B2 Ban

A week or so ago I'd had the bright idea of organising a party for my class, B2, as I felt that as we all came from different parts of the globe, noone really knew each other. I organised it for Friday and dilligently advertised it on the board and in my best Chinese only for Friday to come and I have a raging cold... However, these things are sent to test us so I dragged myself over anyway- and was glad I did.

We started off at a restaurant on Qingda Yi Lu, the street where we often go. We were put in the private room. Chinese restaurants all have these small rooms with circular tables for large groups. Despite it being a circular table, and thus to my Arthurian mind a denoter of equality, there is in fact a strict seating system depending on who is the guest, who is the host and who is what seniority in the company. Our Oral teacher spent a long time telling us the correct order but I've forgotten most of it, except that the head host has the seat facing the door and the second host has the seat nearest the door so he can order. As I'd been the one doing the organising I got the head host's chair as well as the responsibility of ordering. It was quite encouraging how much more quickly I can deal with ordering now! When I first got here it would take several hours to order rice but now I just leafed through nonchantly ordering some 锅包肉 here and some 地三鲜 there, maybe a bit of 糖醋里脊 for good measure.

Then we happily set to munching. The Japanese girl with us, who is best described as cheeky, appeared to be the sommelier for the night and kept filling our glasses with beer. Bizarrely the Russian didn't drink- odd for a Russian no? It was good until... well we'd spent that afternoon waiting for the internet man and he hadn't come so we'd been annoyed etc but then at 7:30 he rang wondering why noone was waiting for him in the flat... so Becka raged back to the flat to sort it out.

Then we all headed to LPG and more chatting in our stilted, uncertain, almost certainly painfully discordant Chinese. But it's still pretty cool how much you can get across! I was chatting to a Korean, who is very cute, and he had heard of Margaret Thatcher, which impressed me. He said he liked Washish. I wasn't sure what this meant so we spent several minutes going through any possible pronunciation in his mind before he wrote it down. He had meant Oasis, the band. The Koreans also taught me the dice game, which I had been curious about for a while. This is where you have some dice, and you shake them in a cup and then other people have to guess what value you have. Or something lol. After a while we peeled off into language groups and I started talking to some Laowais I hadn't met before. One was wearing a Loughborough shirt and he turned out to be a student there. He was in Qingdao on a placement for international business or something, although he's returning to the UK this week. He was a keen rugby player and as such, took up rather a lot of space for his bulging biceps. I was a tiny bit in love.

I also got talking to an American, from Tennessee, who was basically just living in Qingdao. He hadn't heard of evolution until he went to College. Nonetheless he seemed very sensible!

I enjoyed chilling with everyone over a beer but that night I had a vision of a future that I want to avoid. There was a girl who was off her face, wrap dress rapidly unwrapping, complaining about the quality of the weed and how much she hated China. "I hate it!" she slurred, looming into my face, eyes wide open. "And they've been pissing with the Catholic Church!" China has a state run Catholic Church that isn't "in full communion with Rome" or whatever pompous phrase it is and they've recently chosen some new bishops and made rebel bishops agree or something. This girl was a Catholic, but not a Catholic "soul" whatever that means, and asked what I thought. "I think China's been through enough without Catholiscm so that's a good thing" I replied. She reeled a bit and then carried on about weed again.

So yeah, I hope I never become a drunk, high, arrogant, half-dressed, whining expat!

I mean, what would you rather have, a system that means you can grow up thinking the world was invented 6000 years ago, run by multi-millionaires (and you can only win election in the US if you can afford the campaign), or one that bans facebook but refuses to expose its citizens to Jewish myths and Roman letters? I pick China! Sure they are lied to about Tiananmen Square, but that was 20 years ago now.

China's government's sole concern in economic prosperity. If that involves freedom of speech, enshrined in the Chinese constitution as is the right to voice criticism, then China will let that happen. Give it time

Boram and Sara very kindly cooked Becka and I dinner today. They cooked banfan, which we already like, and something that sounded like tapichiki or something. It was bits of vegetables, and something fishy, in a spicy tomato sauce. Nice, but for the spice. They've made me some Korean type tea which appears to be flower buds in hot water. Weird but wonderful. When the flatowner's son came round he said it was funny we British were using Chinese to talk to the Koreans. He lived in Canada for a year which explains his excellent English.