So, last saturday was the 'big' day of the football game. By the time it was on, I had made my way to Yantai with my flatmate Andy, and after a walk along the beach, a dinner and a game of rummy we walked out to explore the streets and to look for a place to watch the game. The first place where we stopped was a little restaurant, as they come on China, with just a few rickety tables and some plastic chairs. And a whole bunch of Chinese, a few of the men already drunk on bai jiu. One of the men sat down next to us, and started to yell all the ten words of English he knew, including China, Japan, we win, etc. And he ordered a plastic pitcher of beer and kept trying to pour some for us. He wasn't too impressed with me, when I wouldn't take a piece of mango that he was offering (not too appetising after he'd just taken a piece himself with the same toothpick...) and called me a thief (which he spelled out for us, t-h-i-e-f, just to make sure). All in all he was being a pain, and so we decided to leave the restaurant at half time. (At this point the score was 1-1).

When we left the restaurant, the man came out after us and started following us. So we ran. And he ra. we hid behind a door, he saw us, we ran again... Until we managed to lose him. And ended up at a wicked night market, with lots of food and all kinds of useless and useful and pretty and ugly things you can imagine for sale. As the food goes, the most "interesting" things were possibly the chicken head and chicken foetus kebabs....mmmm...

And the game? When Japan scored their 3-1 goal, the TV was simply switched off, people walked away and it was like it never happened.

Though they showed on the news how in Beijing outside the stadium some violence had erupted, and Chinese fans went around trying to be like their English counterparts...

All in all the weekend was a good one. On sunday we visited the town of Penglai, which has a coastal park area on the cliffs with old temples, a pavilion and so on. A beautiful place... We went their from Yantai by taxi, which we rented with a Chinese family of three. We paid the driver 20 yuan to take us there (it would have been 15 by bus, a 2-hour drive) and we got a lot more for the price than we originally thought. This sweet guy basically drove us around for the whole day, came to eat with us in a little restaurant, fed us fruit that his girlfriend brought, took me to a bank and finally drove us back to Yantai. And there, he arranged seats for us on the bus back to jinan, after which he invited us for dinner, on which he blew more than half of what we had just paid him for the day. Some people are just amazing.

Coming back was a little bit of a nightmare, on a bus that left almost 2 hours later than they originally said it would, with a bunch of people sitting in the aisle on little stools, squashing me into my seat, with the obligatory karaoke videos playing at 4 a.m., being stuck in a traffic jam on the highway for an hour at 3 a.m. and finally arriving at 5 in the morning. And then working at 8.

But now I need to get ready for a trip to the Public Security Bureau to try to persuade them to give me a residence permit for another 6 months in this wonderful Middle Kingdom...