Winter has arrived here too...

So, yet another month ~ or two have gone bye…days are getting colder and shorter…the city workers are busy wrapping-up the bushes with plastic tarps and sewing them together by hand. And I’m not talking about a couple here and there, I mean every single hedge and bush and small tree gets this attention. It must be great for vegetation but it’s sooo depressing to me. The plastic that they use is white with blue and red stripes… It’s and absolute eye sore…The winter season is dry, cold, windy and dusty and the plastic make little to make the surroundings more appealing.

The colder weather hasn’t prevented the bad smells from hitting either… the latest problem that we are having these days is at the yard. Because access to and from the vessel is relatively difficult, the workers prefer to defecate in dark corners throughout the ship… We are all complaining about the smells of urine and the rest yet there appear to be no real effort to address this problem.. It’s one thing to see a 3-year old squat and take a dump in the street, it’s another to see a 30-year old squat and take a dump on the ship! ~ my ship!!

I’m again typing away in a car, being driven from Beijing where I spent a couple of nights there to sleep-in and relax a little. It’s been exactly what I needed to disconnect. This time, the driver has been given instructions to pay the tolls. I wasn’t in a mood to go through what Kevin went through last week with the same driver… Turns out that they got pulled-over at the tolls (shortly after swapping the license plates) and Kev was stuck there for about 30 mins until the driver had to br*be the toll officials and was allowed to drive through!

Brother/sister aunty/uncle.
Jane, our secretary has been a tremendous help at the office. Like Michelle, she’s been adopted by ~ and has adopted ~ the team and is part of the gang. I introduced her to peanut butter and then peanut butter with bananas and she’s now hooked. She’s also picking-up UK and Canadian slang which is an absolute riot! Yesterday, I taught her to describe herself as ‘pitoune’!

As you know, there is a one-child-per-family law. But very confusingly, people will call so-and-so brother and somebody else brother too, etc. Turns out that in smaller towns, you don’t call people Mr or Ms., you call them brother or sister. And they don’t need to have any close tie with you to call them brother either. Also, you don’t use the person’s given name. You’re supposed to say: brother Surname. And if the age gap is big, you call them Uncle/Auntie. Jane recently admitted that she finds it very confusing for her also.