We had brunch and took eight of my films to be developed. I'm a bit nervous because the guy gave us a reciept for 40 RMB (about ?.60) for which we'd paid nothing and said something about tomorrow. Oh well. Then we tracked down the Jade Buddha Temple. It rained heavily for two and a half minutes. There was nothing particularly noteworthy on the way there, but I did see the woman in the post office the other day using an abacus which I forgot to mention, so that fills that gap. We paid admission and read the sign outside that said no fortune-telling or selling of silver foil could go on inside the temple, and that on the 15th of a lunar month the place opened at 5am.

The place was very busy and I think it must have been the 15th of a lunar month today because everyone was making tiny silver foil boats, stuffing them into red paper bags and setting fire to them. The temple smelled of bonfires and incense and sounded like monks chanting. There were flags stung up and old ladies on chairs with picnics and laps full of foil and boats. We saw the jade Buddha, a huge and rather pretty statue in an upstairs room. He was the Thai- or Indian-style fellow, serene and slim and with a head dress, rather than the fat and jolly Chinese version. The edges of the walls were covered in hundreds of small gold Buddhas.

Then we took a taxi to a tourist market we'd stumbled on to look for a mah jong set because I wanted to learn to play it when I got back. We didn't buy one in the end because the salesmen were all too pushy and the sets were very heavy but it was amazing how low the prices went when we walked away. One lady even chased us down the street saying, 'You tell me how much! You tell me price!' when the final price we heard was already about half the starting one. In all the shops we went in, just to have a look, shop assistants would pounce and immediately start offering things. It was very hard work and not that much fun. I did buy Mikey (actually, Mikey handed over the money cos I never have any) a wooden book for Chrismas though. I've been looking for one for ages. There were a lot of Irish tourists trying to wait for a space to cross a footbridge and not succeeding. I heard one of them ask if they should be moving because everyone was passing them. For all I know, they could still be there.

I bought a magic magnetic floaty thing and some magic heaty-plumps from a lady who looked shocked at the price I suggested and then capitulated instantly making me suspect I should have tried harder. A soldier asked Mikey's opinion about which pashmina to buy a German man.

We walked to the Bund and had a bit of time to kill until supper, so we checked our mail in an internet cafe in an obscure room that we got to through a lift in the back of a department store behind a rack of men's jackets and then along a maze of corridors with cabaret rooms and women in red singing Chinese opera. One of the rooms was playing a song by a little-known German band that was a hit (only in Germany) in 1996 while I was there. We ate in the place below one we ate in earlier in the week and then took a taxi home. I had a tepid bath and wrote this. Now I'm going to bed!