Return to Nanjing

I was really looking forward to getting back to Nanjing after 8 weeks being depressed in the UK… so much bad news and miserable people – was desperate to get back to happiness in China. Yes, I know there is bad news here too but it’s sometimes good not to hear bad news everywhere you turn. I would rather be ignorant and happy than well informed and miserable.

So as the plane arrived at Shanghai I was keen to get cracking with another year in the Middle Country. Of course my bag was still en route from Hong Kong but that’s the price you pay for a quick connection. I took my hand luggage including change of clothes (I learn from experience) to my usual Shanghai hotel.

The next day having been reunited with my bag, I headed off to Hoingqiao Railway station to geta train to Shanghai. And what a station – Wow – it’s enormous (not as enormous as Nanjing South which is the biggest in the world) and clean and bright.

Arriving in Nanjing I phoned the agent to get the keys to the new flat. Next problem – the agent was away from NJ and due to return until the day after. Luckily Lynn and family and their spare bed came to the rescue. The next day and a first look at the flat – well, to be accurate, the first smell of the flat – disgusting smell of sewerage – got to get that fixed asap.

Hungry I headed to the fridge to see if Sue had left anything edible there…. found some nice packs of chocolates she had clearly brought from NZ. Yum, I thought she wouldn’t mind me having one and I wolfed them down. The next day she informed me that she had brought one pack of chocolates for each of her teachers. Oooops “Did you buy exactly the right amount?” I asked with a guilty expression. She took it well and I suggested that there was always someone on the staff who doesn’t eat chocolate.

Next day – to my new office on ChengZuoCun and I share some space with Intevision, a company owned by my friend Jiang Xue Wen. They make corporate videos – I starred in one! His boys do not speak English so I have to speak Chinese to them. It’s not as convenient as the last office but still FOC so I shalln’t complain. As you walk along the corridor to the office my desk is the one you see immediate in front through the door (you can see it in the balcony picture).

Found my PC on the desk (well not mine, so much as that which is on permanent loan to me from H4 in London!) but no cables, no mouse, no nothing so spent a very hot and sweaty hour rummaging around in boxes in the server room finding everything I needed and plugging it in, connecting the internet and then similarly installing my laptop.

Mr Zhao the “driver” and my favourite person in Nanjing, was painting the cage which he had just built around the stair well leading to the offices. He explained that we needed more security so he is planning on bulding a cage not only around the stairwell but along the balcony entrance too so that when there is a fire in the offices we will burn to a crisp. He is employed by H4 as a driver but now the company owner and his wife and children now live in London he doesn’t have anyone to drive around. So now he hangs around the office looking busy and making work for himself. Someone has put a desk for him next to my desk but we don’t have a chair so he never sits there.

For lunch I wandered around the area to familiarise myself with it and found ChengZuoCun to be a miserable, dirty and smelly street fully of grotty noodle kiosks, scabby looking cats and dogs and pavements so full of other stuff that you have to dodge the traffic on the road. However, I was pleased to find a cafe which looked fairly clean and tucked into gongbaogiding (penauts and chicken and chilli) and my favourite (yushangqieze) which translates as “aubergine cooked so it smells like fish” (it doesn’t smell of fish!).

Now I am in day three of my new office and I sit here with the door open there is a faint smell of food cooking coming from the security hut by the main gate (we are at the back of a police station), the obligatory drilling and hammering of people rebuilding Nanjing (amazing how you can become deaf to this), car horns, the shouts of the rate-catcher downstairs as he pushes his bicycle around with his stock of rat traps, poison and second hand mobile phones! (Yes, strange combination!) and Chris Evans on Radio 2 I know I’m back!