I had a really great weekend this Thanksgiving - I may start celebrating it every year from now on. Things began on Friday when we went to Scary Alley for dinner. It's a cramped street market selling everything ever, although you go for the food. Meat skewers, tofu, sweet potato chips - the closest I'll get to regular chips, I guess, except they're covered in sugar, but no soup, hurray! - fruits, vegetables, pastries, wraps, noodles, sweets, eggs... You can easily walk up and down this street for an hour, and I did, just having a little bit of this and that, whatever looks good.
Baijiu. noun Chinese traditional alcohol, absolutely foul, white spirit, tastes like paint stripper, £1 for a coke-can sized bottle of 50% ABV, used for toasting special occasions or to test the limits of the body's resistance to poisons.
Some time later, we fell into taxis and returned to Laowai Towers where, at first thanks to the baijiu's warming effect (as if you can feel your liver disintegrating), we began the Zhengzhou International World Championships of 1984 Genius Edition Trivial Pursuit. What a game! I recognise that this is essentially a 'you had to be there' scenario but suffice to say that watching Andy and Anna argue that it was Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton (respectively) that brokered the Camp David Accords in the seventies and, if you didn't know who Menachem Begin was before now, well, where have you been?
Triv went on until half past two in the morning. It's such a great game, where the answer to almost all the questions are A) London, B) Soviet Union or C) Menachem Begin, at least in the 1984 Genius Edition they are. On Saturday morning, we played a huge game of American Football for Beginners, laowai and Chinese students, and discovered that almost everyone is a natural. Except, perhaps, the new teacher John, who kept falling over!
In the evening, we all went to the Tiger Restaurant: it's a great place,walking distance from campus, a pleasant change of scenery, serves some of the best food I've eaten in China and is served mainly by students from college. Lin, Irene, Michael and Taylor - the Chinese staff from our office - came too. They taught us to order the best dishes, and we taught them to down beer and to sing Country Road, various National Anthems and Jingle Bells.
The weekend's competitions continued after dinner with Speed Scrabble - brilliantly described by Becky (English) as like Scrabble on speed. Nine of us played using the letters from two sets. You take seven tiles to start. You have to make words using the same rules as slow Scrabble, except without a board and you can rearranged your words at any time. Whenever anyone uses all their tiles, they say 'Go!' and everyone takes a new tile and has to incorporate in into their words. It's ace, we're definitely playing it next Christmas!
Speed Scrabble then turned into poker, and me losing 10RMB - £1, a bottle of baijiu. Oh well. Today I'm just chilling out, planning some lessons, doing some applications and waiting to Skype My Darling Sister.
Hope all's well,
X