervous and stuff. Oh well. I think everything is just about organised and all we have to do is show up.

Mum and Dad seem to be coping with China alright, although yesterday’s smog did get to Dad’s lungs. Got him some medicine to keep him going, though. Sometimes China’s rather relaxed controls over what can or cannot be sold over the counter are good- I’ll have one Ventolin inhaler, please. Oh sure, here you are.

Anyway, the weather is bright and clear today, perfect for Mum and Dad’s first peek at the Great Wall. Hopefully it’s one of those days when, rolling down into the Yanqing basin from Badaling, you get a spectacular view right across the basin.

Alright, better go.

Could it be that this afternoon I made some real progress on catching up all that paperwork that I want out of the way before my parents arrive? Wow. Amazing. I’m treating myself to a bottle of Dragon Seal dry red wine as a reward for an afternoon well spent. Yeah, I know, not much of a reward. Somehow I just didn’t want to face the market at 5-ish of a Saturday evening. Then I remembered that the nearby Dia left me with the impression that despite being small, dusty, dirty and chronically understaffed, and what staff they do have being a bit lacking upstairs, had a surprisingly reasonable wine collection.

Ummmm…. How did I get that impression? Oh well, bottles of dry red were available, and surprisingly un-dust-covered considering how everything else in the store looked like it had just been bought in from the Gobi Desert, and at reasonable prices.

Reasonable prices? The older I get the more in touch with the Scottish half of my ancestry I get.

But the also had wines claiming to be from Spain and Argentina for absurdly low prices like fifteen or twenty yuan. I kid you not. Imported wine that cheap? To quote a Canadian I knew out in Taiyuan: “Let me check my passport. Nope, in fact I was not born yesterday.” Hence the Dragon Seal. Well, it’s drinkable, that’s about all you can ask for from wine.

So lzh is up in the village making some of the final arrangements for the wedding on Friday. Not everything is going as well as it should, but some things are turning out better than expected. I’m down here doing a much better impersonation of productivity than I thought possible. Mum and Dad arrive Monday evening….

The rice is cooked, so maybe I should think about whipping up something to go with it. Soon. Another glass of wine to whet my appetite first.

So, yeah, today started brilliantly. 8 o’clock class means my alarm was set for 6:30- yeah, wake up in darkness, love that (actually, that’s the one thing I really, really loathe about winter- waking up in darkness). And then at 7 o’clock sharp the power went out. Within a couple of minutes, just as I was pulling my jeans on about to step out and check the fusebox, I heard people downstairs opening their doors and talking, so I assumed the whole building was without power, but I stepped outside to check the fusebox, anyway. The switches were all in their right places, there was nothing obviously wrong, but stupid, stupid me did not think to check how many units of electricity were left on our meter.

…it’s a pre-pay system, you see, and the last time we bought electricity was right before National Day….

Anyway, after class I bumped into a colleague who lives in the same building and asked him if his power had gone out at seven am. No, he was online and nothing untoward happened. And then he offered up the brilliantly obvious suggestion that maybe we’d run out of power and needed to buy more. Well, no shit, Sherlock, it’s been nearly two months since I last bought electricity.

So I stopped by the office to do a couple of things, but gk wasn’t there, meaning most of what I needed to do could not be done, so I went home to see about this power. Funnily enough, the meter only had four units left on it. Well, couldn’t they let me use those four units while I bought electricity? Really, shouldn’t they cut it off when the meter hits zero? Whatever, I grabbed the card and went over to the electricity buying office.

No, I won’t rant about the people I met in the electricity buying office. I’ve done that kind of thing enough already. Let’s just say your average jellyfish has more backbone than the first guy I came across, and more intelligence than the second. Doesn’t matter, I bought my electricity and went home.

And then the meter refused to recognise that I had bought more electricity, and a light marked “报警” flashed. Report to the police? No, that can’t be right, it must be just some warning that something’s wrong. So I called the foreign teachers’ apartments maintenance man. Something must’ve gone wrong in the electricity office, he says, call them, and then he reels off a number so fast I don’t have time to hear any single digit, let alone grab a pen and write it down. So I grab my coat and electricity card and prepare to go back to the electricity buying office to sort them out, but decide to try one last time…. And after a bit of jiggling around, the meter recognises my card, adds the electricity, and all is well with the world again.

See, I’ve had this habit for a long time now of buying 200 kuai worth of power at a time. It usually lasts six weeks to two months. Having bought power just before National Day, I should’ve known that it would be running out about now, but somehow that did not register with either lzh or I.

But I still had to pay the phone bill… Did I ever mention I hate banks? Anyway, on the way to paying the phone bill I bumped into another colleague and we got talking and talk turned to lunch, and lunch turned to more talk, and eventually some time after two I got to the bank to pay the bill. The nearby Beijing Rural Credit is pretty good for that, the queue is never long, so that was easy enough.

So then I grabbed my empties and wandered round to the market. My beer people hadn’t gotten their delivery, no beer, not one bottle, just a crate over-flowing with empties. Tomorrow, they said. I believe them. I go there too often for them to cheat me, and I go there because they’ve never tried to pull anything on me. So, and here’s showing just how stubborn I can be, I wandered past at least two other stores selling beer and up to a small supermarket, the one with the obviously fake whiskey, and other whiskeys and vodkas that I would love to buy if I could believe they were real. Why? Because I trust them to sell me cans of Tsingtao, and they too have never tried to pull anything on me. I won’t buy spirits from them, but I trust them with beer.

And why did I walk past two other stores I know sell Tsingtao bottles, stores where I can recycle my empties? Because I’m stubborn. I have exchanged sharp words with the people in those two stores because they have tried to cheat me. It’s not much, all of 5 mao per bottle, but if you’re going to treat me like that, I’m taking my money elsewhere. You lose, I get more exercise.

And the result of all this is the catching up on paperwork I wanted to get done I didn’t get done. I think I’m going to wind up spending my weekend in the office. I want all this out of the way before my parents arrive.

But the air has cleared up brilliantly today. Not perfect, still a bit of haze off in the distance, but still much, much better than normal. Today’s wind did it’s job well.