Miao returned home today from a business trip (auditing) in Shenyang, the province capital of Liaoning in which we live. I waited for her bus to arrive at the train station for indeed that’s where the buses come and go, and was struck again at how young she looks. I’ve missed her and it’s nice to have her back again.

At least one of us (me) will be going to England on Tuesday (from Beijing) so we went into the train station to buy train tickets for tommorrow, we had thoughtlessly not considered this before and we regretted it today as there was no sleeper tickets availabe, only a 15hr seat service at 59kuai each, which is cheaper than we usually pay to goto Shenyang (3hr fast train journey). Howerever we were not willing to shell out the money for Flight tickets and this was our only other viable alternative. Neither of us wanted to go on a bus, so the cheapest train service it was. We then went home by taxi and had a little rest.

Working on information Miao had gleaned from the phone infromation service of EMS (China Post) we had intended to goto the EMS depot near the airport to collect her visa application materials that the British Embassy sent back to us. We didn’t know the result of her visa application until we opened this package. Unbeknown to us, and seemingly the operators at EMS, they had already arranged delivery for today to one of her colleagues in her work office.

With that cleared up we went out again to visit a bank in order to change money for our trip to England. We found that the banks and exchanges in Dalian (and by Dalian read China) don’t exchange Renmin Bi for other currencies at the weekend – only on working days.

We then walked to Miao’s workplace where we eagerly opened the embassy package and found that our application had been successful and that she had a valid 6 month visitors visa. I’ll be going home for a holiday with Miao afterall.

We had hoped to goto one of the markets behind the train station to buy tea, but by this time it was a bit late and we were both quite tired. Miao especially since she had been working long hours on her business trip. So we came home, ate and we will goto bed soon. Tommorrow is the beginning of our trip home to England and will take a lot of time and energy (and we still haven’t packed yet)