Traditional Chinese tea house for breakfast

Traditional Chinese tea house for breakfast


Traditional Chinese breakfast

I was the first to wake, which is most unusual! Apparently neither Will nor Mark had slept well. We went to a traditional yet modern Chinese tea shop in a shopping mall a short bus ride away. We ordered dim sum, thick sweet pancakes and somehow ended up with spaghetti bolognaise despite ordering something completely different! (It’s quite common for that to happen in China as we have found out!) But no bother because it was actually very tasty.


After drinking lots of tea and eating way too much delicious food we went for a massage. Or rather Will had a massage, and Mark and I had a thing called cupping, which I had never tried before but it is an ancient Chinese method of putting suction cups all over your back and leaving them there for a while to suck out toxins, improve circulation and balance meridians.

When they removed the cups I had lots of raised, dark red spots that looked a bit like giant pepperoni all over my back.
I’m not gonna lie, it was uncomfortable. Not painful exactly but definitely not relaxing. When they removed the cups after about 25 mins I had lots of raised, dark red spots that looked a bit like giant pepperoni all over my back. I won’t disturb you with a photo of that. These take anywhere between 3 days and 3 weeks to disappear. Some of them were bruised and tender. Clearly I had a lot of toxins in my skin!

Chinese family

After this we went back to Lingnan and had a panini in a wonderful Italian café. I had parma ham, mozzarella, tomato and black truffle which was divine. Afterwards we went back to Mark’s flat and basically chilled for the entire afternoon. Joan invited us to eat at her sister’s house just across the road. Apparently she wanted to meet me because ‘she had heard I was beautiful’! Mark had to work 7-9pm so we went with Joan to her sister’s apartment around 7.30pm. She was living with another girl and her boss. None of them spoke English but we had a bit of a chat with Joan and got to know her a bit better. She is learning English from Mark and was having a little trouble but she seemed keen to learn from us.

Her sister cooked a beautiful spread of eggs and tomatoes, spicy fish soup, noodles and rice. It was delicious and we felt honoured and very grateful. Mark arrived just after 9pm with beer so we had a few drinks with them then headed home around 10.30pm. I slept on the sofa again but didn’t sleep quite so well.