Ganbei!

Last night was one of the most fun nights I have had in China.

Like many activities in Shanghai, the night began out of nowhere. I am not sure if this is a Kijiji trait or a China trait, but there seems to be no advance warning when something is about to happen. Maybe conversation takes place in Chinese around me and I just don’t get told until the last second, but I am always being asked to do something – go to lunch, dinner, whatever, and then it is instantly time to go. This was no different - I was getting tired and ready to pack up my stuff around 6:45 and head home for a laidback night. Yiyi walked over and asked if I wanted to join some people for a party to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. Of course I said sure. And she said, ok let’s go. Less than 10 seconds later I am in the elevator out the door.

First stop on the way to the party was the grocery store. This was the first Chinese Supercenter I have been to. It had a Chinese name (but Tesco owns a portion of it) and was very similar to a Super Walmart in the US – huge, lots of groceries and lots of other stuff. There were some small differences of course, like most chicken and meat was not packaged, it just sat uncooked on ice. People would pick up chicken breasts, look at them, throw them back on the ice chest, and eventually stuff a plastic bag full of them. We picked up a bunch of gross looking food, and I smuggled some Chips Ahoy into our shopping cart.

Then we went to a co-workers apartment (relatively similar to a post-apartment complex) for the party. The “party” was a small group of 7, and almost immediately upon arriving I was sent to work in the kitchen. I tried to explain that I have only cooked spaghetti and microwaved Trader Joes in the past 3 years, but that did not work. So less than 30 minutes removed from my desk, I am making bacon, mushroom and tomato omelettes (they turned out good tasting but unattractive - omelette flipping with chopsticks is hard) in a Chinese kitchen.

Then we had a generally great night talking casually about all sorts of stuff ranging from movies and tv to political issues in China – Big Brother, the Great Firewall, One Family One Child policy, abortion, gay rights, etc. Really fascinating, though a little depressing [note: editing this out, I will elaborate more once I am out of China, just to be safe].

After talking until around 11:00 (the beer really helped people be more comfortable trying to speak english), I introduced the Zeros and Ones game that I learned in Australia which was a total hit. Finally, the beer ran out and we decided to move on to Chinese whiskey which tasted as bad as you would think. We were drinking out of paper cups and the whiskey was so strong that we had to use two cups since it would eat through the bottom of the paper. And I also learned the Chinese word for Cheers – Ganbei! – though it is different from toasting in the US because when someone says Ganbei you have to finish your drink. Lots of fun, but I am glad we did not have a larger bottle.