Banquet

Monday night the English department had a banquet.

We all took a bus to somewhere (I have no idea...a restaurant, maybe) and sat in a little room and had a banquet. Most of the faculty were there: five foreign teachers (three with ULS, my organization, two with Peace Corps) and maybe 12 Chinese English teachers. The head of the department, Jack, was there too.

We sat around for a little while. Some of the teachers played Mah Jong for money (Kris said that teachers can rack up a huge debt playing mah jong: 20,000 yuan in one night!!)

Then dinner was served. We sat at a round table that had a very large lazy susan in the middle of it. They put platters of food on the lazy susan, and you would just spin it so that what you wanted was in front of you. There was a spicy pork dish, a whole fish (including the eyes) that you would just pick some flesh from and eat it, several soups, some rice noodle dishes, some mashed potatoes, some vegetable dishes... it was crazy! And everyone uses their chopsticks to take a bite or two of what they want. We had rice in our bowls and just ate and ate for hours.

It was really spicy and the only drinks were beer and hot tea. As I'm not much of a beer drinker, I drank hot tea from a plastic cup. The food was very spicy and the tea was very hot...that's not the best combination!

At one point the other table was laughing a lot at one of the teachers. He was saying "let's go" in all of the different tones. It sounded like "Let's! Go!", "Let's Go?" "Let's Go!!" "Let's Go..." I mean, it was obviously the same phrase, but they think it's so funny that the same words said in different tones still mean the same thing in English. I'm still having such a hard time with tones that I didn't even get the joke-I had to ask Kris!

We got home very late 9:30 and I think I just fell into bed. But it was a good night!