Got invited for an afternoon out with Tommy (Maths teacher) and his friends yesterday. What an afternoon! Text said " R U (impressed with the text slang!) free tomorrow afternoon? How about this: I'll show you my fitness club first, u can have a look of Chinese most popular Pingpong, and we have dinner with friends then, after that we go to language salon in cafe, meet another group of my friends. Will you?"
1) Tommy owns a fitness club??!
2) What the hell is a language salon?!
Figured I had nothing else to do so I'd go ahead.
Fitness club...nope! Two rooms with sweaty Chinese men beating the hell out of each other with ping pong balls. I have never seen anything like it! I used to think Dad was good at Ping pong on holiday, but bloody hell these men were outstanding. The games were so fast, the only time I actually saw the ball was when they all stopped to stare as I walked in, again a lot of "Ni hao"'s! Was taken into another room then where I was immediately surrounded by about 10 kids speaking flat out Chinese to me, again "Ni hao" was the only reaction I could think of. Played a bit of Ping Pong against Tommy's 11 year old daughter, I say played, I think I touched the ball maybe 3 times in the entire game...beaten by a 11 year old!
Tommy told me on the way out that he got asked if I was Korean and if I was Lydia's mother (Mama)! 1) Do I LOOK Korean? 2) This Lydia girl is 100% han! Not 1 fragment of her DNA is caucasian! Daft daft kids.
Went for dinner then, which I found out was a "banquet" as we arrived, but at least I wasn't wearing trainers this time! First to arrive...the City Court JUDGE (plus family), second to arrive...the city planner (plus family), this guy designed the blueprint for the entire city and designed some of the buildings within it! Now I'm a geog graduate and have studied cities since I was about 14, yet I still cannot think of any better adjectives to describe a city than "big" and "busy". So when asked "Whaaaat do yu tink off mah ci-tee?" (MY CITY??!), I just smiled and said "yes, very big, very busy, lots happening" he took it like the biggest compliment in the world, slapped me on the back several times and laughed in Chinese to the rest of the men.
The final bloke to arrive then was only the owner of the freaking restaurant we were dining in (plus family). My conversation was limited to Tommy, the planner and the restaurant owner's wife as they were the only people who had any English. Now, English in a strong Chinese accent is pretty difficult to understand at the best of times and there's generally a lot of smiling, nodding and various hand gestures between both parties. So add to that a deaf, English speaking, Chinese woman and the conversation is just on another level! It was like something out of Little Britain!
Before we moved to a similar rotating table the men (and Tommy's manly wife), played Bridge on the square table in this private room. they play cards with 2 decks over here, and will never play with an already open deck of cards.
Dinner was served/spun around towards me and this time I ate pigs ears, donkey (I hope to god that was lost in translation), pumpkin (picture the pumpkin soup incident of 2004!), smelly tofu (definitely wasn't lost in translation) and various other animals and vegetables. Very similar to the last rotating table occurrence, lots of toasting, smiling, standing and dropping of food due to the chopsticks. Only add to all that: Rice Wine!! Not too sure what I was expecting, but it definitely was like nothing I've drank before, which says something after 3 years in Aber.
So toasting was a lot different this time 1) More people were drinking the wine, so definitely didn't suffer from a lack of confidence when it came to "speaking" to the Welsh girl 2) They didn't just drink out of their glasses, they poured the wine into a small wine glass (kind of), picture a wine glass scaled down to the size of a shot glass. So with the whole chopsticks, wine, mini wine glasses, donkey and numerous "Ganbei"'s (bottoms up/cheers) it was just one mess!
Tommy was asking about alcohol and drinking in Wales, so I started describing a good old Aber night out. Taught him the "I like to drink with Tommy" song and said that we played lots of drinking games. He said they play "dlin-kin liddles", where you drink if you can't get the riddle (sounds fun!) he then goes on to ask me what games we play. I was under no pressure whatsoever and had all the time in the world to answer and the only freaking game that came to my freaking mind for the whole time I sat there was "Never have I ever"! So I explained the game using the example "never have I ever jumped off a building", he seemed to understand this, so I used another example; "never have I ever lived in Wales". Nothing in the world could have prepared me for what happened next. Tommy, the fourtysomething year old Maths teacher says "Never have I ever had sex" and preceded to gulp down his wine forgetting all about the mini wine glass. I don't care what country you live in, where you come from, what language you speak or how well you can speak it, there is NOTHING you can say to that, NO facial expression, NO hand gesture, NO English or Chinese response. Soooo, as you do, I turned around to teach his daughter "head, shoulders, knees and toes".
After Tommy explained to me how Tomatoes boosted one's "shex -yu-hal end-hu-lance", and that his wife wanted him to eat more of them (this time it was "row row row your boat" I taught his daughter), we left!
We walked into what looked like a really modern bar (yey), very gutted to find out that it was in fact a tea house! Again, walked through to a private room where there were steins of tea for us this time, to meet more of Tommy's friends (this was the English Salon). I met Sarah (Chinese-English interpreter in some multi-national air conditioning/wire company), Frank (public servant...didn't ask), Jack ("tax-ee man", turns out he was a tax collector not a taxi driver), John (English masters student), Joy (male, data analyst) and finally I met Alltheway. I kid you not, this guy, who was a retired "public servant" was called All the way!! Might not be as good as some of the other English names I've heard, but it's a start.
English Salon: basically a room of people drinking tea and talking about various topics, main topics of conversation that night: me and Tom Cruise! Heard 2 different opinions on the One Child Policy 1) Rich people would want to have more than one child if they could 2)Poor people wouldn't want to have any more children even if they could. Then, of course, they turned to me! Went back to geography A level days and waffled something about one child being spoilt more than if he/she had siblings, the one child carrying the whole responsibility for caring for his/her parents/grandparents in old age. Miss. Jones daear would have been proud! Got the nod ('s) of approval so must have been allright. They ended the night by slagging off the British government, as much as I agreed with a lot of their views, cmon look at your own government first!! I could quite easily have brought up Tiananmen square, Tibet or Taiwan, but didn't really want to face "re-education" camps or deportation just yet!
Outcomes of English Salon: Bagged myself free weekly Mandarin lessons, a tutoring session with Tommy plus friends' kids, a pot of "hai quo-lee-tee gleen tea" and a lift to the lakes every week (?).
Note:
The Chinese love the "Where are you going on holiday?", "I'm going to Romania/Remain here" joke
I've seen my first Chinese six pack, belonged to a ping-pong playing policeman
Rice wine tastes like what I imagine urine would taste like, gonna have to do a Guinness job and force myself to like it
Chinese university students don't have freshers week, instead they have a week of military training! The only marching I did during freshers week was crol teircoes!
"Egg flied lice" is a genuine Chinese dish
It's a Saturday and there's grade 13 students in school as we speak
I slept with a lizard under my bed last night
Muchos loveage xx
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