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I’m going back to Melbourne this week.

I’m so looking forward to leading a bit of a normal life for a while and working out what it is I want to do.

Daily life in Hefei is just too bizarre, not at all possible to make rational decisions while here I have decided.

Yesterday the intercom rang and I ignored it, as I usually do if I don’t recognise the person.  Just a few minutes later my visitor was back with a guard, ringing again.  I like and trust our lovely guards so answered just in case he had something important to tell me.  The conversation went something along the lines of:

Hello?

Is anybody home?

Umm… no, there’s nobody home.

Ok (hangs up).

I’ve no idea who it was or why he enlisted the guard for help.

Not long after that, a girl from the washing machine company called and fired off a very rapid bunch of questions I didn’t understand a word of. Our washing machine has been “fixed” a number of times recently and each time I have got what I assume is a follow up call from the company to check all is well.

Generally once the caller realises I am clearly not fluent in Chinese, they ask a few simple questions, I give a few simple answers and I am left feeling quite impressed with my ability to hold a phone conversation in Chinese.

After a few attempts at answering”Washing machine, good” to each of yesterday’s long incomprehensible questions and not succeeding in making my caller go away, I decided instead to reply to each question with long English phrases.  Strangely enough, she wasn’t put off and we had quite a long conversation about who-knows-what.

I was standing in the middle of the road today, and as I happily daydreamed a little while waiting for a couple of buses to hurtle past on either side, came to the realisation that I have finally settled back in to the Chinese way of crossing the road.

It always takes me a while.

I have begun psyching myself up to start driving here now, as it may come in handy to be confident enough to take a large machine out onto these roads sometime.  Unfortunately the more I try and understand the secret Hefei driving code, the more confused I become.

My most recent observation is the slight overuse of green traffic lights.

It is perfectly normal to drive into the oncoming traffic when turning left here (where we drive on the right side), and no one seems to mind at all, bicycles, cars and trucks all expect such behaviour and are content to weave their way around.

The thing that has confused me recently is the fact that despite us having a green turning arrow, we are still finding ourselves barrelling through the oncoming traffic.  The oncoming traffic, that is, that really should have a red light whilst our arrow to drive across them is green.

I had at first thought this was an amusing fault with one intersection near our home, but have since discovered that it is a trait common to most intersections here.

I pointed out the oddity to Patrick who simply replied, as if I am just a little slow, that “yes, it’s green so you can go, you just have to look.”

So now I must get used to the fact that a green light doesn’t necessarily mean you can actually go when turning left… in addition to the fact that it is legal here to turn right against a red light…

There must be some logic to this somewhere.

Possibly driving at night will be easier, as they just switch all the lights to flash orange instead.

The last few weeks have gone by in an absolute flash.

I can’t believe the wedding, the friends and family coming to stay, and our little trip is all finished.

(Finished for me anyway, my parents being still stuck somewhere around Hong Kong airport after a looong day of travel gone wrong.)

We have had amazing weather for the last fortnight, blue skies every day.  We’ve been really lucky.  Unfortunately a ridiculously thick fog rolled in last night.  It was so thick, that when I opened the window, it actually started floating into the room.  THAT is thick (and rather scary) fog.

My parents enjoyed a very exciting cab ride to the airport, as apparently rather than slowing down for lack of visibility, the drivers just flick on the hazard lights and drive even faster due to the absence of visible obstacles.

I don’t know what to do with myself now, I’ve had so much on my mind for the last few weeks, suddenly everything is quiet again…  The exception being Chandler.

I have already taken him for two walks today and he is still a little over excited to have us home.  He woke me up at 3am this morning by drooling in my eye socket while banging his tail loudly against the cupboard door.

I’m pretty sure he used to be trained not to do that sort of thing.

I’ll get around to uploading some photos once Chandler eventually passes out of exhaustion.

Someone asked me the other day how my plans were coming along.

Plans? Weird question….

I said I didn’t really have any plans at the moment, at which she paused for a confused few seconds and said “…for the wedding*?!”

Ooohhh… I see.

A little embarrassing…. Especially seeing as I have had basically the same conversation with at least 5 different people now.

I am just not a ceremony person, I am generally impatient and intolerant of fuss and it irritates me when people don’t just get to the point. Extra fluff just isn’t necessary, and really seems a little wasteful. Weddings fall into the ‘fuss’ category for me.

I thought I might begin looking forward to it when the date got closer, but it hasn’t happened yet. I have a month left to start looking forward… there is still time…

I have to get two dresses made, and they take a month to make. I sat down and looked up a bridal website the other day to see what sort of dress I might like. Mistake! Even last minute pressure isn’t working here.

I have had a painful headache for the last two days, which is possibly from paint fumes, but I am thinking, also very possibly caused by bride.com.

I can not go back there.

There were flowery countdowns to the day; clipboards for flowers, dresses and catering preferences; slimming tips, bridesmaid tips, organisational tips AND a ‘what kind of bride am I?’ survey.

What is this strange world I have stumbled into?

I don’t even know what happens in a Chinese wedding… I just had to insist to the wedding planner not to attempt to make it ‘western’ style for my sake. I hate to think how an enthusiastically organised Hefei x western style wedding could turn out…

Catherine Deveny wrote a (drunken?) bitter opinion piece in The Age recently about modern women changing their names when they get married. I can’t find the link after a quick look, but her follow up after a freakishly large and angry response is here.

The initial article went somewhere along the lines that I am a pathetic, spineless something-or-other for changing my family name to Patrick’s when we got married, which is an opinion she is entitled to, I can’t be bothered to argue it.

What it did make me think about though, is the number of women who don’t change their names now. Clearly ideas of marriage and it’s traditions are changing.

People are marrying later, divorce rates increasing, women are not expected to leave their careers… blah blah.

Why is it that the huge, white, fluffy, wedding extravaganza is still going strong and apparently growing?

It is all too strange for me…. please help me out if you’re one of those girls who kept a wedding scrap-book from the age of seven… or even if you like weddings… I seriously would like to understand what the meaning of it all is.

..but don’t go confusing marriage with weddings, completely different thing.

Anyway, as I said, I have a headache, which today excuses my rant.

I was just avoiding said headache by watching a TV series featuring a similarly uninterested bride to be trying to avoid all her own wedding fuss and caring not at all which cake would be chosen.

Cake!

Now that is something I had completely forgotten about weddings! There is cake!

I may just start looking forward to this after all.

*For anyone getting confused at this point… we are already married and have been for almost four years, we just didn’t get around to the wedding part yet.

I think I should have painted our house myself.

Since we moved in, we have had painters in each day fixing dodgy bits of paintwork. One wall is being ‘fixed’ for the fourth time this morning.

Our sinks are full of paint, our floors are covered in paint, new furniture has paint on it, and even Chandler is getting about with a few spots on him.

I was coping o.k with the paint everywhere, figuring I have the time to clean it all off when they finish… the thing that really gets to me is the horrid little rickety ladder they use.

The little wooden ladder is held together solely by one fraying red handkerchief. The painter wobbles up and down the
ladder on his spindly little twig legs with a brush in one hand and a bucket of paint in the other.

The ladder fell apart TWICE today, leaving the painter in a puddle of paint all full of twig legs and bits of ladder… he just tied all the bits together and kept on painting.

I hope he got the wall right this time, I don’t think I can cope with any more painting…