Eating Cake with Chopsticks

Teddy who has served as my liaison to the school since I've arrived here decided to take a different job recently in the school. He will still be around but he won't be the person in charge of making sure we have water, electricity, heat, and get paid on time. Since this Friday was supposed to be his last day in the job we planned a surprise dinner/party for him. We got most of the foreign teachers, including the Germans, to come down to one restaurant on market street. Ken then arranged for Teddy to meat him near there. It definitly seemed that we had surprised Teddy pretty good when he showed up. The restaurant we ate at is one of the nicer ones on campus and a lot of the students go there when they have birthday parties and what not. They had a little trouble with our groups since there were so many of us that they had to push together three tables for us all to be able to squeeze around. We ordered a bunch of different food and that place is pretty good so it was a lot of fun. We were able to get Teddy to drink enough beers that by the end of the night he looked pretty tipsy. Ken had also gotten a cake at one of the other places on market street. In usual Chinese fashion the cake came with only about five plates and a few of these little prong like devices that you are supposed to use as forks. Since we didn't have enough to go around most people ended up eating their cake out of a bowl using chopsticks. I'll tell you you never know what skill you'll need in China, but the ability to eat a cake with a pair of chopsticks is certainly an interesting one.