At last I'm able to sit down and take a few hours to collect my thoughts about the things that have happened since my last post, in the hope that at least some of them will be interesting. Well, when I say 'able' I should say 'forced'; landing with all my weight on my ankle during kung fu has left me hobbling around the flat over the weekend, and it's amazing how much headway it's possible to make on work when you can't walk or cycle anywhere interesting. Annoyingly, the last few days have had incredibly low pollution counts and blue skies too. Ho hum.

Speaking of my ankle, I had my first ever dealings with a for-profit hospital a few days ago when I wasn't sure if my ankle was broken or just very badly sprained. I'm normally quite pro-free market, but when I was told over the phone that if my insurance didn't come through an initial consultation would cost 1000-1500RMB, and that the X-ray would be even more, in my mind I was halfway to making a red flag emblazoned with the NHS logo and singing a song of angry men on top of the first barricade-like structure I could find. Now, this sky-high cost may have had something to do with the fact I called the biggest, shiniest, most English-speaking hospital in China (having been advised that medical care is one area in which you do NOT want an authentic Chinese experience), but still. It turned out that the whole thing was moot anyway as I went from hobbling to limping to walking normally over a few days, so either my ankle wasn't broken or I'm secretly Wolverine, and either way there's not much a hospital can do to speed things along.

I almost uploaded this post without writing something about why the 11th of November's so important in China. It's nothing to do with World War One. China's only involvement in that was sending around 100,000 labourers to dig ditches for the Allied Powers because it wanted to stop paying Germany's share of the Boxer indemnity and, if it was on the winning side, get the German colony in Shandong returned in line with all that national self-determination talk that Woodrow Wilson was spouting.* No, in China 11/11 is Single's Day, a fairly recent invention created because of all the ones in the date. As an essentially spurious 'day' that actually caught on, it's mostly become an excuse for marketing gimmicks and online sales.

All in good fun I suppose, but it's interesting that what was basically an internet meme about being proud of being single became so widespread. I guess it makes sense in a country where parents dread the idea of their children dating when they should be focusing on their studies, but where the pressure on twenty-somethings to hurry up with getting married and starting a family is legendary. There's a whole industry based around providing escorts for Spring Festival, so people can show off their girlfriend or boyfriend when they return home to meet the family and ease some of the pressure for one year at least. What with the leftover women (women who focus on their careers until their late 20s or 30s who then have serious trouble finding men who both meet their standards and are interested in marrying a woman with a successful career) and the diaosi (the stereotype, even more common than in the West, of the teenage male who hasn't got a hope with women and spends all his life on the Internet), and that's a lot of people who might want to take ownership of the fact that they're single for a little while. All rather interesting.

So, what's been happening in my life? Well, as I said I would at the end of my last post I went to Shanghai a few weekends ago to meet up with my dad and pick up a few essentials I hadn't been able to take out with me, like champagne and ski gear. As Cambridgey as that sounds, I don't want to face a North China winter unprepared (after all, <ubiquitous Game of Thrones reference>), nor do I want to celebrate my upcoming 21st birthday with only Yanjing beer, even if it does cost 25p for a pint-sized bottle. Also brought across was a cake tin full of home-baked millionaire's shortbread, which took me about 2 days to get through.

Anyway, Shanghai was lovely - I went to a 'Moroccan' restaurant where I ate shrimp jiaozi (normally translated as 'dumplings' but in fact more like ravioli) and Hainan-style chicken (Hainan of course being a well-known Moroccan exclave), and then on to a bar/club called Bar Rouge, which charged 100RMB for entry and was swarming with the sort of people who care what bars they're seen at. On the other hand, it was across the river from the classic Shanghai skyline and I wasn't buying my drinks, so it became much more tolerable as the night went on. It even reminded me of Cambridge at one point - the go-to joke about Cindies is that the music's so cheesy, the Lion King soundtrack occasionally gets onto the playlist, yet at this painfully cool club on the Shanghai Bund, what should come on but a dubstep remix of the African chant at the beginning of 'Circle of Life',** followed by a mashup of 'The Bare Necessities' with 'Thrift Shop' and 'Jump Around'. Of course, I'm pretty sure everyone was only enjoying that ironically, so it was fine.

Then as we were walking back (because the taxi drivers wanted 100RMB to take us to a hotel four blocks away) I got a little depressed by the number of sketchy-looking men we passed offering 'lady massage' and started practising my Chinese swear words on them. I'm not sure whether they were more surprised, angry or impressed, but at least we didn't get stabbed. The next night in Shanghai I took my dad wandering around the streets behind the hotel, into an area much more like real China that the area around People's Square where we were staying was. It's amazing how little distance there can be between a hole in the wall that sold baozi (pasty-esque steamed buns with filling) for 12p and a hotel in which the minibar chocolate cost £5.50.

One of the weirdest things was seeing all the luxury car dealerships and foreign jewellers with branches there, partly because of the irony that they were on People's Square (which isn't even square-shaped) and also because of how empty they all seemed to be. Apparently, this is because most of those shops just exist to be incredibly expensive adverts for foreign brands. The commercial import tax on luxury goods is absurdly high because China is absolutely still a Communist country,*** so these brands basically just advertise in China via these so-called shops so that when the kind of super-rich customer they advertise to goes abroad to buy Western cars/handbags/watches/jewellery etc. and ship it all back over, they choose the brand they saw on Nanjing Road or People's Square.

Shanghai struck me as a very strange city, but maybe that's just because I was right in the heart of foreignertown and I've been fortunate enough to avoid spending much time in Beijing's equivalent. Either way, the bullet train connecting Beijing and Shanghai's very impressive, and makes all the hand-wringing in the UK around HS2 (whatever happened to HS1? Did it happen?) laughable. Around 1000 miles in 5 hours is very good going indeed, especially at roughly £60 each way. Getting back to Beijing felt oddly like coming home, although I probably shouldn't have been surprised after having ben renting a flat, studying and finding work for a few months here already. Later in the week I noticed something funny whilst teaching English to Lydia: the week before had been her younger sister's birthday, and she was bouncing off the walls playing with her new lego sets. By the time my next class with her rolled around, the lego was already sat, assembled, gathering dust in the corner. What was keeping her sister amused this time? The cardboard box it had come in. People really are the same the world over.

Then last weekend I was supposed to go to Tianjin for what was marketing itself as the world's biggest hallowe'en party. This was taking place at a faux-Versailles owned and built by Dynasty, one of the companies who are bringing viniculture to China. Unfortunately (or so I thought), I'd hurt my ankle doing kung fu (yes, the same one. No, I don't think there's a pattern) the day before, so had to sell my ticket. As it turned out the whole thing was at best terribly organised and at worst a complete scam. The buses didn't run, the drinks didn't materialise and almost no-one got in. There were actually police, even SWAT teams, keeping people out. It must have been oddly reminiscent of the storming of the Bastille, except the people clamouring to get in were pissed-up foreigners in silly costumes. Read more about it here, if you find yourself so inclined: http://beijingcream.com/2013/11/the-disastrous-electric-castle-party-in-tianjin/ Fortunately, the friend I sold my ticket to managed to climb in through a window and apparently had a good time despite all of the above.

I spent a hugely enjoyable weekend not being hungover and tutoring, only to hear on Monday that my rent was apparently due. Looking at the contract, it turned out that yes, rent is due 15 days in advance of the previous installment running out. It also turned out that one of my flatmates had left for Yunnan a few hours before, to spend a week living in a picturesque farming village where a friend of his was teaching English. Fortunately and in contrast to plenty of other horror stories I've heard, the estate agent for my building seems to not be an a*******, and he said it was fine for my flatmate to pay when he got back (today) and for the rest of us to pay on Friday.

Seizing the opportunity to be a proactive, competent almost-adult, I set about sorting out a Western Union transfer for the money, even calculating how much of the tutoring money in my wallet I could put towards it to reduce the hit on my UK account whilst still being able to eat. Congratulating myself on how fearsomely competent I was being, I walked over to the bank where for some reason I got to wait in the 'VIP' area, where they had leather chairs and boiled sweets on the tables, which I took to be a karmic reward for showing levels of competence hitherto thought beyond mortal ken. Then once I got the money I realised I could have just withdrawn the same amount with my card over a few days and it would have cost me around 50 quid less. Ah well, at least I got another opportunity to practise my Chinese swear words, and paying now means I won't be paying over a thousand pounds in rent on the day before my birthday. Now I just have to work out how the next tranche is supposed to be paid when half of my flatmates leave in January and I'll almost certainly be away travelling on the date rent's due...

Such seems to be the way of life in China; potentially humongous crises blindside me with surprising frequency, but then turn out to be entirely manageable. I'll either end this year far better at coping with stress than I was when I arrived, or far worse, and I can't work out which yet so I'm not going to try and guess. Which probably bodes well. Anyway, I'll wrap up by talking about a few Chinese films and TV shows I saw whilst sprawled on the couch with my ankle at death's door, because quite frankly if you've read this far you'll read anything:

• My Oscar: a You've Been Framed-style show of home videos. At one point they cut to a compilation (obviously taken from YouTube, but sssh!) of American parents telling their children they'd eaten all the kids' Hallowe'en sweets and filming their reactions, which made for some good 'aren't foreigners silly?' laughs, but in fairness to the programme it then showed a compilation of Chinese parents taking iPads away from their kids with some equally funny results, particularly the girl of about 3 who saw her mum walk away with the iPad, looked slightly confused, then walked over to her mum's handbag, took out the iPhone and started playing with that instead. This was followed up by a boringly serious monologue from the host about how this was a real problem and how letting children get so addicted to technology is bad parenting. At least they're acknowledging the problem I suppose.
• The Lion Roars 2: a slapstick romcom set in ancient China (yes, you read that right). Mainly worth a mention for the first few scenes, in which it's established that a young woman is terrorising her village by stopping all the men from taking second wives with her kung-fu skills. Her widowed magistrate father decides that he'd quite like to get remarried (which she also isn't allowing - widowed women remarrying was heavily stigmatised in traditional China), so sides with the villagers and they agree that if they can just marry her off she'll calm down. I really quite want to see the first film in this series now.
• Red Cliff: words can't describe how incredible this film is. It's as if Lord of the Rings had a baby with Gladiator, and 300 had a baby with Troy, and once they'd grown up those two films then adopted a Chinese baby and raised it to be better than both of them combined. As someone whose first interest in China came from a video game about the same period of semi-mythologised heroes and adventurers as this film, and who shares his Chinese name with the guy who rides alone on a white horse through a horde of enemies to save a baby in the first 20 minutes, I can honestly say it's the film I've always wanted to see. My only complaint is that at a total running time of 5 hours in 2 parts, it's not nearly long enough.

There's much more I want to say about Chinese TV, one sitcom in particular, but I'll save that for a later date because I haven't watched enough of it yet and this is already quite a long post. Hopefully I'll have the time and capacity to write again - on my birthday I plan to buy a bottle of really high-quality baijiu (a Chinese spirit which is never less than 40% abv, very frequently more, and which at the lower end of the market could provide a cheap alternative to paint thinner) because it's hugely popular in China, so I don't want to unfairly base a low opinion of it on the cheap stuff I've tried so far. If I survive that experience I'll undoubtedly have something interesting to write about, as long as I can still arrange my thoughts into anything remotely resembling coherent sentences!

* Except whoops! Japan got given it by way of a consolation prize for 'racial equality' not being included in the League of Nations' founding principles (because tearing Russia a new one in 1895, carving out their own empire in the Pacific and playing the great power game like a natural still didn't make Japan as good as white people, as far as white people were concerned). Long story short, the Versailles Treaty's only noteworthy in China because it set off a series of student protests known as the May 4th Movement, which really fired up the debate about China's modernisation and from which many of China's key thinkers and personalities of the subsequent decades, including Mao Zedong, got their first taste of serious political involvement.

** According to a comedian I saw in Cambridge who grew up in South Africa, the translation of that chant is something along the lines of "A: Oh look, there's a lion over there. B: So there is." Sorry if I've ruined that film for you.

***I can't help feeling that if "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" weren't the government's own official term for how the Chinese economy is structured and therefore acceptable, it would be really really racist.