Woke up this morning to rain absolutely bucketing down. Nice. When rain falls here during typhoon season, it doesn't matter if you have an umbrella or not, the rain hits the ground so hard, it bounces back up to your knees.
So, what do three crazy women with 5 kids in tow decide to do? Go fabric market shopping!!
We decided yesterday that we'd go to the Chinese fabric markets - called Di Hua Street Markets which are basically streets and buildings full of fabric shops, tailoring materials and dried fruit/seeds/meat and Chinese medicinal shops. It's about a 30 minute ride away into the city.
Only thing was, Andrew had the car today and I'd left all our umbrellas and raincoats in the car. DOH!
Should have realised this was a first of many, many omens.
1) No umbrella or raincoats = don't go out in the rain (first bad omen)
I got our guard to call a taxi - usually, the taxis are clean and safe and the guard helps by telling the drivers where we'd like to go rather than us trying to get the drivers to understand our very bad Chinese pronunciation.
Well. Today was not a good day.
2) Daytrip out + Bucketing down with rain = 2nd bad omen.
I raced over to the car, shoved the girls in the back seat, but got absolutely soaked as the driver didn't understand that he needed to open the boot so I could put the pram in. Finally when he did get it, after the guard trying to tell him in Chinese, much joint gesticulating and me finally running to the boot to bang on it as a big hint, he opened it up and I shoved the pram in and raced inside - a completely wet rat.
Here onwards, the omens just kept on coming.
The driver, I thought seemed rather mentally challenged. He just nodded in a sort of crazy way when the guard spoke to him in Chinese and mumbled something in Chinese that to me sounded like 'blahblahblah', but I assumed all was well.
We turned the corner and he stopped the car and said 'Wei?' which is what you say when you answer a phone here, so at first I thought he was talking on his mobile and then realised he had aimed it at me. 'Oh! Shipai Lu, deborchee' I responded in my very bad Chinese, to which he just said 'Wei?' and looked a bit cross eyed.
At this point I just thought, oh, poor man. Must be bit slow. Then, I wondered why he'd be driving a car, let alone a taxi, if he was. Hmmm. Anyway. he mumbled something and started moving the car again, so I pointed, he huffed and I sort of directed him to my friend Julie's apartment, holding tightly onto the two girls, who really didn't want to be restrained.
When I got there, I rang Julie to say to bring down the address in Chinese on paper so we didn't get completely lost. She didn't have it, but we got her guard to explain. To which the guy did not understand either. Then, Julie rang her Chinese friend and husband to explain to our 'special' driver.
Our retardo taximan just kept saying, 'wei? wei? wei?' on the phone and when the phone was passed back to Julie, her friends said 'Get out of the car - the man is completely mad or on drugs....' to which we saw the driver spit red into a cup and pop another beetle nut vine into his mouth.
All suddenly became clear.
He was high as a kite on beetle nut and completely OFF HIS ROCKER!!!!!
We escaped and got into another taxi.
3) Taximan on beetle nut = Crazy retardo = 3rd bad omen
We got to the fabric market, realised we were dropped off at the wrong side and so got completely soaked once again racing round to the right entrance.
Finally found the lifts to get us up onto the second floor of a building where it is fabric central, and after waiting for quite a while for the lift to come, was just about to get into it, when 3 very rude or ignorant (or both) Chinese men raced in ahead of us and closed the doors just as we were about to step in! Yeah, thanks you d***heads.
When the next one came alone, we all squeezed into it plus another woman and man who rushed in at the last minute and needed to go three floors higher than us, so what do they do when it comes to our floor? Just stand in the way, so there's lots of 'excuse me's' (or deborchee's) and squeezing past them, and then as Julie tried to get out, they wouldn't move and the doors closed on her leg.
At least we were there, and Zoe and her two little ones were waiting for us - Zoe is usually very good at keeping everyone calm and making things sane again, but she'd had a long and uncomfortable taxi journey all the way down the mountain so was pretty frazzled too!
Am giving up doing the bad omens - there are just too many.
Fact is, we shouldn't have gone to the market today.
The girls were sopping wet, I was sopping wet, all they wanted to do was race through the rabbit warren of the market to which all you could hear was us mums shouting their names and chasing after them in all directions and finding that they'd pulled bales of material onto the floor or were 'picnicking' on offcuts that they'd managed to unravel and sit their wet bodies on.
Then, to just add to our amazing adventure, I managed to get some kind of allergic reaction - my eyes became incredibly bloodshot and itchy and I started sneezing no end - think I must have got too close to the feathers!
Need I say more?
It was a scarily horrible morning!!!!!!!!
All I went for was to buy some nice Chinese material for them to do something nice with as a reminder of their birth place. I managed to find some things, but really, I need to go back sans kids....or maybe just on a sunny day.
In the afternoon, whilst Juliette was having her nap, Annalise and I made what she calls 'smudge' (fudge) - we should have just stayed in and done these kind of things instead, as we had a ball.
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