Glitter!

Today started off in a very stressful way. Basically, Becka found out that as everything shuts for a week for National Day she would not have her passport back from the Visa authorities before we went to Suzhou. Not only does she need this to fly, she needs it to check in to hotels. After a lot of panicking the dust has half settled and we think that there is a slim chance she will have a passport. If not she may be able to use her student ID or a photocopy of her passport at least for the hotel if not the planes. She can always get the train. So hopefully disaster has been averted...

We went to a Korean restaurant for lunch and I failed miserably because I just can't eat spice. At all. I ended up eating jam sandwiches instead. Not good.

Then I made the dreaded return journey to the Entry/Exit Bureau (to quote Daisy, which rather sums it up, "my god how much of your life have you spent there!") to attempt again to get a residence permit. This time there was success and it took only half an hour as well!

The day continued to improve as Becka, Daisy and I went for a manicure. I got blue and gold glitter on mine :D They are rather spectacular. It was cheapish at around £5 but it's also rather good as you can speak to your manicurist (?) in Chinese :) Although we spent ages on me trying to get them to tell me the word for glitter. Eventually they understood what I wanted but now I have forgotten the word so it was rather in vain... We ended up teaching them the words for sofa, nail polish and glitter :P

As Jazz Steak was very close we went for a salad (precious vegetables) and chips. The waiter's accent was virtually unintelligable and we spent a very long time trying to work out what he was trying to say. Eventually we realised that he was trying to say that there were no chips... This hurt :( My salad was very nice, even if I couldn't bring myself to eat the prawns, and the sandwiches were ok. However there was a lot of mayonnaise so I ran out of enthusiasm after a while.. Plus the sandwiches were quite wide so difficult to get in your mouth all at once.

My bus driver did things with her bus that I have never seen before. She was actually weaving it in and out of traffic. That's pretty nimble for a bus! The traffic here can be quite scary- but not as scary as trying to cross the road. Even when there are crossings, a green light doesn't necessarily mean that cars won't be coming at you. Just fewer. And when there aren't, you have to get across 8 lanes of traffic. This is impossible to do in one go so you spend several exciting minutes in the middle with cars passing inches from you, shuffling forwards when there is traffic behind you, and backwards when there is traffic in front... Certainly adds an element of chance to life.

English of the Day: "Certainly ocn world shall know but ONE WALT DISNEY"