Today’s mission was to get the address of the hotel in Jintai to send to my brother and to get myself to Wuwei to pick up the PC and other equipment.

I got to the bus stop around half past nine and was told the bus would be there at ten. Well – it got there half past eleven, but that was OK because the Chinese people sitting at the ticket office were nice and we managed to communicate. Speaking of communication – I have bought an English – Chinese dictionary for the htc telephone.  It is great to be able to look up words quickly to answer questions and more importantly to understand them! The problem however is that I don’t have Chinese characters on the phone, so therefore I cannot show them the character, but have to read the pinyin in order for them to understand. So I will have a look around for Chinese characters for the phone! The bonus of course is that it doesn’t weigh anything since I am already carrying the phone.

Then followed a four hour bus journey to get to Wuwei. I used the well tested tactic of keeping my sunglasses on and also had the ear plugs for the mp3 player mounted in my skull   🙂   That way I didn’t have to answer questions about what I was doing in China. Nice to be able to space out now and again. As on the last bus ride, to backtrack, I kept my eyes open for the Great Wall the whole way. I was sort of happy to see that there was a strong wind, and lots of sand in the air. My father sent a weather forecast a couple of days ago that predicted this. It was nice to sit on the bus and not be walking along some ridge of the Great Wall.

Towards the end of the ride my brother called and asked for the address of the hotel. I had the card, but it was written with Chinese characters, so I asked the lady beside me.  She kindly spend quite some time shouting the characters to the Chinese woman Jon had recruited on the other end, to write down the characters. The bus was noisy and they were playing the TV too. To make sure, I asked another person to repeat the characters once I got off the bus.   Jon was then ready to send the parcel with the new GPS and deodorant to the hotel.

But no – things are never as simple as they seem. The attendant at the post office got suspicious of this deodorant thing as Chinese don’t use them. She decided it might be explosive in some way and didn’t allow it in the parcel! If she only had the sense to send it, she could have made life so much easier for a lot of fellow Chinese people the following few weeks!! I’ll have to have a look around in Wuwei after deo tomorrow, but after searching the net extensively for deodorant and ANY expat information in Wuwei, I’m not optimistic…

Thank you for sending the GPS Jon, and have a safe journey home to Scotland!!