China is way into celebrating frivolous holidays. Women's Day. Children's Day. Teachers Day. Not that women and children and teachers are unimportant, I just think that having a whole day set aside to celebrate something that we should be appreciating every day is pointless.
Regardless, Teacher's Day in the village was commemorated with an all school meeting followed by a huge banquet.
The meeting would have been boring, even If I could have understood what was going on. But I couldn't. So I sat respectfully in the audience with the other foreign teachers for an hour and a half listening to people I'd never seen before give speeches in Chinese, applauding politely with the crowd at random intervals.
After that we headed to the banquet. Every table was served a ton of food and as much beer and baiju as you could drink. As I'm not one to turn down free alcohol, I poured myself a beer.
Before I noticed that I was the only woman drinking something other than hot water. Oops. I guess that it's just the younger generation of Chinese women that drink in public. So I figured I'd discretely sip a few beers and escape the baiju fueled party that the men were having.
Chinese people love to drink. It's actually quite ritualistic. You fill up small shot-glass sized glasses full of beer, toast with somebody, down your glass, and then repeat with EVERYBODY within a 5-mile radius. Ganbei! Cheers!
Here's the thing. When you're drinking beer out of little tiny cups, it can be difficult to keep track of how much you are drinking. And trust me, little shot glasses full of beer add up quickly.
Not to mention that it's considered horribly rude to refuse a toast.
So I toasted. With the principal of my school. With the principal of the sister school. With the guy that founded the schools. With everyone at my table.
No problem. I figure the first round of toasting was the equivalent of one beer.
However, the table next to ours, a table of all men, was toasting with baiju instead of beer. Baiju aka strong wine, is the equivalent of drinking floor cleaner, and it's really strong. So this table was getting pretty rowdy.
A few of the men at that table decided that me drinking beer was amusing and thought it would be fun for me to start chugging beer like the men. I was brought a slightly larger glass and began to chug beers with the gym teacher. THE GYM TEACHER. Who is a big guy. Tall and muscular. I think the first glass was supposed to be a joke… but I chugged it in one gulp… and that started a bit of a competition.
According to Sky (my Chinese math teacher friend) my ability to chug a beer is "very cool". I'm even more of a celebrity than I was before.
Thankfully I was able to bow out gracefully when the gym teacher wanted to switch to chugging 40 oz bottles of beer. The other foreign teachers took over the drinking competition, and I was able to leave the meal mostly sober with my dignity in tact.
Plus I got a free Slanket (a blanket with sleeves) and 200 RNB gift card to the supermarket as a bonus. It turned out to be a highly successful and entertaining evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment