I Swear Revenge!

Today I went out with Ma Ming and a couple of the students to see the desert but that will be in another blog post today I want to talk about lunch, and revenge. After the desert, as is fairly common in these group outing situations, we had a banquet style lunch. This is usually nice even if it involves too much food. Actually Ma Ming had been talking about going to this place for a while since it serves local fish and sits right next to a big lake. At lunch, as is also common, there was beer and toasting. I didn't really want to drink much beer since I had a lot of stuff left to do in the day and I know that it's never just one beer and that being drunk would pretty well screw up the rest of the day and possibly my week. Also we are having another banquet, that will be the fourth since I've arrived, on Tuesday so I thought I could do my drinking there. Ma Ming despite not drinking himself, he said he had too much the previous night was merciless in pressuring me to drink.

At first it was sort of funny but after two hours of being pestered to drink more I'm pissed. Ma Ming may try to do nice stuff for the teachers he but he can really get on my nerves. He jumped into a photo I was trying to take and after he said "Oh, that was rude," I tried to play it off as a cultural difference before he said again that no it wasn't just a cultural difference he was rude. Well Tuesdays banquet offers me the perfect opportunity for revenge. This Chinese machismo thing is a two way street. I know I can drink more than him and I'm not going to stop toasting him until he's on the floor. You can toast a whole table but you can also just toast one person, the trick is to essentially gang up on one person and take turns toasting him. I'm pretty sure I have the other foreign teacher Slav on board and I bet I can recruit Roy to help as well. Bring on the Baijou. On a lighter note I took a picture of all the food we had served at the banquet so you can see what one of these things is like. If you can't identify some of it don't worry that happens to me too: