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Published: November 24th 2010
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Carrots, Potatoes, Sprouts, Eggs
Kinda tasted like beef stew, oddly. I cleaned up the kitchen and experimented with cooking a bit. All the food here is pretty oily so sometimes I like to take a break from it. I mostly know how to follow recipes and make things that require an oven or western ingredients, but recently I've been picking up some vegetables from the shop down the street and seeing what I can do with some vinegar, soy sauce and spices. Sometimes the results are good.
My friend here helped me look at an online forum to get a used bike from a student at nearby Wuhan University. One weekend I rode my bike around the East Lake to Moshan park. Unfortunately one uses the word "shan" from the smallest backyard hill to Mount Everest, and this particular shan was quite small. It was still nice to walk outside in the woods and breathe in some nice air. There were the usual pavilions and statues of random dudes and a luge ride(!). The area of the park next to the lake was particularly nice. They also had a super weird recently-installed collection of stone statues randomly placed around the woods. Though the statues had been constructed just 10 years
A Dude
In Moshan park. ago, I think they tried to make it look like the relics of an ancient civilization. The area had a very mysterious feel.
After I checked out the park, I rode my bike home the long way around the East Lake. The East Lake is a huge lake that takes up much of Wuchang/武昌. I should note that Wuhan is basically composed of three cities. Wuchang/武昌 is the cultural and educational center, with many universities and tourist attractions such as the Yellow Crane Tower and the Hubei Provincial Museum. Across the Yangtze River/Chang Jiang/长江 is Hankou/汉口, the business center. Also across the Yangtze River and separated from Hankou by the Han river is Hanyang, the industrial center. Anyway you put the names Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang together and get Wuhan. I basically never go anywhere but Wuchang, though I hear there's some nice stuff in Hankou.
I had a nice evening riding my bike on the relatively quiet two-lane roads surrounding the East Lake. It is rather peaceful out there and you can kind of get the feeling that you are on a relaxed drive through the woods. It reminded me a bit of driving to a friend's
house in New England.
I also must tell the story of the teacher's day holiday/my adviser's birthday party. For the teacher's day holiday, we had a "party" for our professors, but it was the most rigid and structured lab "party" I have ever been to! Basically we all filed in to the room and sat down. Our HR guy was the MC and made some formal speeches about all the professors. Then all of the 50+ students in attendance had to stand up one-by-one and say their name, their hometown and something like "happy teacher's day!" I was really embarrassed when it was my turn, but I survived it. Then was a presentation of some gifts and bouquets of flowers from the students. Then the teachers went around the room and gave flowers from their bouquets to all the students.
After the party, our professor and all of the researchers and students working for him went out to celebrate his birthday. In total it was 40+ people, so we took up a big room of a restaurant. The food was great, lots of new stuff that people eat in the south and I hadn't seen in Beijing. Also
there was tons of Huangjiu/黄酒, a sweet rice wine with a nontrivial alcohol percentage. Here I learned about cheers-ing ("jingju" I think they said), where groups of people run around the room and try to get each other to drink. Sometimes it's kind of like a challenge. Usually you get a group together or you pick on a friend who you want to get really wasted, then you both agree on how much you are going to drink (a sip? half? the whole glass?), then you drink together. It's a terrible positive feedback loop because the more people drink, the faster they run around the room, and the more excited they get about getting everyone drunk. Lots of people wanted to cheers with me especially, because I was the new foreigner kid. Probably the drunkest guy there kept coming to my table and refilling my glass when I said I didn't want any more. I think the idea was that the more you can drink without getting drunk, the tougher and more awesome you are. Our professor said that we didn't have to do lab work for the rest of the day, so we should go ahead and drink a
lot. I couldn't believe it... getting wasted at 1 pm on a Friday and losing a whole afternoon/evening of working time!
I personally do not have much experience with this competitive kind of drinking. I don't like backing down from a challenge though, so I chugged many a 12 oz glass of the stuff. Finally I got to the point where I was like okay, I need to stop now so that I don't get sick. Just then my labmates said that we had to go cheers our professor. Man! So we went over and I was just planning on drinking a small sip. I even told our professor that I had already had too much and if I drank any more I might get sick. His response was something like, "I am your professor and this is our custom - I will drink half and you have to drink the whole thing." My labmates nodded that indeed I had to drink the whole glass. I didn't really have a choice, so I chugged it down. I looked over and saw drunk-constantly-refilling-my-glass man PUKING ON THE FLOOR OF THE RESTAURANT right next to our professor. A lot of the
grad students thought that everyone gets Asian flush, so they were all like, "Your face isn't pink so you aren't drunk... you're so tough!"
We all stumbled back to the research institute to nap off the alcohol. I thought it was really weird to get so wasted with our professor. Even weirder that he pressured me to drink! Jeez if somebody said that jumping off a bridge was a Chinese custom and I needed to do it in order to be respectful to my research adviser, I would probably do it. I drank TOO much. I went back to my apartment, rested in bed, woke up to puke, and rested some more.
At 9:45 pm my cell phone rang... my response was "guhhh whoooooo is calling me... I don't care... shut up." I ignored it until it stopped ringing. Then it rang again and I picked up, still drunk. IT OPI TESTING!!!! I had completely forgotten! (Our post-CLS program oral language testing, done by phone.)
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anonymous
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Wow, your birthday is November 24th? Late to say Happy Birthday... Your experience is really interesting.