Birthday Weekend Extravaganza

Well, the last couple of days have proved that I really don't know much about China. It all started with me inviting a few people to dinner for Josh's birthday.

Now, a sidenote is that I'm still not sure whether birthdays are really this important in China, or if they think that Americans think birthdays are this important. It might be like their view of cake: Chinese people are convinced that Americans eat large helpings of cake daily, especially for breakfast. Anyway, I'm just not sure, so I can't tell you whether this experience was normal or not.

The important part is that I invited people to dinner for Josh's birthday. Unfortunately, two of the people don't get along, so I had to plan two separate things (one on Saturday and one on Sunday, which brings me to another tangent, the point that only Americans have weekends in China, the other teachers and the students all work 7 days a week, and I think some people resent the fact that Josh and I have two days off every week).

Friday night we just hung out at the apartment. We've been watching "The 4400," which I found on DVD here, and we've been reading a couple of different books, so it was fine. Saturday morning one of the Chinese English teachers came over because he had questions about an exam he had to take (which is apparently part of being a teacher in China). I was told that it was an English exam. When he showed up, it turned out that it was a statistics examination written in English. It took me the better part of 30 minutes to explain that even though I know English, I haven't taken a statistics class in almost 8 years.

Our friend left, determined to find the answers to his exam online (cheating is perfectly acceptable here, it doesn't really have a moral value attached to it). Josh and I spent the rest of the day cleaning, mopping, etc. We had invited the two Canadian girls from another high school over, and so we didn't want to look like slobs. Also, I had to wash all the dishes, because whoever lived here last had just stuck them in the dish sanitizer without washing them (a sanitizer is pretty cool; you wash the dishes by hand, but then throw them in the sanitizer to make sure they're disinfected, because all the dishwashing is done with cold water.) Lots of preparation and work.

Our friend (Lee) came over and we went shopping for all the stuff we needed to cook dinner, and then we met the Canadian girls and went back to our apartment (we hadn't planned for one of the girls to be vegetarian, but she was really nice and I guess there were enough vegetables for her to eat that she wasn't starved). Lee showed us how to cook this great beef dish with garlic and peppers, and we sat down and started eating (note, pictures of all this will be up today I hope).

The food was great. When we finished, we opened up the cake that we had gotten for Josh. It was huge - we still have half of it crammed in our tiny refrigerator. But the best part was the two pandas on top (made by hand out of frosting). Anyway, the cake was very good (for China), and I ate more than my share. We threw in a movie called "A Good Year." Made by Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe as the star. It sounded promising for a romantic comedy. Anyway, it was terribly boring, although it looked well-made at least. The girls and Lee left when it was about half-over, and then Josh and I cleaned up. I ended up reading for a couple of hours and finished Brandon Sanderson's Well of Ascension.

Now, that may sound like a fairly reasonable Birthday Extravaganza - and it was. I was perfectly happy with that. I assumed that Sunday would just be a nice dinner, and then we'd be all done. I had no idea what was in store for us. I'll go ahead and post about Sunday a little later (or maybe tomorrow) because I'm tired of typing.

Side note - After trying to learn the first verse of the Jackson 5's ABC / 123 song, the kids absolutely refused to do it anymore (even though it had been their idea) and insisted on teaching us about China and the Chinese language. I learned about the 4 famous Beauties of China, one of whom was apparently incredibly fat.