My day off.

Well I've not had much time off so I was very excited when I was allowed out on Saturday night. I meet up with some friends and we went to a vampire inspired bar for some true blood. Most people had had a heavy night the night before so they left and it was just me, Andy and a girl called Rocco left. We went to a few dive bars and then headed to youth which is where disaster struck!

Someone barged past me and Rocco tried to stop them pushing me and the guy (a really big guy) pushes her really hard in the chest. Rocco's like "what the fuck" and he goes mental and pushes her even harder until she falls over towards the stage behind us. Then another guy complete unconnected to the first starts pounding her in the back of the head. It was fairly horrific. I attempted to stop him by pulling at his T-shirt - obviously this had absolutely no affect. Fortunately I resisted an impulse to jump on his back and wrap my arms around his neck in order to strangle him as the more realistic part of my brain reminded me that I am not Buffy and I in fact have no upper body strength. Although I did flex my muscle the other day and I'm fairly sure there was something there. Anyway, back to the action, so the pounding lasted about 30 seconds and this felt like an eternity. At some point Rocco gets pushed over the stage knocking about 30 beer bottles over and getting a bottle thrown at her head by another on-looker. She then manages to escape and I grab the bags and we all run outside.

Me and Andy have lost Rocco when we get outside and are frantically looking for her when we spy her with her hands clutched over her head and blood pouring down her back and her face. Rocco is calm as a cucumber and tells us she has lost her wallet. She needs it as this will tell us which hospital to take her to. So Andy ventures back in and fortunately finds the wallet straight away. I help keep pressure on the back of her head. Obviously now we know where we are going there are no taxis. We can see one but people are getting in. I'm still buzzing from the adrenaline so I decide to run over and steal it. I run up and say "we need this taxi my friends been attached" and wave my bloody hand in their faces. We get the cab but the taxi driver doesn't look impressed. Andy tells him where to go but he wants to go to a closer hospital. We remain stubborn as Rocco says they know her at the hospital she wants to go to. So eventually he sets off and then gets stuck behind another taxi. He just sits there. Me and Andy are getting pretty stressed by now as we have no idea how serious Rocco's head wound is. Rocco is obviously somewhat preoccupied with bleeding.

We make it to the hospital and walk in and are taken straight to a room. They calmly ask a few questions such as name and weight and what happened. Rocco answers and then the doctor takes a look. They clean it up a bit and then the doctor says to the nurse "get the staple gun". Rocco's eyes widen and she says "would this be a good time to tell you I'm scared of needles". Andy says he is too and leaves the room. The staple gun is about as bad as it sounded. After 14 staples Andy returns and we're told to wait for the insurance company to call to ensure Rocco can have a cat scan.

While Rocco speaks to worried friends, me and Andy explore. We discover that the hospital has a yurt. We see what the doctors having been teaching. The white board says that endorphins produce a happy face and adrenaline produces a fuzzy face. Filled with a greater sense of confidence that the doctors know what they are doing we steal some tea and go back to Rocco. Around 4am everything is sorted and we drop Rocco off at her hotel with a large bandage around her head and slightly bloodied pink and purple flowery shirt (kindly  given to her by the hospital - though they did explain that when she came back for a check-up she should return it).

After such an exciting night I have trouble sleeping. I ask DD if I can have the day off at 8am because I've been invited to a music festival. She agrees and I decide I deserve a lie-in. The first lie-in I'd had in 3 months. I wake up eventually and go for eggs benedict and a proper cup of tea (twinnings English breakfast with milk)! Feeling satisfied I venture off to the festival which is pretty far out of town. I arrive and am informed by Will who I am meeting that the festival is dry and could I sneak in some booze. I wander around aimlessly for a while until I find a shop selling alcohol. They don't sell anything I recognise and most of the bottles look too big to sneak in. However I find some small ones and I ask the man what it is. He tells me and I am none the wiser. I ask how much and he says 4 yuan for 2. This is about 40p. I start to doubt if the bottles actually contain alcohol but I buy them anyway and then head to a toilet to sample my purchase just in case. A quick whiff is enough to tell me that I defiantly have alcohol. I stick both bottles in my belt like guns and don my coat. It's boiling outside so I kind of wish the coat wasn't necessary. I head off to find a taxi to take me to the festival and discover I can't remember where the train station is. I wander for a while constantly reminding myself that people are looking at me funny because I'm white and not because I have two bottles of ridiculously cheap spirit concealed in my coat.

I make it in and meet up with Will and his friends. One of whom is a teacher at their school and is Chinese. I show her the alcohol and she says that it is 72% proof and sometimes she uses it as disinfectant. We watch and wander and I really enjoy myself. The festival is fairly standard but minus some of the drunken antics and a lot less cross dressing though a fair few funny hats and some flags. I did see someone dressed as chopper from one piece though which made me smile even though he is probably the worst character.

We have a dance and a jump and even a sing along at one point when the Chinese version of Green Day did a cover of 'you are my sunshine'. It's about this time that my phone runs out of battery. We stay till the end and then head home. We get the subway and I leave the others as I live in the middle of nowhere. I get to Wangjing East which is where the last part of my journey begins to discover that I have missed the last train by 4 mins. So a taxi it is, except there are no taxis. I wander for ages until I find one and get home at 11.40pm. I get to the door and find it is locked and the key has not been left out for me. After overcoming my guilt at having to wake everyone up I ring the door bell. No one comes so I give it another go. Still nothing. I do a bit of banging. I try a shout. I go round the back and repeat my front door tactics. I then sit in the porch for a while weighing up my options. I can keep banging or I can go back into town. My phone has died and I have no ones numbers however I know that I have Will's number on Facebook so if I could just find a computer.

I get a cab back. It takes 40mins. I go to the wrong place and get another taxi to Sanlitun which is where we went out the night before. On the way we pass Rocco's hotel and I remember they have computers in there so I yell "stop" and rush to pay and get out. On the internet I realise that I don't know any of my proxy sites as they are on my phone and saved on my laptop so facebook is out of the question. I then attempted to contact anyone and everyone I can find online by other means. Hotmail, googlemail and skype. Eventually Sam comes on skype and I get him to access my facebook and tell me Will's number. I call Will from the hotel's phone and wake him up. I explain the situation and he say's he'll have a think about what I can do. I have no passort so hotels and hostels are out. Will says I can stay at his and he and his girlfriend could check in to a hotel but I don't feel comfortably making them do this. He suggests asking the hotel if they have a charger. I had until this point felt this was pointless as I have a Sony Erickson and I can't imagine anyone having a charger for it. However it turns out hotels have these nifty universal chargers and I get some power back in my phone. After waiting 20mins of course. I try calling everyone I know (Andy and Alex) and get no answer. My phone dies again. I try again and 20mins later I ring Rocco (the only other person I know) - I had not wanted to call her in case she had a horrible headache and hated me forever however she was fine about it and at 4am I finally put my head down on a pillow and got some sleep.

At 8.30am I'm up and heading home. I return to the house to be told I'm incredible stupid "why did you think you would be able to come home at 4am?" I explain that I text her at 4am because that is what time I sorted myself out in town and that in fact I got home at 11.40pm the night before. DD still thinks I'm an idiot but she didn't seem to know what I should have done differently.

At 4pm I find that the rabbit has died. I'm incredibly sad about this as she was my first friend. It appeared that no one had feed her in my absence and she had eaten some newspaper, an ikea pencil and my watch. Captain Sam Zigga Zappa esq will be sorely missed and never replaced in my heart although physically she will be replaced as Niu Niu really likes rabbits.

The White Rabbit.

I have commandeered a rabbit! She was in the smallest cage ever (approx. two hands wide - and I have small hands) so I rescued her and set her free in my room. She was not too keen on the idea of getting out of her cage at first so I said some encouraging words, namely 'some bunnies are born free, some bunnies achieve freedom and other bunnies have freedom thrust upon them' she was unimpressed so i coaxed her out with cabbage and then she tried to eat my toe nail.

She is about half the size of my foot (I'm a size 5) she is the cutest pet I've ever owned but also possibly the most mentally handicapped - if any of you have meet Zac the cat or Barney the dog you will know this is no mean feat! She shits every where which I was warned about and according to the internet if she gets diarrhea she could die!

I'm in over my head. I don't know how to look after a living thing. All of my plants have died! I don't have any resources. No reasonable sized cage, no bedding, no restricted space for her to play in, no cardboard box with holes in. The internet advice people seem to be assuming quite a lot. I have given her a strawberry for roughage.

At the moment she has a variety of names. I elicited the help of Miss Annie Herbert in the naming of my rabbit and we currently have Captain Sam Bartholomew Ziger Zaper, Esq. However I feel we may have to drop the Bartholomew part as it is too gender specific. The issue being that although I have looked I'm not entirely sure if she is a girl. I can't find a penis but rabbits have a lot of hair.

Plus I remember when I was younger and we got a cat who also had many names. I wanted him to be a girl and my mum looked and said it was too early to tell (maybe this is the same with the rabbit, or maybe she lied) so I named him Rose. For reasons I have long since forgotten I wanted to be called Rose when I was 5. I even insisted my teacher Mrs Cooper call me Rose but she refused on the grounds that my name was Holly but when I refused to answer to Holly we compromised and I was Rose for the day. So my cat Rose turned out to be a boy (apparently all entirely ginger cats are boys, and all white cats are deaf also a liter of cats have multiple fathers - I can't tell you if any of the facts in this paragraph are correct or if they were all made up by my parents). After discovering the maleness of our cat we called him Tiger Rose (slightly more masculine) however it didn't stick as we had been calling him Kitten whilst the sex was confirmed and this seemed like the most appropriate name. Obviously it quickly became completely inappropriate as Kitten reach adulthood but it was far too late by then.

The point of my story being that gender non-specific names can solve a multitude of issues in later life but everyone gets old.

Beware the baby...he bites!

Well my cousin Niu Niu pretty much tries to eat everything which I believe is standard baby practice. He's particularly keen on anything you've told him not to eat. He also suffers from a terrible case of food envy. Unfortunately for me he only seems to get jealous of the food I'm eating. Not a meal time goes by I'm not offered something new to try and seconds after I've skillfully scoped it up with my chopsticks I hear the pita pata of Niu Niu's teeny tiny feet and he grabs my jumper from behind bites my lower back and tries to pull my jumper off until I offer him my food. He's very cute though so as of yet I've been unable to mind.

 

Niu Niu hasn't exactly got the hang of giving you a kiss on the check, he just kind of dives in and deposits slobber all over you. And for some reason even this is cute. He also likes to play with the dust pan and brush. He sweeps some dust one way and then back the other way and then attempts to pummel the dust to death by repetitively hitting it with the dust pan.  Every time he does this it reminds me of times when I've been with Charley and one of the cats has done something human-like, like sit at the table while we're eating and Charley says "Ah, he wants to be people". Except I have to keep reminding myself that Niu Niu actually is a person. For some reason when I first arrived I kept getting a huge urge to make that tutting sound you make to attract a cat when ever I needed Niu Niu to come towards me. It doesn't work though. He just kind of tuts back at you. 

Part of the reason I'm here is to help Niu Niu grow up bilingual and I'm proud to say he has learned his first English word (sort of) he can say bird (he say birb). He has also learned to say no, no, no, no, no which is what I say every time he does anything he shouldn't (very regularly). He has now taken to saying no, no, no, no, no, no just before he throws which ever expensive glass object he's managed to grab as you carry him up the stairs on the floor. So basically saying no five times is not a successful deterrent for babies.

I appear to be bad at discipline. Not only does the baby not listen to me but the dog is the same. If anyone else goes outside and they sort of shoo him out the way he just moves but if I go out he bites my leg. It's very playful but a little obstructive. Whenever the dog is like this Niu Niu gets worried and I have to pick him up. The other day I'm heading outside and the baby decides he's coming too, the dog is ready in waiting. I pick the baby up and head out the door and the dog immediately bites my leg, I pull away but he keeps hold of my trousers. I sort of dance around in a circle with the baby and the dog and for reasons unknown to me Niu Niu picked this exact moment to bite me in the face!

I think my lack of discipline skills might come from my parents discipline techniques. Which basically consited of them assuming that if we did something stupid - such as jumping off a 3 meter high shed - we'd learn our lesson from that when for example we sprained our ankle. Fortunately this didn't happen to me as I decided to jump second.

I have named the dog Mao Mao as this is what Niu Niu kept calling him when we first got him. Initially I thought mao meant cat so I was a bit confused when no one seemed to be correcting Niu Niu about this. But it turns out mao also means fur. So basically it's a terrible name but I'm sticking with it. Presides a lot of Chinese names don't translate that well. Niu Niu means cow cow.

Pain or pleasure?

Right, so Saturday was a day of relaxing. DD's friend Shu Li who now lives in London was back in Beijing and we went to visit her. Shu Li is very very rich. Well really Shu Li's brother is very very rich as he is number 5 on the Hong Kong stock market list (I do not know what that means) but anyway she has a massive house and swimming pool and all that jazz. DD says she is crazy and at first I had this image of a crazy eccentric woman but this was wrong. She was just angry. She shouts at everyone. She's not entirely evil or anything just not much fun to be around. And DD says that if Shu Li wants her to spend time with her she will have to pay for things. So we went to the spa.

At the spa you get naked. I've become used to pretending like everything is normal when it really isn't so I just went along with it. You don't share the shower but there isn't a door. Eventually I'm taken to a room on my own. A masseuse comes in and covers me up a bit. She massages my back. This is kind of nice but at times it hurt quite a lot. I haven't figured out if it's meant to or if there is something wrong with me. A bit of me wonders if it's because I have virtually no muscles though I have no idea why that would make it hurt. Anyway, they do that thing where they stop your blood flowing in your arm for a min and then let go and it feels really nice. It's a bit like the feeling when you have sat on your leg for too long and blood rushes back but without the pins and needles and feeling slightly concerned your leg may have given up on you completely and you'll never walk again.

After the massage I get a facial. It's my first facial so I didn't know what to expect. They rub in about 20 different creams. Some they take off others they leave for a while and then kind of dab you with a sponge. She put some gloop on and then covered my eyes and left. Then I thought I could hear her in the corner and I thought why is just watching me, surely this isn't normal, oh my god maybe she is going to kill me! So I try to open my eyes and it really hurt because the things covering my eyes have got some kind of bloody soothing cream on them. The pain caused my paranoia to subside and I realised she wasn't in the room it was just the air con rattling.

Next she attempted to ask me if I wanted to have my eyebrows done. It took a while to get this across. I thought she was telling me to close my eyes at first and then I thought she wanted to do my eyebrows so I said yes and then she looked confused and started pointing at her eyebrows so I said they looked nice. Eventually she got a pair of tweezers and a eyebrow razor and waved them at me. I picked tweezers and she used the razor anyway. Though to be fair I do have a lot of eyebrow.

Finally she gets a pair of ultra thin tweezers and sticks them into my face. This was by far the most painful part of the whole thing. After a while she says tong bu tong (which means does it hurt) I say Tong! (yes!) and she shows me all the gunk she has pulled out so far. It's quite amazing that I could have that much crap in my face and not know about it really. I let her continue without complaining and felt a bit guilty later when I covered my face in foundation because we were going out.

So I've learned that being pampered is fairly painful and rich people have to go to much less effort to look good than everyone else because other people do it for them but it's not a fun experience and they would be happier with the gunk in their faces.

For the evening we went to dinner with a couple who are friends with DD. DD was in the military secret services from the age of 14-19 and this is where she knows the man Wan Ge from (I remember his name because it sounds a bit like wanker though he seemed very nice). His wife who introduced herself to me as Kylie is learning English (from someone from Liverpool which I said was a little unfortunate but I don't think she understood). Their daughter goes to university at St Andrews and might be considering staying in Scotland so Kylie wants to be able to communicate. I wanted to say in that case learning English from a Liverpudlian might not be such a bad idea cause the Scottish accent is even harder to understand. But I didn't. 

So we had a hot pot which is amazing. You have a a big bubbling pot in the middle and you throw stuff in and fish it out once cooked with your chop sticks then dunk it in a bowl of brown tasty stuff. It's great. In China they eat a lot. And they seem offended if I don't also eat a lot. So I've been trying but there is a limit. The other issue I have is that they eat fast. Some of you will know that I am not capable of eating quickly and I feel a bit silly when everyone has finish about 30mins before me and has eaten twice as much.

Anyway I need to get to the interesting bit. So Kylie says "do you like shopping" I say yes and she looks at her watch. It's 9pm. "We go" she says. So I follow her and we go to some Harvard inspired store and she picks up a few jackets and then she takes me to another store and says "do you like this store" I say yes because I've never heard of it and I don't want to offend her. She then says "anything you want I will buy for you, because I like you". Obviously a bit of me wants to buy everything just for the sake of it but I feel a bit worried about picking something too expensive. So she basically picks for me. I try it on and try to see how much it'll cost but the labels don't have prices on. She buys them for me and it comes to 1070 yuan (about £107)! She pays on a special store card. I'm very grateful and tell her I like her lots as well. Which wasn't a lie. I did really like her before she spent a load of money on me. Although a part of me did think who says money can't buy love?

On the way home DD tells me that the reason they have so much money is that the husband is very high up in the military and he gets bribed a lot! So I feel less guilty about having the money spent on me in a sense but a tad worried about what he might have been bribed to do.

Skip to the end...

I was going to explain everything that has happened since I arrived however I realised this would take forever so I'm going to pretty much start from this week and fill in the blanks when I have a lot of time on my hands. I've reached the point where I'm starting to get the hang of China. Me and Dong Dong (my aunt) had two very important meetings last week in which we had to bid for two contracts.

The first contract we were bidding for was to organise a gala which will be held on 18 July this year. The gala is to celebrate the opening of three tourist islands in the Tang Shan Bay region which is about 3 hours from Beijing. We will have several traditional Chinese dances, some kind of Chinese celebrity singer and some famous hosts. We also have to organise the dinner and the advertising.

So we worked 7am - 2am everyday for 4 days and then feeling very tired we went to give the presentation. I could tell that if we didn't get the contract I would be fired and I still think this was the case. In fact I'd resigned myself to being sent home even if we got it. DD seemed very stressed and unhappy with me. Chinese people do not arrange meetings in advance and they won't necessarily stick to the arranged time. So when on Saturday the meeting was moved from Wednesday to Monday I was not that surprised. And then on Sunday we were told the meeting would be at 10am. This meant we had to leave on Sunday afternoon and stay in a hotel in Tang Shan so we would be on time to the meeting.

So Sunday night in the hotel was not fun. We were all stressed and DD most of all. I was not prepared enough. DD and Da Long (a man we live with who I believe is the father of DD's baby) were arguing in Chinese. This had been happening a lot and I didn't know what they were arguing about or how I should behave. Should I ask what they were fighting about or assume it's none of my business? I decided to be typically English about it and pretended I hadn't even noticed they had had an argument.

The next morning we get ready and I upset DD on the way to breakfast by asking her a question that interrupts her thoughts. She tells me I can't just leap into conversation, I need to say excuse me Dong Dong and then speak. It's rude not to do this and it's true that if she was just my boss and not my aunt I would have been more polite however I get a bit confused about the boundaries because of being a part of the family. Anyway after she has eaten she perks up a bit. She says in a much nicer way that she just wants me to learn how to be a good PA when I'm not working for her. She does the whole positive thinking thing. She says she thinks we will get the contract and I realise from the rest of our conversation that the reason she is so stressed is that the family has run out of money and we need the contract to pay the bills. My aunt is a very successful business woman however she does not have anything which brings her a constant source of income.

On the way to the bid we run into trouble. The most ridiculous traffic jam I've ever seen. There were cars in the middle which were going across horizontally for no apparent reason. There were four lanes on each side of the road however our side of the road was using seven lanes and the other side only had one lane. The other side of the road was moving and our side was not. It was absurd.

Anyway we make the presentation and then some things happen that I didn't understand and we go to dinner. At dinner I'm allowed to sit next to the big boss which is unusual as I'm only the support staff but on this occasion I was allowed. The big boss talked to me a little and I just about made the conversation work. Then he asks "how much can you drink" (in Chinese though obviously) as he says this a bottle of Chinese spirits is brought around. I say I'm not sure and the big boss laughs. The girl next to me can speak English and she explains that the big boss can drink 2 bottles and I say I definitely can't drink that much.

In China, particularly at business meetings, it is important to toast each other a lot. When a toast is made it is customary to down the contents of your glass. They like to make a toast every few minuets or so, so this can get messy. The big boss was very pleased that I drank alcohol and when I didn't seem fazed by the first two shots he decided I should toast everyone around the table. There were seven people around the table. I was quite drunk by the end of it although I was still behaving quite sensibly I believe. Everyone was very concerned about me but I was fine just a little giggly.

So the big boss was very impressed and we got the contract. I was very relieved and also excited because I'm not being sent home and I get to go to Hong Kong and buy a new laptop! Also to Henna Island and stay in a five star hotel. And go to the Shangri-La after the project is finished. Very excited about all of this.

The second project is the one I'm mostly working on right now. I am setting up four exhibitions which will start in London then move to Paris, then Berlin and finish in Milan. I'm project manager so this is a lot of work and responsibility but I'm really enjoying it. Also I might get to go to each place for two months so I'm working hard in the hope that I can. I'd be in London for the Olympics so I wouldn't miss that and it would be great to see the project through to the end.

 I'm running out of steam now so I'll leave it here.