Banquet Time

As some of you already noted yesterday was the first day since I started my blog without an update and there's a good reason for this, I was drunk. Not just a little drunk either me and the entire English department were quite thoroughly sloshed. Banquets are apparently partially welcome celebration and partially excuse for middle aged me to drink an enormous quantity. Baker the dean of the English department was one of the worst offenders insisting on constant toasts to any number of things which usually ended with everyone trying to finish there current glass. Nor was there any shortage of alcohol besides wine and beer there was Baijiu which even the New York Times compared with "rubbing alcohol or diesel fuel." Baijiu sort of tastes like sake but with a much sweater and just generally worse flavor, which is pretty hard to take down when you're trying to finish of a wine glass sized serving of the horrible concoction. Beer and wine are also pored into the same glass leading to some truly odd tastes. But it was far from all drinking the food, and boy was there a lot of it, was really good. There were a bunch of meat dishes, but maybe the best single thing was some sort of cooked eggplant that was so good that Clark got Baker to order another plate of it. The women at the table mostly passed on the heavy drinking by being the first Chinese people I've seen drinking Milk.

After the banquet me, Ken, David, and Clark went up to Clark's room and continued drinking for some time. This would all be well and good but at 8 this morning we all had to get up to go to the doctor's office. It seems that all the tests we did before coming in, and boy were there a lot of those, isn't good enough for the people here who basically had us repeat every test we had already done. At least the school paid for the whole ordeal. Afterwords we went out to a KFC, now I don't mean to sound funny but I've noticed that besides loving fired chicken the most common desert here by far is watermelon. The KFC was OK but it was pretty funny to see pictures of Colonel Sanders up all over China. In one last bit of new I have a cell phone. Now I have no earthly idea what it takes to call a Chinese number from America but my number in China is 13701503650 written as they do in China with no dashes or breaks. Just remember if your calling me that I'm exactly 12 hours ahead of the east coast so if it's 9am there it's 9pm in China. Just as a general rule if it's AM your time it's OK to call me.