The other reason is coming up but i'll run you through the last week or so first.
Last Monday night Dave and I got an authentic chinese take away. We walked down to our favourite local restuarant and ordered our meals to take away. They made the dishes on the plates and then poured them into styrofoam holders to take home. We had a a mixed vegetable dish- su shi jin- which was carrots, cabbage, bamboo shoots, water cheshnut,spring onions, ginger etc fried in oyster sauce, and also a kung pow chicken-gong bao ji ding- and some rice. We platted up our mass amount of food and sat back, relaxed and watched the West Wing. Heaven! Just like home!Tuesday was Halloween. We didn't do anything on the night itself, think we just watched even more West Wing. Incidentally we are now onto the 4th Series, so we have watched 66 episodes at 40 minutes each, meaning so far we have spent about 40 hours watching it and we aren't even half way through yet! Time well spent.
Now for the second reason for the lack of blog activity.On Wednesday night we were invited out to a Kids' Halloween Party. It was being hosted by a Publishing Company who , amongst other things, publish english magazines for children so I think they wanted some western representation to give them some kudos. They had gone to quite some effort and cut out halloween shapes, gave us all masks and played spooky music. The evening was a little boring but going fine until the pumpkins came out. They brought out a pumpking for every table and gave us a stanley knife with which to carve it into a "jackle lantern". Whilst they were explaining to the kids how to do it they said "and our western friends will do this all the time at home, so we expect theirs to be very good".Initially I sat back and allowed Meredith to carve ours. But this was going nowhere so in a gung ho move i grabbed the knife and ploughed it into the pumpkin, at the same time I also managed to plough it into my hand, between my thumb and forefinger. This sent blood spurting everywhere over the table akin to something out of a horror film. They organiser's quickly moved me off and got me to a doctors. The medical centre was quite clean but not as spotless as western ones, expected though. The process was quite difficult with the language barrier, but one of the publishing company stayed to help. The best moment was when to test whether I still had feeling in my hand after having the anisthetic they just stabbed me with a needle until i stopped telling them not to. I had 2 stitches which were relatively painless but felt wierd as they pulled the strings through.
Afterwards they tried giving me an injection, presumably antibiotics but I wasn't too keen as they coouldn't tell me what it was. I tried to explain that in England we have Tetanus injections but they were not able to understand. They did a test of the injection, which really hurt and there was no allergic reaction but I still decided against it, tetanus covers me against things like this anyway. They gave me some pills, which had penicilllin in-i'm allergic to penicillin so thank God for the internet- so I got some more the following day. I've been going back every two days to get my bandage replaced which is annoying but necessary i guess. Anyhow the stitches are coming out tomorrow. The kids have been nicer to me with the bandage on though, I guess they feel sorry for me, so I might just bandage my hand up every now and again!
The publishing company girls came around with some gifts and some flowers to say sorry. Which was a nice touch and greatly appreciated. They were so sorry but you just can't legislate for an english idiot can you!
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