Mr Pan has been rather absent of late. We tell ourselves that it's not us, that maybe he is just busy, but we are starting to think that the novelty of us westerners has worn off.
Well Mr Pan dropped by last night, and unlike his fly in fly out visits of late, he actually hung around for a bit and helped us out with a couple of things. We bought a mossie net about 2 months ago and have attempted to put this thing together only twice...each time we have gone bananas trying to get it together only to get no where. It is singlehandedly the most frustrating design you could imagine. So we asked Mr Pan a couple of weeks ago if he might be able to have a look at it for us, as seemingly he bought the same one when we bought ours. Needless to say after Mr Pan had a look at it last night, it was decided that the net is "broken" and needs to go back to the store. Thank ye gods Mr Pan has taken it upon himself to do this as I couldn't even fathom how we would try and exchange something at the store we bought it from. Even so, I'm not sure that another one would be any better. You can't seem to get mossie nets here that just hang from the roof. They are all these fandangaled things that look like tents and sit on top of the mattress. I've no idea how someone is supposed to get in or out of bed, or for that matter make the bed...but only time will tell.
Mossie net attempt #3. Still no luck.
As he was about to go, Mr Pan spotted our newly purchased fan lying in parts on the floor. We had only just returned from a trip to the shops to buy a screwdriver to assemble the fan. Well, Mr Pan isn't one to let something go, so before we could try to stop him he's down on the floor putting the fan together. I had assembled half of it, but had stopped at the base due to not having a screwdriver (we had actually spoken to Mr Pan the previous evening, and Marcus asked if he had a screwdriver we could borrow. Mr Pan mistook this as us needing the "school driver"...ah, the joys of translation!) All I can say is I am very glad Mr Pan started working on this thing as I would not have figured it out.
Marcus and Mr Pan deep in contemplation over the fan. I'm not sure what Marcus is looking at given the instructions were in Chinese ;-)
And finally, it wouldn't be like Mr Pan to come over not baring some odd purchase or "gift". Last night was no exception. He came in carrying the world's smallest watermelon.."a gift for you!" See below for hand-to-watermelon ratio....
Speaking of which, I think I might go eat some now!
And in what can only be described as the best news we have heard since arriving here, we finally said to Mr Pan last night - the couch has got to go! We can take no more of sitting on what is basically nothing more than a park bench. Three months in and enough is enough! Turns out he believes the school has a couch somewhere that they can swap for our couch. He is going to organise something with Mr Shen, the principle. We live in hope....
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