Chinese Staff Party and Club

I love taking pictures of my travels- who doesn't? Whilst physical photo albums aren't common for people my age to posses, having a hard drive full of pictures is the modern equivalent. Its not as nice as a beautifully assembled album, but is more practical to carry around and takes far less time. 

When I become a real adult and get a house of my own, I'll have to make some physical albums. For now, I browse my memories digitally, and recently I came across a folder labelled: ''Chinese Staff Party and Club''. The pictures brought back a blur of strange memories from one particularly odd evening China...

The evening was an end of term celebration, something that is particularly necessary after a 22 week slog at a kindergarden. Why they have such marathon school terms in China is still beyond my reckoning, but just add it to the list of Chinese stuff I don't understand. We arrived at a large function room in a hotel and a champagne welcome where people could mill around and talk to their colleagues.

I took a picture of them, taking picture of us.

The Chinese teachers don't seem too interested in us at school. Most are glad to see us in lessons because it means we will take the kids off their hands for 20 minutes, but the language barrier between us makes interaction difficult.

Yet during social occasions, they become obsessed. They flock to greet us as if we are celebrities and genuinely wait in line (rare to see Chinese doing this) to have their photos taken with us. It seems that having a Westerner for a friend is very fashionable. 

After this, we were seated and presenters took the stage. Since I can't speak Chinese and therefore 95% of the staff body could not understand me, I was naturally up on stage with a microphone. It would be great if I was joking, but I'm not. The school pays a lot of money for teachers like Dan and myself, around 3 times the salary of a Chinese teacher, so they want to get their money's worth.

Celebrity couple of the evening

This being our third time on the Chinese stage and knowing from previous performances that nobody listens to us, Dan and I decided to take it less seriously than before. I told him that he had to say the word 'Robot' in his speech (the speech was unrelated to robots) and he returned with the challenge of 'Ebola' for me.

I thought hard about making a clever pun, but what what rhymes with ebola? I was a bit tricky but I settled with: 'You all look lovely, ebola me over with your outfits'. It was a ropey way of saying 'you bowl me over' which still is an unlikely thing to hear from an English person. Holly and Caroline, watching from our table, caught the pun and were silently giggling.

Dan was less bothered about masking his joke and just added the word 'robot' when announcing the name of the school. On both occasions, none of the Chinese were concerned and the Westerners (or girlfriends) were amused.

Toasting to something or other.
Thankfully when someone gives you wine,
you don't need to speak their language.

 Wrapping the speeches up, we sat down to eat. There was a buffet of food that would have been great if only they'd left out a few ingredients: Whole roast chicken, with the face still attached, frowning at us; a meaty broth, with floating bones; and freshly steamed dumplings, who's filling was translated as 'various organs'. This is what the food is like in Southern China, and it didn't appeal greatly. 

Yet I did think that this would be as good as time as any to try something the locals go mad for: chicken feet.

Chew the back of your finger. Do it now.
Nah its not great is it- but it is similar to eating a chicken's foot.

Looking at the picture, you will notice the shrivelled and rubbery flesh that covers the foot. There's no meat as such, just thick skin, served cold. I would describe it as gnawing on the topside of your own finger. Now that I had tried it, I was sure never to want one again.

Following this there was entertainment from each department in the school. The theme of 'Scenes Re-enacted from Popular Films'. Again, we knew nobody would understand us, so had put together something more visual- a dance medley from The Lion King. It meant we didn't have to rehearse and instead, winged it on the night.

If you wondered what the upcoming live- action remake of
The Lion King would be like, I imagine similar to this.

After this event, which was quite fun (even with the chicken feet), a group of the Chinese staff said we should join them at a night club. They actually relayed this through the translator who works at the school, who would not be joining us- it was going to be sign language for the rest of the evening!

A sign in English even though probably less than
1 in 1000 people speak it here.

We arrived at the club before the Chinese teachers, so we found ourselves a booth. My English colleague Caroline (seen lifting me up on stage a few pics back) had won Y500 (£58 or USD72) at the end of year party. She kindly bought some drinks for us Western lot. They were expensive by Chinese standards, I think the Y500 got us about 30 300ml bottles. To put this in to context, if I took Y500 to my local supermarket and spent it all on the standard Chinese beer Tsingtao, I would be able to buy 73.3 litres of beer, which is 129 pints!!

A man came over with the bottles of beer that we ordered and I've not recovered from what he did next, even though it was over a year ago... but let me provide some info first.

Background Information: As you may or may not know, the tap water in China is not drinkable. As such, glasses are usually not deemed clean after they have been cleaned in it. Whether you can therefore describe them as 'cleaned' is another debate.  At restaurants its not uncommon to wash your glasses, bowl and chopsticks in boiling tea as they arrive, which sterilises them and makes them safe to eat and drink with without giving you an upset stomach. Why the restaurant does not do this for you, and provide clean things to eat with, I'll never know...

So, back in the club, our beers have been brought over and the glasses are set on the table. Rather than pouring the beer out, the waiter very kindly washed the glasses- with the beer we had just bought!

I was horrified to see this and could not get my head around why this is seen as acceptable.

Hands trembling with rage managed to capture this obscenity for evidence.
What a complete villain this man is. Fire him!

After this absolute travesty, and several minutes of complaining about the guy whilst he washed the other glasses (he could not understand us), some pub snacks were brought over- the usual ones, like bits of chili pepper and some boiled root. I did like that food was given for free but it wasn't enough to calm me about the wasted beer. And yes, I know that I didn't even buy the beer myself but that's no reason for me to accept wastage.

The Chinese colleagues arrived and they helped themselves to the beer too. There was no effective way to tell them that it was ours and by this point I'd given up! We played games of Liar's Dice which is popular in clubs in China. Its good because it can be played with lots of people and by using hand gestures- perfect for noisy clubs and language barriers.

Several boiled root helpings later and more treats were on the way, this time in the form of a skinny man in a sparkling suit. He came along and sang some songs. All of the pop music in China, whether its what I heard on the radio, or from this chap, seemed to be wailing ballad type music. I don't know if its common to have singers in clubs in China because I only went to one other club in my entire time there. But, there was also a singer at that venue so it might be pretty common. 

What a crowd pleaser.
Though if you look at the people in the background,
nobody seems too bothered

What's not so usual is people dancing in clubs, whereas in England its the reason many people go. Nevertheless we got up and set a good example for the Chinese, and some of the teachers joined us. 

Oh no, where did the other Westerners go?!
I'm stranded in the South China Sea!

 Following this, just before we left, we were ushered off stage as Shiny Man was making a return. Maybe he had read the lack of interest in his previous performance and decided to up his game, for he returned with fireworks and back up dancers.

People still don't really care..

With all of the entertainment of the evening, we were ready to head home. It was a welcome change since the area isn't always so exciting. Nevermind, school was out and my trip to Japan was just a few days away!

Read about Tokyo and Kyoto adventures here, or another post about crazy China