The flat is very clean and secure, we are working on the outside (see photo). My washing was the last to come in from the suspended metal rack 4 floors up this morning having woken at 11am to tropical storms: thank goodness we have air con. Old ones crumble on the concrete exteriors; however this flat has been Ikea’d and is fine after the initial culture shock. Entrepreneurial post grads have rented it to us; it’s almost a shrine to their little boy with curtains, tiles, posters, even windows etched in Disney, Winnie the Pooh and space invaders, and the wi fi code is his birthday by the look of it. His characters writing practice is in evidence – he looks about 7. On the other hand health and safety nightmares abound – gas in flats, no window locks, they don’t even close fully, and its four floors down.
My ICT skills are on an exponential curve; thank heaven for the BBC. Woke at 2am jet lagged last night and managed with iphone and tunein/iplayer plus VPN to get Philip Larkin as Book of the Week on R4 which sent me nicely back to sleep “Why Coventry, I was born here”. In the local shop, the Pleco app is a revelation, type in the food you want, it speaks in Mandarin and when you can’t get your Chinese speaking tones right - a lot of belly laughs at our pronunciation by the shop assistants. By such means, plus Ken Hom’s book, we assembled a duck stir fry this evening. We’ve put stickers from “ Chinese in 10 minutes a Day’ on the walls. It is honestly fantastic to feel you are in a country as a true foreigner, with no one replying in English all the time. Question: is it possible to learn a new language at our age?
First day in the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnoloty tmo!