A Toast to Prince Charles

We had the Christmas banquet last night and once again it was a lot of fun. The president of the University came again, it was a new president this year because the old one retired/was forced out. There is also an end of the year banquet for the whole foreign language department, but that will be next week. This banquet was just for the English and German teachers and was held in the hotel I live in. The food was good, at all the banquets I've been too the food is pretty consistent so even though there are always a few new things I know what to expect. I'm not going to go into a whole description of Chinese drinking habits again but suffice it to say there was a lot of toasting. The new president and Peter, Teddy's boss not the one who lives across the hall from me, were quite into a machismo see how much you can drink sort of thing. At first it was the Americans drinking bottles of beer against them drinking very full cups of wine. But at one point when I was having trouble downing a whole beer in one swig I joked to Peter about when they were going to bring out the Baijiu. Well that was all it took for the president to start ordering up some really expensive bottles of Baijiu.

Ken in his apartment has a gallon drum of the cheapest of the cheap Baijiu which went for about 30 RMB for the whole things. These little bottles they brought out at the banquet cost I believe 600 and 700 RMB respectively. The more expensive one was called Maotai and has a Wikipedia page if you click on the blue hyperlink. Peter even noted to me that he would never have been able to order these bottles if his boss wasn't there. Now I can say that this stuff is definitly better than the gallon drum of Baijiu but it's not much better, and it's not 100 times, which is about the cost difference, better. The drinking was kicked up another notch then and people were making toasts to all kinds of odd stuff including Peter who at one point compared Sean to Prince Charles, in a good way I think, and then did a toast to that. They also gave us some gifts like last year, but this year for some reason they decided to give us a fancy box with apples in it. I think some one may have been under the impression that apples are somehow connected to Christmas but it's good since I was out of apples anyways. After the banquet was over we all met up back at Ken's place and Ken and Sean whipped up some Hot Buttered Rum which we drank while we went out to do caroling. We didn't have quite as much time this year but we his up a lot of places and the student reaction was still great. Caroling in China has to be one of my favorite things I've ever done.

I was pretty hung over during the night and I woke up a few times feeling pretty sick from drinking and eating that much but each time I woke up I drank some more water so when I actually got up a little after noon today I felt pretty good and not hung over at all. Today was Christmas eve my time which can be hard for missing being with family back in the states but seeing all the students cheers me up some. As I was walking back from class I saw some students hanging out a few asked me if I was doing anything on Christmas eve, but since I don't go to church I'm not sure what I would be doing. One group started chattering a lot as I walked past then one girl ran up to me and gave me a milk tea, which is kind of a combination of hot chocolate and green tea, another gave me a balloon a few minutes later. In both cases I thanked them and wished them a merry Christmas in Chinese, but that was about as much as I could say. Now maybe they gave me this because they know it's Christmas and they know that on Christmas people give gifts so they thought it would be fun to give some little token to a foreigner, but I've had people give me stuff in the middle of the summer also so I think I'll just attribute it to my dashing good looks. Merry Christmas China, and merry Christmas to everyone in America too.