In juxtaposition to this, the sky has looked like a faulty fuse box recently with the most intricately shaped, violent lightning forks I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’d go as far as saying they’ve looked unrealistic- on one occasion some of the forks were purple, with eight or nine prongs. (Can you use the word prongs when you’re talking about lightning forks?) This was the same night that they appeared alongside a double rainbow and a blood red sunset- it was as though the sky had just installed Photoshop and was now trying to compete with the Aurora Borealis. I could hear the whole city screaming and cheering for it. The most bizarre thing was that there was absolutely no storm alongside it either, lightning without thunder and a rainbow without the rain. The morning after this light show I was outside, the sky had completely cleared and it was blazing sunshine…when thunder started. No rain, no clouds, no lightning, just thunder by itself. It was absolutely deafening as well, I’m wondering now if this strange natural phenomena might actually have been bombs going off. I’m pretty sure this place could host a nuclear war and it wouldn’t come out looking much different.

Whilst I’m talking about mysterious sounds I just remembered I have a burning question- what the hell is it that makes a rainforest sound like a rainforest? You know, the sound which is like a like a high pitched constant rattle? No, maybe more like a rattle crossed with a buzz? It may have been going on this whole time and I’ve only just tuned into it, but it reminds me of those ‘sounds of the rainforest’ cds which peculiar people buy because they think it helps them relax and fall asleep. Ironic really when the place is brimming with creatures that want to eat you, or at least poison you ready for something else to come along and eat you. Did you know that a jungle is a just a rainforest with a thinner canopy of trees? This means that jungles have more going on at ground floor level, I think that might be worse. Also do you realise that for almost six days now I’ve had a strange mesh of two songs from the Jungle Book going around and around in my head? It’s like a short circuit without an end. As soon as I reach the point in ‘Wanna Be Like You’ where I don’t know any more of the lyrics, the records flips straight over and starts playing the ‘Bare Necessities’ until it’s eventually too much to bear and that damn baboon starts singing the first song again.

Speaking of blatant, groundless lies about the western world, Simon and I were talking to James about London. He is going there this summer on an arranged tour so we asked him if he would be sightseeing- he said that it all depended on what the tour guide had planned. We told him that there were some nice buildings to see and mentioned which areas were nice to wander around, to which he replied “yes but we don’t go out without the tour guide, London very dangerous!”  So obviously I had to go away and research every spurious tale that Chinese people get told about Europe. Apparently on some flights, Chinese tourists are given information leaflets about the dangers of Europe. There was one in particular which stood out- it was en route to Germany and insisted that during any sightseeing activities everyone must stay together as a pack because there are so many gypsies on the streets “who will get together and surround you, demanding to see your purses and wallets in order to rob you. Furthermore, at any historical or cultural sights do not under any circumstance ask anyone to take a photo for you because the people here will also use this opportunity to rob you”.

There was another section about local customs and the leaflet explained that European cashiers don’t like it when many people put their items down on the counter at the same time all expecting to be served…at the same time. Rocket science, I know. “Cashiers in China can deal with calculating many things simultaneously- we can serve three people at once and everybody will receive the correct change. Europeans don’t like this, they cannot deal with maths in this way and you are likely to put them in a bad mood if you try to force them to.” FIRST OF ALL IT’S NOT A TRIP TO THE LION ENCLOSURE OF A ZOO AND SECOND OF ALL THERE ARE AT LEAST NINETEEN OTHER THINGS WRONG WITH THAT SENTENCE, JUST ONE OF WHICH BEING THE FACT THAT NEITHER OF THE WORDS “MANNERS” OR “QUEUING” APPEAR IN IT. On top of all this the leaflet also dissuaded the tourists from eating at European restaurants whilst they were travelling as it was likely to make them ill and this could disrupt the heavy itinerary for the trip…the heavy even schedule demanded that everyone synchronise their watches to the nearest minute. Europe: enter at your own risk.

Despite having been here for an eternity, there’s still a lot to learn, namely which lies are safe to use and which leave you treading on fiery coals. Never, I repeat, never use illness as an excuse to get out of doing something. Illness is taken very seriously here, even more so than I realised- not that you can blame them when the medieval plague still festers around select towns. Yesterday the landlord came over at crack of dawn to collect the rent, we knew she was coming in advance but Si didn’t find the grit to get out of bed at such a painfully unsociable time to talk to her. Instead I closed the bedroom door and waited in the lounge for her to arrive. Obviously her first question was- “is Simon not coming out to talk?”

“No he’s gone back to sleep, he had a headache when he woke up.”

She looked she’d just seen some horrifying apparition.

“Oh my god, does he need to go to hospital?”

“What? No, he has a headache.”

“He should go to hospital! I can come with you to help with any translation.”

I was having to block her path to the bedroom door as a precaution now.

“NO REALLY IT’S FINE.”

“The hospital is only ten minutes away, it won’t take long, we should take him right away!”

In the end she settled for giving me extremely intricate directions on how to get there and how to explain what was wrong with Simon when push inevitably came to shove. When I got around to relaying all of this to Simon he asked me to give him my word that even if his leg fell off I wouldn’t take him anywhere near a hospital in Haikou city. I agreed to this. I’m also going to have to come up with a new excuse for the occasions when either of us doesn’t want to interact with the day because I’m absolutely certain that this one is going to land us in trouble.

Another thing I’ve noticed here is that strangers seem to be able to communicate with each other telepathically. In the last few days three people have asked me if my hair is real. Three! It’s never happened once before, in the whole eternity that my hair has lived here, now everyone is asking. What on earth is this? This one old guy in a grubby white vest even came over to stroke it. Personal space isn’t really at the forefront of anybody’s concerns here.

Up until now I’ve managed to continuously give these dreadful entities a very wide berth, through a combination of strategic routes around supermarkets and learning to hold my breath for dangerously extensive periods of time. Honestly, it’s necessary- you would choke and drown otherwise. So needless to say I was really pleased the when James ordered some for us all to try at the restaurant where we teach him.  “It’s Hainan speciality! You try, you try.” The two words ‘Hainan’ and ‘speciality’ have become the least enticing words in any language. The situation got worse still when the durian actually arrived- you see it wasn’t in the form of fresh fruit, or ‘unfresh’ fruit either for that matter. It had been cut into chunks so heavily deep fried in batter that if you had no sense of smell you could have easily mistook them for hash browns. The inside of the batter was just as bizarre too, it was white and stringy like poor quality chicken nuggets then the very centre was over flowing with this really repugnant greasy yellow paste. It was on a whole new spectrum of grotesque, impossible to compare to any other flavour. In fact, I’m working on permanently erasing it from my memory.

To me this flavour suggests that they’re not supposed to be eaten, by anyone or anything, ever. Apparently pigs, elephants and tigers all find the fruit quite appealing but given the absolute randomness of these customers, they were probably in a position where they didn’t have all that much choice at the time. It must have the strongest natural defence of anything in wild, we ought to give it credit for this genetic achievement and leave it in peace, miles and miles away from any civilisation. Go and buy and cactus if you absolutely need to be around some spiky, dangerous form of plant life, leave the durians to just be durians.

On a vaguely similar note, Simon recently had a cold, just a common cold, no big deal. However, because of this cold James absolutely forbade him to eat any eggs until he was completely over this bout of mild illness. Altogether this egg lecture went on for a solid two weeks. Every single day he would harp on and on about how eggs are the worst thing you can possibly eat when you have a cold (I believe the scientific base for this was, oh yea, absolutely nothing). I mean we literally had to lie about what we had eaten if he asked because he was so stern and persistent about this damn egg rule. A couple of days back, Simon told him that he was still feeling a bit ill…James ordered some fried eggs for him. I have no words.

I was assuming we’d find some workmen to ask where the hell the door had gone. I did find some, about eight of them in fact but they were all asleep in the sawdust on the floor and I felt a bit bad waking any of them up over such a trivial matter. In the end we had to search the adjoining building (the downtown police headquarters) high and low for a door which connected it to the visa office. I tried asking one of the police officers how to get into the next building but it was about useful as interrogating the dead.  He looked horribly inconvenienced and either pointed me to the exit or shooed me away, it was hard to tell. By complete fluke we decided to follow a girl carrying a kettle and she lead us to the visa office, I mean we were on the wrong side of the counter but beggars can’t be choosers.

I think maybe now that summer is approaching and there are more people visiting the island the locals here are bored of seeing white people. There are a lot more people treating us with a kind of slightly irritated indifference than before. I really must stress though- this doesn’t apply to everyone. Last week I was walking along the street and an old woman dragging a peculiar metal frame on wheels started walking alongside me…staring at me. Then she started leaning in further towards me so that she was staring from about a six inch distance. She was really making it a challenge to ignore her. She looked me up and down for a long time, with this expression like she was strenuously trying to make a difficult decision or solve a conundrum. Finally she nodded, “hmm…piaoliang [beautiful]”, and stormed away. Well, at least she really thought about it before coming to a conclusion, I suppose I should be pleased.

However, I did see this scene the other day in a palm tree next to said field. There must be something in the atmosphere around these parts- I’m eagerly waiting to see a rabbit with a pocket-watch one of these days.

Now I had to draw a diagram to accurately show the height of the tree (that’s me standing underneath it). One minute I was watching this guy doing Tai Chi on the grass and the next he runs up the side of palm tree, it was like watching a squirrel it was so swift. Simon thinks I dreamed the whole thing up since people generally don’t hover around in palm trees ten feet in the air balancing on one leg doing Tai Chi. You decide.

On the bright side our teaching is going a little better this time round. James even gave us some Chinese tea the other day which costs £600 per kilogram. Why, you may be thinking, is it so expensive? Well there’s a very good reason, you see it comes from a special tree which lives on a rock on the side of a special mountain. To be honest it tastes like every other Chinese tea, which taste remarkably similar to hot water. So why, you may still be thinking, is it so expensive? Basically, because the rich here have nothing better to spend their money on. Still though, a nice gesture. Simon and I are also learning quite a lot from teaching these lessons, so far we’ve managed to cover the entire history of China which was summed up by “well we lost most of our big wars in history because everybody was taking too much opium”. It took a very long time to understand what this meant because instead of saying the world ‘opium’, James was calling it ‘hop-ee’ which believe me sounds a lot more abstract out of context.

The only bad thing to come from all of this is that every day we’re spending two hours speaking English in a very peculiar caveman-like manner and it’s unbelievably difficult to snap out of it. This is getting progressively worse too. You see, it began by saying jumbled sentences like “there’s nothing I would less rather do”, which sounds wrong but it’s passable. Then Simon started mixing up words like “hotel” and “hospital” which was a bit more worrying.  Now we seem to be in this habit of making comments and then unconsciously repeating them in a simpler manner. For example, we are walking somewhere and it’s raining…”Oh no I’m soaking now.” “YES, BAD RAIN, VERY VERY WET.” Did I also mention that REANNE VERY LIKE LISTENING MUSIC. VERY MUCH LIKE AMERICAN GUY MUSIC. BEAUTIFUL. EVERY DAY LISTEN. The irony is that picking up speech patterns in this way is supposedly a sign of social aptitude, pretty sure anyone who has to hold a conversation with either of us in the next couple of months will disagree. I’m trying to read incredibly tedious, boring books and look at pictures of old libraries in order to maintain my grip on the English language. I doubt if it’s working but it does provide a bit of imaginative fuel for pretending that I don’t really live in this ramshackle neighbourhood in the most hopeless city in the northern hemisphere.

The other slight alteration in our lessons is that somehow food has now become involved. This always occurs via same conversation which goes all the lines of- “Sam (that’s Simon but it’s too late to correct him, he calls me Reen) do you want something to eat?” “No thanks I just ate lunch, are you hungry James?” “No I just ate…WAITRESS bring us food.” The food tends to be sweet corn. Oh sorry did I just say sweet corn? I meant battered sweet corn, infused with sugar. It’s really quite dreadful but apparently in China “girls like it because very sweet”. He suggested that maybe I “don’t like the Chinese tea here because girls like sweet milk tea and fruit juice. Guys like tea and coffee.” I’m happy to admit that my anatomical understanding is limited, but last time I checked the human sense of taste was completely unrelated to gender. He seems to think it’s the same as how girls like the colour pink more than boys do.

The second thing he ordered for us to eat was potato. Oh sorry did I say potato? What I meant to say was “mountain medicine potato” which bears absolutely no resemblance to a potato, probably due to it not being a potato at all. First of all it’s purple on the outside and fluorescent nuclear green on the inside, and it’s made out of goo. Also in batter. I had to wait until he wasn’t looking and hide the thing in my raincoat. Hours later I realised I was still wandering around with the damn mountain potato hidden in there so I left in a shop.

1)      Put proper amount of water in cooking pot with drop vegetable oil.

2)      Put a bag of noodles strip.

3)      In a separate manner.

4)      Churn the water is reboiling up. Make flame weak.

5)      The noodles will be done.

6)      According to the seasons, you may do cool noodle. Taste well.

I don’t know how or where I went wrong but by stage 5) the noodles weren’t ‘done’ so unfortunately I lost the flow of the instructions after that.

The only time that people are really forthcoming is when they think they might be able to sell something to you. This is ironic really because selling anything in China is almost exactly the same as shooting fish in a barrel. What’s more, you don’t even have to pretend that your product serves any purpose, given that the latest trend here is paper I-pads. The fact that they are made out of paper and do nothing isn’t even the most absurd part of this, nor is the fact that this polished bit of old tree costs £50. No, the most incomprehensibly ludicrous part of this is that people are buying them as an offering to give to their deceased ancestors to use from beyond the grave. Whoever it was who thought of this at the fake Apple store is either absolutely mental or absolutely not.

Whilst I’m pretty sure that this marketing stunt would have worked at any time of year, in the consumers defence I will at least mention that they were buying them for an occasion- this week there was a national holiday to celebrate ‘Tomb Sweeping Day’. To be honest nothing really happened except that for five days the adjacent building would play this dreadful ‘make you want to throw yourself off a cliff’ dance music from 7am each morning. It’s probably fair to assume that it’s one of these holidays which has lost its meaning over the years, like Easter I suppose. The day after the ‘celebrations’ had died down I had this moment of shock when I was in my house alone and I realised that it was quiet. For a few moments this amazing haze of tranquillity seeped into my brain, but I didn’t quite harness it, I was trying too hard to listen to the sound of nothing which uncovered the reality that it actually wasn’t quiet at all. There was still the deafening rattle of construction, pointless wailing and the vile gargle of everyone struggling to bring up the contents of their own throat. I really can’t stress how different this noise is to the normal, reassuring hum of a city. You see, it’s not a murmur of a crowd, it’s a constant shrieking of a few people, but that ‘few’ is always just enough to ensure that it’s constant. I can’t accurately remember what quiet sounds like.