The Hunt for the Pink T-shirt

It’s not very often that you need to find a pink t-shirt at short notice. We were positive. A quick 15 minute jaunt along Shiquan Jie should do it, then dinner. Then relax.

We left work at 5 o’clock. We sat on the bus for about half an hour and it didn’t move anywhere. I have now nicknamed myself the ‘five o’clock bus fascist’. My feeling being that if you’re not on the bus at 5 o’clock then you’re missing the bus, the bus is leaving without you. The 5 o’clock bus leaves at 5 o’clock. Not so.

At around 5.30 the bus driver shouts at us to get off the bus. Well he shouts a lot of things in Chinese that we don’t understand and gesticulates towards the door. He drives off leaving us in the same place we started. It transpires that he has gone to help out another bus that has crashed. Obviously.

So. We get on another bus. A bus that spends half an hour driving us in the wrong direction round the lake and then dumps us and tells us to get on another bus. Deciding our luck with buses is not particularly good we sack it off and opt for a taxi. The taxi driver does not seem pleased about our destination. He calls someone and puts them on the phone to us. The person on the phone asks where we are going. We tell him. This happens another three times before the taxi driver dumps us at the opposite end of the (very long) street from where we want to be.

We begin the very long walk, laden with bags from work. At first there is an absence of pink t-shirts. Shops have EVERY other colour of t-shirt other than pink. Then we spy some pink t-shirts. Ones with feathers, diamantes, giant pictures. No plain pink t-shirts. Where is Primark when you need it? We split up and arrange to meet in half an hour, pink t-shirts in hand. Neither of us can find the place we arranged to meet and spend 45 minutes looking for each other. I accidently knock a man off his bike and cause a ruckus. We trek UP the road, DOWN the road and eventually get a bloody pink t-shirt around 9.30. Only 4 and a half hours later.

We have dinner and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. Pink skin to match the pink t-shirt.

BUT: we did raise nearly 600 quid for breast cancer charities.