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Published: September 10th 2010
I promised some stories of strange encounters with the po;lice so here they are:
1. Picture us five foreigners on a street at night downtown, happily eating skewered duck’s hearts and ice cream with fish eggs, when we hear some live rock music coming from down the road. Over we go to watch the music and it’s a relatively impressive and loud line-up of rockers, standing outside a restaurant with banners, a red carpet and a small crowd gathered around on the street. Rock music with Chinese lyrics sounds hilarious.
We soon realise that they are playing to open up the new warehouse-esque restaurant, but as they were playing right in the doorway, we had to walk straight through the band’s performance to get into it.
Once in the huge restaurant, we are greeted by the usual gaggle of about 10 waitresses showing us to a table and all asking questions at the same time. After a few minutes, we notice an intriguing bunch of 40 year-old men two tables away from us, one of which is in full mili,tary pol,ice uniform, and one of which is standing, swaying and looking around the room, incessantly rubbing his belly. They begin staring at us because we’re foreigners, and we can’t help but look back because they are completely plastered, having drunken arguments and heart-to-heart ‘best mate’ chats, and toasting with a new shot every two minutes.
At some point the mutual staring turned into a sort of long distance ‘body language conversation’ between us and that table: the kind with lots of raising glasses, thumbs up and smiling etc. Our Chinese friend asked the waitress who they are, and she told us that not only was one of them the boss of the opening restaurant, but the man rubbing his belly was the head of the Hainan Arm%ed Pol)ice!
Obviously we begun raising glasses to them more, and eventually the head guy started walking over to us with a big bottle of Baijiu (Chinese spirit of 50% alcohol). He went up to Ben, slammed a glass down in front of him and insisted he do a shot with him, in fast Chinese. GANBEI is Chinese for cheers, Ben’s face screwed up as he did it, lots of cheering and the man laughed and walked back to his table.
What do you do when the head of the poliice has just forced a drink upon you? Well, a bit amazed at what just happened, we asked our Chinese friend, Nick. Nick said we should wait a few minutes and then do exactly the same back to them! After plucking up the courage, Ben and I both took the only drinks we had (lager) and walked over to this table of very important drunkards, put glasses down for them and shouted our newly learned phraise ‘XING HUI XING HUI’, which we weren’t really sure of the meaning of. Our Chinese friend had told us that, in this context at least, it means ‘we’re going to pour you guys shots and you’re going to drink them with us’.
Luckily it went well, the men were really friendly, down went the drinks and sure enough, the men came back over a few minutes later and poured shots of the petrol-scented liquor for our whole table. We went back over again and got chatting to the men some more, and that boss of the arm(ed pollice asked to exchange mobile numbers and gave us his name. It's not every day you come home with the number of such a person in your phonebook.
These clearly rich men left their bottles of spirits on the table as they left to go home, which we proceeded to pick up and take around offering to tables, saying XING HUI XING HUI and making friends with people including the table of Chefs who had finished their shift. I like to think that the chefs' days were brightened up by our mispronounced compliments on their cooking of tripe and MSG salad.
2. The next encounter started at the beach at a different part of the island. Ben and I left the girls sunbathing, to go and ask on old woman where we might be able to buy a volleyball to play with. A powliceman had been watching the conversation for a while and came over to join in and offer advice. After he got the idea of what we wanted, he pointed to his motorbike and urged us to get on. Topless and in bare feet, we both clambered on to the back of his bike. We were expecting a two minute trip round the corner to a beach shop, but the journey he took us on got weirder and weirder, as we went down small roads, turning off down dirt tracks, through forests and past wooden shacks with chickens running around the street. As we drove past a barbed wire fence with about 10 heavy arti!llary can,ons and men with gun,s guarding the gate, we started to get a bit worried what was going on.
To our relief, after 20 minutes we entered civilisation again and saw the pleasing sight of a colourful shop selling volleyballs. As usual, the man turned out to just be a really nice, helpful person, and even helped us to get a good price for the volleyball! That’s just the way things seem to work here :-) I just felt bad as we walked away and noticed that my sweaty chest had completely soaked his uniform from sitting behind him on the bike!
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Dad
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Bizarre
Absolutely bizarre, what a different life. Glad the lessons are going well too. Hope your weekend goes (went) well,we may be going to the beach too.