Hi guys,
I am back in England now.
On my penultimate day in China, I visited the Martyr park and the Hunan Provincial Museum with two of my sisters. Very nice too. then I had a meal with Ding, my second sister, Yurong's best friend. Ding talked about her rather useless ex-husband and about her lack of dating success. She is a successful businesswoman and will not settle for someone who sees her money and doesn't see her. Yurong phoned her from a party in a drunken state, wanting me to come and Ding dissuaded her in a slightly irritated state.
On the last day I spent the morning in the Mei Yin agency, sitting at a computer and chatting to the translators. They asked me what kind of ladies I liked the look of and why, asked for suggestions about which profile pictures I thought were most effective, and asked if the real ladies I knew there were correctly represented by their photos.
I noticed that whenever my cursor went over an English word, the Chinese translation came up immediately, with alternative meanings and spoken translation. The translators rely on this for doing a lot of their translations. A translator showed me the programme I needed to download, though for the life of me I can't download it in England. It's all in Chinese, so if someone who is better than me at reading Chinese can read it, it is a really useful tool. The addresses are:
www.baidu.com ,
www.skycn.com/soft/31325 and
http://account.youdao.com When I left I hugged my two best sisters at the hotel and they both said 'I love you'. I hope I will be able to say that to someone next time I go and hear her say it back to me. Now where did I stash my pot of gold. lol
Alex