Padd Solutions

So, The old saying of being careful what you wish for stands true. I wished for something interesting to happen so I had something blog about, and I woke up with a small resevoir where my living room floor used to me. My water cooler had pee'd all over the floor in the middle of the night. Thankfully all my recently-purchased artwork was on the table, and not on the floor. A hairline crack at the top of the bottle meant it could no longer hold its vacuum, meaning it was slowly leaking on the floor. Of the 20-litre bottle, about 10 litres remained. I really didn't feel like trying to yank the bottle out of the cooler without spilling the other 10 litres all over the place. I needed to drain the water out of the cooler, but the only suitable vessel I had was my old water cooler bottle...which was too big to fit under the tap. British bodging for a Chinese problem was called for:

Plastic bag with a hole poked in the corner, et voila... water could flow. Anyway, looks like I'll have to fork out a *whole* 60p for another 20litre bottle! :P I could probably complain and get another one free...but it's 60p!

Me and Tim went out for breakfast. But again, it was far too late to get anything decent at the market, so... KFC! Mmmm... KFC Chicken for breakfast. That's so wrong, but so right in any country.

Then Aya went to the dentist. Chinese dentists are whack. You walk in, tell them your tooth hurts, they tell you how much it will cost to fix, then you sit on the chair, and have relevant work carried out. It's not my place to say what Aya got done, but it was super cheap, and looked like good work. Still, very ghetto:

^ Quite a clean room for China. But check the trainers and the dirty overcoat. Yum.

^ How do you say "ahhhhhhhhh" in Chinese?

Then we went and collected our scrolls from the mounting/framing place.

^ Tim and Aya putting my shizzle up for me. Even in China I seem to be able to land the role of "Supervisor."

^ My uber wall. I'll take better pictures some other day. The central scroll roughly says God helps those who help themselves, and then from left to right the 4 paintings are Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

^ Tim's bad-ass poem written in bad-ass old characters. It's bad-ass.

^ I love the colours on this one. The actual character is "Fu" or something - Happiness. It can be written like 100 ways. Thats a lot of happiness.

^ There are gold speckles in the paper that 'ping' with the sun. They stand out awesomely with the gold silk scroll.

^ I like the simplicity and cleanliness of this one. Tim's were done by a different artist than mine. If you compare this to mine, the edges of the characters are a lot cleaner. This one reads roughly "Many rivers flow into one sea." You can dig around that for some meaning of acceptance and how we're all the same. Heavily ironic considering how xenophobic Chinese people are.  I'm also curious as to why Tim has put a scroll about accepting diversity in his bedroom, but I'll leave that for ya'll to ponder.

^ Close-up of the bad-ass old characters.

After our little period of pretending to be arty and sophisticated, it was off to KTV to celebrate Jenny leaving. Again, an awesome night of Karaoke, the list of things sung is equally embarassing as last time. Lowlights including Dido, Fergie and Mariah Carrey [just realised I have no idea how to spell her surname...you know who I mean] Highlights included Wilson Pickett - Mustang Sally and Brian Adams - Summer of '69.

^ From left to right: Aya, Tim, Rob, Cheer, Jenny, Kathy (hiding behind Jen) and Cliff.

^ Brother and sister duet representin' the US of A.

It was wierd drinking Carlsberg instead of Chinese beer... I think I still prefer Tsingtao, and yes... Carlsberg tasted exactly the same as it does in the UK. By the end of the night, just a very drunk quadret of Rob, Cheer, Jenny and Myself remained. I vaguely remember walking down the street shouting numbers out in Chinese, I think we got from like, 1 to 45 before we got confused / lost interest. We stumbled our way to the 24hr McDonalds, I grabbed some hot wings - they were hot! Munched those down, swigged on my Coke and wondered home. Needless to say I slept very well.