Flat-Hunting in -30, in Chinese

And here we are, in Harbin, which is, if everything goes to plan, our home base for at least three months.

We push through the surge and out of the station into the brisk night air. In Bulgaria, this time last year, I remember thinking how very cold -22 was.

Harbin is way below that. The snow on the ground is granular, icy: the fresh stuff sparkles like diamonds, not the soft flakes I’m used to, heaped piles of it are black with the coal dust they seem to use in lieu of grit here.

But we have hats, gloves, down jackets, snoods to pull over our faces to warm the air we breathe. It’s fine, in fact. It’s really OK!

“Well,” I say to Zac. “It isn’t that cold, is it?”

“No,” he says. “It’s alright.”

And… Oh wow! Right there! Right in front of the train station, there’s a little ice palace, clear and sparkling, each individual ice-brick gleaming in fluorescent neon, decked in scarlet Chinese lanterns, topped with little ice-neon pyramids.

It’s so shiny! It’s so lovely! I like Harbin already!

“Oooh!” I say. “Look at the ice palace!”

Zac looks up from the snow and goggles at it.

OK, I think, we’ve made the right decision. We can be happy here.

Ooh! There’s a shop selling SAUSAGES! Not Chinese sweet sausages, either. Proper Russian-style sausages, packed with garlic! Woohoo!

Further Harbin Chinese is as good as it’s supposed to be. It is, indeed, pretty classical putonghua, the style good teachers speak, the standard style of Chinese, which makes it really, really easy to understand.

Even the hotel touts are speaking putonghua. And I’m pleased to see there are tonnes of them, so if all else fails I can throw us on their mercies and they’ll find us somewhere…. anywhere… somewhere warm to sleep.

I dump Zac with the bags and wander across the enormous open space in front of the train station, eyeing the serried ranks of high rises to work out which holds a hotel.

It’s here, I figure, or Zhongyang Dajie, the pedestrianised main street that’s Harbin’s answer to Oxford Street.

Ooh! There’s a shop selling SAUSAGES! Not Chinese sweet sausages, either. Proper Russian-style sausages, packed with garlic!

Woohoo!

And a joint offering pelmeni!

WOOHOO!

I tear myself away from food and focus on the hotels. There are several station hotels in Harbin. I go for the one opposite, because it’s got a lovely rotating door with flowers in it, and the cheaper one has those heavy, grimy silver insulating curtains bound with tape that lurk behind all doors in northern China in winter. Practical, yes. But also fundamentally depressing.

They want almost 500 kuai for a room! Yowsers.

Then, fuck it, I think. We’re in peak season, it’s a Chinese four-star, we need a reasonable place to stay on our first night here, or otherwise we’re going to end up hating Harbin. Plus it’s our three-year travelversary. And then I can get up early, eat their Western breakfast, use their wifi to find some flats to look at, and we can be in our apartment tomorrow afternoon.

Our room even has a bathtub! WOW!

I try to grab a cab. “100 kuai,” says the dude. I laugh. “50,” he offers. “Use the meter,” I say. “Can’t,” he says. We repeat this a couple of times.

Perhaps predictably, we sleep through breakfast. Bummer.

I pay through the nose to leave our bags at the train station rather than cart them around town for the foreseeable, then we head off to Zhongyang Dajie. Which isn’t where I think it is.

Then I realise that the map in our Lonely Planet is scaled wrongly, though not as badly off as Google Maps was in Beijing, and try to grab a cab.

“100 kuai,” says the dude.

I laugh. “50,” he offers.

“Use the meter,” I say.

“Can’t,” he says.

We repeat this a couple of times until we find a guy who’s prepared to use his meter, and pay a princely 9 kuai to the end of Zhongyang Dajie, a pretty cobbled street adorned in ice sculptures, with some rather splendiferous nineteenth-century buildings in the Russian christmas cake vein, a tonne of malls and a chaos of fake brand stores and “Russian shops”.

This, I figure, is as good a place as any to get our bearings in Harbin, not to mention find somewhere warm with coffee and internet.

“Oooh!” says Zac. “They’ve got Psy!”

They have indeed, alongside some more conventional ice carvings, sculptures of the likes of swans and mermaids, got an absolutely bloody enormous sculpture of Psy. We’re not far from the Korean border, here, and the Chinese, even in Beijing, are even more mad for Gangnam Style than the rest of the world.

“Ooh!” says Zac. “CAKES!”

They’re very lovely cakes, actually. The coffee’s decent too, the wifi works and they have armchairs. We settle down in armchairs with custard tarts and coffee (me), and cake and lemon juice (Zac), while I try to work out what district this is, because this is clearly the centre and we like it, so this is where we want to live.

It appears we are in Daoliqu, or Daoli. Excellent. Now I can start to navigate Ganji.com.

I scour through headlines like: “The cell good rental…” “Truth pine bin refined decoration…” “Live in the comfortable sleep of mind, Harbin the Mango 360 fashion public…”

There are pros and cons to flat-hunting on a Chinese website using Google Translate.

Every flat in Harbin appears to come not just with a kitchen but also a “methodist”.

And most of the sales pitches read more like a William S. Burroughs cut-up than anything related to English.

I scour through headlines like:

“The cell good rental”

“Truth pine bin refined decoration”

“Live in the comfortable sleep of mind, Harbin the Mango 360 fashion public”

“The room was clean, fully furnished, bag and that is to live away from bus station”

“Personal bedspace, brand appliances, complete wedding apparel 10 trillion fiber”

“Five-star upscale female beds in the Central Street new brand appliances”

“Qunli people’s livelihood the Shangdu Liangshiyiting”

It doesn’t necessarily help much when I get to the descriptions, either. “Medium decoration – something ordinary, residential.” “Ming dynasty decoration…”

Ooh! “Gold floors!” I want a flat with gold floors!

There’s something very ominous at the top of almost all of them.

“Rental price 1500 yuan a month, charging a pair of years.”

Rent paid six-monthly, up front?! That can’t be right!! In our little laowai flat in Kunming, we paid monthly.

I decide to ignore that.

I don’t like it. So it isn’t happening. That six-monthly rental is totally not a thing, right?!

I can do this! I can totally do this! A phone conversation in Chinese! No problemo! Can’t be that much harder than explaining a hunting knife away at the airport, right?

By lunch, I’m feeling pretty good about this flat-hunting lark. I’ve identified a few flats that are in the right location – not as easy as it sounds, since Ganji.com uses Baidu maps, which are in Chinese, which means I have to compare the Chinese characters and the general visual scale to Google maps, which are typically WAY OFF in China, and Lonely Planet, which seems right, but for the scale.

I guess I could also go and buy a full-scale Chinese language map of Harbin, but I don’t know enough characters to navigate the “alphabet”.

In fact, Zac and I have, we decide, found the perfect flat for us! It has wifi! It’s Tang dynasty style, with dark wood. It looks rather cosy. It’s around the corner from here, and it’s available now.

I IM the broker, using Google translate.

As with other brokers, she doesn’t come back, probably because I’ve sent her gibberish, or possibly because I’m not registered as a user. Who knows?

Still, our last Chinese lesson covered some of the vocab around flat-hunting, so I should be good to go with calling a broker.

Yeah! I can do this! I can totally do this!

A phone conversation in Chinese! No problemo!

Can’t be that much harder than explaining a hunting knife away at a Chinese airport, right?

“You can speak English?” I ask, feebly. “No,” she says, spewing out a stream of extremely rapid, yet flawlessly accented Chinese. “(&^(*&%(&*%apartment&^*&(^*&Daoli-district^&(*&^(&*^can’t this apartment &(*⋯⋯&*⋯⋯(&&*⋯⋯Daoli-district(*&district(&^(&this-is-a-question?”

“Hello!” I say. “I be English. My Chinese be not too good. I want rent the 2-room apartment on Ganji.com. You understand?”

“Yes,” she says. “I understand. (&^(&^&(*^&^%&(^apartment &(^(*&^(&*%*^%can’t&)*)*&%^%$apartment this-is-a-question?”

“You can speak English?” I ask, feebly.

“No,” she says, spewing out a stream of extremely rapid, yet flawlessly accented Chinese. “(&^(*&%(&*%apartment&^*&(^*&Daoli-district^&(*&^(&*^can’t this apartment &(*⋯⋯&*⋯⋯(&&*⋯⋯Daoli-district(*&district(&^(&this-is-a-question?”

My Chinese comprehension, over the phone, is approximately 10%, if that. While enough to understand that this apartment is, for whatever reason, not happening, that is clearly not enough to rent an apartment. Or even arrange a booking.

Further, I don’t know enough characters to read the original descriptions on Ganji.com.

Chinese, for the record, has around 40,000 characters, of which a high school graduate should know 1500, a university graduate 3,000 and a Chinese language professor might know as many as 10,000, with a focus on their area of historical specialism.

Chinese, for the record, has around 40,000 characters, of which a high school graduate should know 1500, a university graduate 3,000 and a Chinese language professor might know as many as 10,000, with a focus on their area of historical specialism.

500 is the generally accepted baseline for basic reading comprehension: I know around 150, which means, because most commonly used characters use bits of other characters, although rarely in their original form, I can recognise quite a bit of stuff and clue in given context.

Further, mainland, AKA Mandarin Chinese uses between four and six tones, depending whether you count the non-tone and enclitic r, so each syllable can be pronounced in 4-6 different ways.

And, yes, in case you were wondering, a syllable pronounced on the same of those 4-6 different tones can mean very, very different things (think how many meanings English has for “jack”!) but may be written the same way, vaguely differently or entirely differently, depending on what happened in the Chinese language 1000-5000 years ago, and what happened to it again during simplification.

Further almost identical characters can mean very different things, while some characters have the same sound for various very different meanings.

“That one is rented already,” she says. “And they only want to rent for one year, paid six months in advance.” “What about if we pay six months and leave part way through?” I say. I’m so sold on this little wooden flat. “You lose the deposit,” she says.

Yeah. Chinese is a bitch of a language. It really is.

I don’t know the correct tones for all but the most blindingly obvious street names, so I don’t really stand much of a chance of communicating an address, or hearing one well enough to repeat it to a taxi driver should our communications get that far.

Nor do I even know the Chinese for “Can you text me the address?”

This is FUBAR.

“Wait a little,” I say. “I have a Chinese friend. I ask her call you. Wait a little.”

I Skype our Chinese teacher, Huaze. “Are you busy?”

Mercifully, Huaze is not busy.

We look at flats. Whenever I get the nod from Zac, she makes a call, then summarises for me.

“That one is rented already,” she says. “And they only want to rent for one year, paid six months in advance.”

“What about if we pay six months and leave part way through?” I say. I’m so sold on this little wooden flat.

“You lose the deposit,” she says.

“That’s all, right?” I say. “I can’t get sued? I just lose the deposit?”

Apparently, all this broker’s flats want one-year rental, minimum. Bugger.

And, further, six months’ rent upfront is standard for this part of China. Plus deposit, plus broker’s fees, plus whatever it costs to install broadband and the rest. WHAT?!

SIX MONTHS?!

I am absolutely el skinto until some people pay me, which, according to the sod’s law that is life as a freelance writer, they won’t, because I need the money.

Why can’t Harbin be like Kunming, Shanghai, Beijing? Where there are absolutely tonnes of little laowai flats, fully kitted out with linen, IKEA furnishings and fast wifi, absolutely ready to go, rented by the month?

Oh yeah, I chose Harbin because we’d need to use Chinese there. Great choice!

I abandon all pretence of speaking Chinese and do ye olde laowai move of handing the phone to a member of staff, shrugging helplessly and letting them give him directions.

I’m rather sold on the flat with “gold floors”, which looks lovely in the pictures, rather like a spread from Elle Deco China, and an absolute steal at £150 per month!

“He says the flat is not like in the pictures,” Huaze explains. “These are just pictures to make the advert look nice. It is a lot dirtier than that.”

Oh.

It appears it actually IS a spread from Elle Deco China.

I umm and ah, then conclude that cabbing across town to look at a flat that clearly isn’t out of Elle Deco China is clearly a waste of time.

Particularly since they want us to rent for a year with six months’ upfront.

The flat-hunting process is now reduced to: find a broker who’ll entertain letting to laowai for a period of less than a year and see what they’ve got in Daoliqu.

You could call this streamlining, I guess.

One’s available! The broker thinks he can do a 3-month let. He has several on his books, all in Daoliqu. His name is Mr Ye. I take his number.

Mr Ye can come to meet us at Bomele.

But I don’t know the Chinese name of the place, and “coffee shop on Zhongyang Dajie, two floors high” doesn’t help as much as I thought it might, given I think Bomele 1931 is the only two-storey building on Zhongyang Dajie. I abandon all pretence of speaking Chinese and do ye olde laowai move of handing the phone to a member of staff, shrugging helplessly and letting them give him directions.

That works. Top China travel tip? Look confused, hand a phone to your driver or your venue staff, and the Chinese speakers on either end will tell each other where you are and where you want to go.

Mr Ye is an elegant, dignified man in his 60s, with long, slender fingers, a long, serene face, a note of Confucian sadness in his aura and the ability of the seasoned Harbiner to be out in -30 (-22F) with neither hat, nor gloves, nor much by way of hair, nor even a particularly heavy jacket.

Mr Ye is an elegant, dignified man in his 60s, with long, slender fingers, a long, serene face, a note of Confucian sadness in his aura and the ability of the seasoned Harbiner to be out in -30 (-22F) with neither hat, nor gloves, nor much by way of hair, nor even a particularly heavy jacket.

I like Mr Ye immediately, and he seems to like us. Or, at least, feel protective of us, this woman and child in the middle of Harbin in peak season, with nowhere to live and some ludicrous plan of taking a place for three months, which nobody does.

Or even, I think, quite possibly pity us. Or Zac, at least.

Heyho.

Whatevs. I like him.

We exchange some stilted small talk about families. The flat is 5 or 10 minutes walk from here! EXCELLENT!

It has two bedrooms! It’s available immediately! We’ll need to sort out broadband but…

“Can stay tonight?” I ask, desperately.

We can stay tonight! And, Zac packed up, our pathetically numerous layers safely donned, off we toddle for a very pleasingly short distance.

Mr Ye points out helpful Harbin landmarks, malls and supermarkets on the way, his only concession to the savage ambient temperature being very occasionally putting his bare hands into his pockets.

Yeah! This is good! We stop by his office to pick up the keys, sparking a moment’s panic from both me and Zac when we spot the camp bed and think this might be where we’re living.

More helpful Harbin landmarks! I like this location! I have high hopes!

We exit the street for a dingy square framed by seven-storey blocks in the brutalist vein, push open an iron grate and begin to ascend a grimy set of stairs ripe with the smell of not-so-recently cooked cabbage. “Hmmmm….” Zac says, adopting a 1950s American broadcaster accent. “In Sah-vyet Russia…”

We exit the street for a dingy square framed by seven-storey blocks in the brutalist vein, push open an iron grate and begin to ascend a grimy set of stairs ripe with the smell of not-so-recently cooked cabbage.

“Hmmmm….” Zac says, adopting a 1950s American broadcaster accent. “In Sah-vyet Russia…”

“You’re right!” I say. “This is exactly how the flats used to be in Soviet Russia. I bet the heating’s turned permanently up to max and you have to open the window once in a while to bring the temperature down! Very strong Russian influence in Harbin….”

We stop on the fourth floor by a metal door with the sort of heft most usually found on strongboxes.

Nope. This is definitely not a laowai flat. Mr Ye fumbles with his keys.

And we’re in!

It’s an odd kind of layout. There are, basically, two big rooms, both living-room sized, one with a bed and a dining table, one with a bed and a desk, a long kitchen giving onto a shielded balcony, a bathroom off the kitchen, and a kind of glorified hallway that’s big enough to hold a sofa, a chair, a telly and a rack for guest shoes.

And no broadband. The kitchen’s been poshed up a bit. Someone’s been to IKEA, or similar, and put new doors on: they’re all turquoise and lovely.

But I really want a place with a living-dining room. We umm and ahh. Explain we’ll let him know. And Mr Ye escorts us back to Bomele.

“The apartment is twenty minutes from here,” she says, and then, encouraged by my comprehension, accelerates. “^(&apartment^*^take bus^&*&^(*&^(*&^taxi(^&(^(*&twenty minutes&*)(&can’t. Twenty minutes!”

Meanwhile, Huaze has got hold of the girl who brokered the unavailable flat.

She’s found one where she thinks the owner might take short lets!

It’s a bit of a way from here, about twenty minutes. But the broker thinks we’ll like it!

I pass over directions. We’re easy enough to spot, what with being the only laowai in Bomele, and up she rocks.

“Please speak slow slow,” I say. “My Chinese not so good! I no understand fast talking.”

“The apartment is twenty minutes from here,” she says, slowly, and then, encouraged by my comprehension, accelerates. “^(&apartment^*^take bus^&*&^(*&^(*&^taxi(^&(^(*&twenty minutes&*)(&can’t. Twenty minutes!”

I look at Zac. He has not a clue what is going on either. We go with her anyway. She tries again with this message about buses and taxis, which is clearly important, largely because she keeps saying “Can’t.”

I admit defeat and ring Huaze. “She says there are no taxis now because it’s peak time, so you need to take a bus. It will take twenty minutes”

“What are the symptoms of frostbite?” Zac asks. “You don’t have it,” I say. “But what are the symptoms?” he says. “I can’t move my fingers.”

It’s an unconscionably long walk to the bus stop past the fairy lights and ice sculptures, during which Zac becomes not exactly fractious but noticeably unenthusiastic, the cold stabs through my exposed ears like needles and my nose becomes so painfully chilly I fear it might fall off.

“What are the symptoms of frostbite?” Zac asks.

“You don’t have it,” I say.

“But what are the symptoms?” he says. “I can’t move my fingers.”

“Then put them in your armpits!” I say.

The broker has explained to us, carefully, which bus we are taking and which stop we get off at. The bus doesn’t come. And doesn’t come. And doesn’t come.

In case you were wondering, out of all the activities I have undertaken in temperatures of -30 and below, waiting for a bus is my single least favourite. Even in snowboots, my toes are beginning to freeze.

“This is ridiculous!” says Zac. “We can’t do this!”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“There’s absolutely no way we can wait half an hour for a bus into town. Or a taxi! If we live in this flat we’ll never go anywhere ever again! I say we laugh it off and go back to Bomele.”

He has a point. “I sorry,” I say, in rubbish Chinese. “Now we already wait half hour for bus. Too slow! We cannot rent this apartment! We go back to Bomele! So sorry!”

We’re into evening, now, and no closer. Although, on our peregrinations around Daoliqu, it has, at least, become quite clear that if we want to live this central on a short let, we’re likely going to be living in a Soviet-style walk-up. Almost certainly one with stairs that smell of ageing cabbage.

“What about the Alice in Wonderland one?” asks Zac. “The one with the pink circular bed with mirrors over it?” I say. “That’s a love hotel. It’s a place where young Chinese couples, because they live with their parents….” “I know what a love hotel is,” says my spawn, bad-temperedly.

Only our first day in Harbin, and we’re already a fixture at the coffee shop. I ask Huaze to explain to Mr Ye that, yes, pretty please, we would like to see his other apartments in the area. He has one available tonight for 1500 kuai for the month.

I spend the intervening period trying to lock down a short let for a week, or at least a couple of nights, on another Chinese website, and asking passing locals to read out loud the Chinese texts it sends to my phone, all of which tell me I can expect to wait 11 minutes for a confirmation.

It looks like a good enough short let. It’s a studio, under 100 kuai a night, perfectly doable.

In fact, if I were a solo person living in Harbin, I’d consider just taking this sort of thing by the month. But we need a proper flat. Two bedrooms, minimum, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room.

“What about the Alice in Wonderland one?” asks Zac.

“The one with the pink circular bed with mirrors over it?” I say. “That’s a love hotel. It’s a place where young Chinese couples, because they live with their parents….”

“I know what a love hotel is,” says my spawn, bad-temperedly.

After many sets of 11 minutes, and no booking confirmation, Mr Ye shows up.

Zac gets into his layers quite agonisingly slowly, and off we process, past more Harbin supermarkets, into another anonymous, grimy square (I’ll later learn that, like British council flats, all these buildings were flung up between the 1940s and the 1960s, when the government razed the old hutong slums), and up more cabbagey stairs.

There’s a poorly sprung campbed in the main living room, on which he bounces with a good simulation of joy. “I LIKE this place,” he says. I look around, at the dingy walls, the dirty kitchen, the random bits of home-made furniture sticking out of the wardrobes, and wonder what has happened to my child’s mind.

This is, umm, an interesting flat. I take one look at the stained lino, the broken woodwork, and decide there is absolutely no way I could ever live here, even if it did have more than two rooms. Our “methodist” in this instance is simply a corridor, without room to swing a cat, let alone to put a sofa.

Zac, meanwhile, appears to have lost his sanity.

There’s a poorly sprung campbed in the main living room, on which he bounces with a good simulation of joy.

“I LIKE this place,” he says.

I look around, at the dingy walls, the dirty kitchen, the random bits of home-made furniture sticking out of the wardrobes, and wonder what has happened to my child’s mind.

There isn’t even a washing machine!

I mime doing laundry. Mr Ye reveals a small transparent blue plastic thing that resembles the top half of a mineral water dispenser, equipped with a plug and a spinny bit at the bottom. “Xi-yi-ji!” he says, carefully.

Which is how, gentle reader, I learn the Chinese for washing machine.

Then Mr Ye unveils a small, scarlet mangle.

Yes, a mangle.

Yes, mangles do still exist today. And, yes. I darn near rented a flat with one.

Wow, I figure. That’s authenticity. Most likely three generations of a Chinese family lived in this flat, sharing the mangle, the xiyiji and these two rooms, and bloody grateful they were too.

I’d never claim that we live like locals when we travel. We came to China to live a bit like locals. But this flat is too local by a VERY long way.

“We can’t live in two rooms!” I say to Zac. “You’d be sleeping in the lounge! That’d be ridiculous! You’d either have no privacy or we’d have no communal space!”

“Well, I kind of like this place!” Zac says.

“WHAT do you like about it?” I ask. I can’t see a single thing that anyone could like about this place, apart from the location.

Zac flannels and grins demonically. I wonder whether he’s lost his mind.

“I think the first place he showed us is looking better by the second,” I say. “Shall we just take that one?”

I can tell, long before he gets off the phone and asks me to call Huaze for him, that we’re not getting the first place because the landlord wants a one-year let, no matter how hard Mr Ye tries, which he does.

From the length of the conversation Mr Ye is having with the landlord of the first place, and the tone, and my 10% understanding of spoken Chinese, I can tell, long before he gets off the phone and asks me to call Huaze for him, that we’re not getting the first place because the landlord wants a one-year let, no matter how hard Mr Ye tries, which he does.

Mr Ye explains the situation to Huaze at quite inordinate length, with a lot of apologising on both ends, and then they discuss some more.

Meanwhile, I hear their mutual apologising and dearly wish I could go to bed now, rather than having to sit through the bit where they both apologise to me.

Eventually, Huaze and I agree that Mr Ye can go back to the first landlord with an offer of 2000 kuai per month for a four month let, aka a more than 10% increase.

I can hear the landlord, who sounds quite ferocious, screeching down the phone at poor Mr Ye.

Huaze precises for me. “It didn’t go too well,” she says. “In fact, she threatened to report him to the manager.”

Bugger. It’s now after 8pm, too late for even a congenital optimist such as me to believe we can find a flat before bedtime.

Off we set into the night. It’s at most -30, and we have nowhere to stay.

“Where do you want to go?” asks Mr Ye, who is planning on escorting us to wherever we are going. That is, of course, a very good question. Our bags are at the station. The touts are at the station. I certainly can’t afford a decent hotel.

“Where do you want to go?” asks Mr Ye, who is planning on escorting us to wherever we are going.

That is, of course, a very good question. Our bags are at the station. The touts are at the station.

I certainly can’t afford a decent hotel, at least, not with all the cheap, good ones fully booked since early January, and the prospect of putting down minimum four months rent plus deposit plus broker’s fee plus broadband.

Particularly not having just dropped well over a grand on visas and travel to Hong Kong, and not having been working much lately due to, well, a planned trip to Everest Base Camp and then close to three weeks of uninterrupted, unplanned, expensive visa hell at the point when I was supposed to be bringing in the bacon.

I figure we’ll go to the short-let place and see if, by any miracle, there’s someone there and the studio is still available, then throw ourselves on the mercy of the touts at the station if there isn’t.

I don’t know how to explain this to Mr Ye, and I’m not sure I want to, so I give him the address of the short-let place.

We get there. It’s a gigantic building and the security guard has no idea what I’m asking about.

Bizarrely, as we wander up the street, pass an array of giant illuminated toadstools and ice sculptures glittering in the headlights, headed back to the station and the touts, I still feel that I really like Harbin.

Because even when you’re homeless, it’s hard not to love some giant illuminated toadstools, right? Err, right?!