Dinners With Seven

Sorry for not posting recently. Computer problems are holding me back. The weeks had been fairly uneventful until just recently, when things picked up a bit. This is a little account of what I've been up to...

One of the strongest friendships we have made out here is with an English teacher called Huang Su Li, or Seven, as she introduced herself to us. She's the same age as me, in her second year at Yizhong and has amazing English. We don't feel the cultural difference when hanging out with her, as we do sometimes with others, so it's like a normal, healthy friendship. A great one too.

Just recently we've been doing a lot of stuff together. A few weeks ago she invited us out to her parents' farm, about 15 minutes ride out of Lanshan. We met her family and ate dinner with them in their mud-brick farmhouse. The photos are from that night. We had a lot of fun and after taking some family portraits we rode back into town to 'play', meeting a load of students and some other young teachers at the town square.

That weekend (31st Mar-1st April) was a holiday for everyone, where people go back to their homes and up into the mountains to visit the
graves of their ancestors and honour the dead. Consequently, everyone was free. It was a beautifully sunny weekend, about 30 degrees, and we all felt like doing something different.

I had planned on taking a trip out to Chenzhou, our nearest city, to sort out some financial stuff, and in the end Anthony, Seven, and a new teacher friend Xian Feng, all decided to come along too. It was just as well as my task took several hours and trips round at least 5 different banks to complete, finally being sorted out by a woman who spoke no English at all. It would have been hopeless had I been alone.

Chenzhou was quite nice actually. Not a huge city, but just like an expanded town. We all did a little shopping ( but not at the fantastically named 'Gelisilan Ladys for Chastity and Beautiful Place') and went in search of western food. We found one place, a quasi-western restaurant, which even had some English on the menus. It didn't help though. We still needed Seven to translate for us as the English was among the most bizarre I have ever seen.

We could have chosen from dishes such as:

- The ham fries the idea powder,
- Swallow that fish three texts cure,
- Srar continent fride rice moodies,
- The idea type pig picks the rice,
- England is miscellaneous to pick,
- The iron picks the cow to pick or the pig pick,
- The cow pick three texts to cure,
- France many private (the last three being sandwiches would you believe) or,
- Many privates of butter.

Not surprisingly we didn't get quite what we ordered, and the fries - the only genuinely western thing on the menu - failed to arrive at all. Later on we ended up in a plush coffee bar which looked like the lobby of a 5-star hotel, complete with chandeliers and flock wallpaper, where we saw pizza listed on their menu. Despite still being full of idea type pig picks, we couldn't pass this up, so ordered an 'Italian pizza'. What came was a thin, round piece of cake, topped with stir-fried beef and vegetables in a black-bean type sauce and covered in mayonnaise.

The only positive thing I could possibly say is that it was the right shape. Well done that man.

I honestly don't know why they even bother sometimes, but if they didn't China would be a much less amusing place. It was a very good day.

Since then we had our good friend Aaron from Dao Xian over to visit for a weekend that was as heavy as it was busy. I did double shifts at the little school to allow them to recover from their hangovers and even had to sing spontaneously. Can't have been good. We visited Seven's aunt, or Gu-Gu, who was as much an 'aunt' as anyone could be and reminded me so much of one of my own (hello aunty June!) and drank with random important people from random schools in the area, visited Xian Feng's house in the countryside and made many forays to the bar to play stupid dice games. It was fun, especially as all this has started to include other young teachers at the school. We have the beginnings of a 'group' - a no-rice-wine group too. They are not drinkers, and that's just great. This was shown all too well last week when we went to visit Little Mr Lei in hospital. He'd drunk 4 glasses of rice wine at lunch, vomited spectacularly and spent the rest of the day lying in a clinic with an IV line attached to his arm.

Hilarious.

4 glasses! I will never be an advocate of this stuff, but really, 4 glasses. My students could probably drink more.