enjoy!
as far as my birthday is considered, it was fantastic! i awoke early to find text messages from some Chinese friends wishing me a happy birthday, great way to start off the day. Then throughout my classes i had multiple singings of the birthday song. Lunch, which i have mostly come to dread these days because as a vegetarian it now always, undoubtedly includes a green mushy ball of some kind of vegetable that appears to be a cross between lettuce and bok choy, overcooked and swimming in a puddle of oil, on my birthday actually there was tofu, eggs and taro! we must celebrate small miracles...
as i mentioned previously i was treated to a birthday party with my 704 class and it was so fun! these kids are really great, very generous and kind. they constantly ask me for my qq number which is like a messenger website like AIM that everyone here in China has... i have yet to acquire this but i will soon, i think. i was given many interesting gifts from my students, mainly, this is very exciting for me, earrings! We had a lesson awhile ago about favorite things and collections and i shared that i like earrings a lot and showed my students a sampling of the ones i have from around the world. They were impressed with how many places i had been and i think they wanted to make sure i had plenty of earrings from China, so i got probably 16 pairs! Other highlights include a set of traditional Chinese fans, a bracelet and hair pin from Yunnan province, a set of tea cups, five stuffed animals, a couple of music box/snow globe things and some paper weights... some are very interesting and some are very beautiful, thought that counts right?
i later went with Penny to buy a cake and go to the restaurant to get a table and choose the menu. The restaurant is called Wan Jia Deng Huo, which i think loosley translates to One Thousand Family Homes Lighted... it is a gaudy, over decorated monstrosity decorated from floor to ceiling with plastic, gold plated pomp and circumstance. Golden chandeliers, sconces, and frames around the italian renaissance paintings screened directly on to the walls, gave the place a yellow, hazy tint in all my pictures. In short, it was a sight to see. It's also difficult i learned to order food for 18 people ranging in dietary restrictions and also arrival times, but i made it work, with the help of Penny, of course, translating the all Chinese menu.
Food was pretty good and so was the cake that i bought, it had blueberry filling to my happy surprise!
*a side note, it is customary in China, and maybe other places as well, for the birthday person to pay for everything. i think the idea is that if i invite you out to a meal, i'm paying. needless to say none of the Chinese people paid for dinner and me and five other foreigners were stuck with the bill. Luckily, despite are fake and fancy surroundings, dinner was not too expensive. However, this tradition left me with some mixed feelings. When it was Penny's birthday she wouldn't let any of us chip in for the KTV room so i guess it evens out. But i still think i prefer the American tradition of treating the birthday person. It's the one time when they shouldn't pay for anything, this is my feeling, let me know what you think of this predicament.
A couple of us went out to have some drinks after dinner at the Forrest Blue & Jazz Bar near the river, it was raining and i had many gifts including a giant Panda bear pillow so we took taxis. All in all a very nice evening was had.
For the weekend Gino, Nellie and i went to Hangzhou to continue the celebrations. Unfortunately, the fall is finally coming and it rained and was surprisingly cold all weekend but we still had a pretty good time, including a little boat ride on Xihu (West Lake) in the rain. We went to an Indian buffet, Hangzhou is a much larger city and has a lot more diversity in terms of cuisine. It was great to have something different, but it was not the best food i've ever had... nonetheless daal is always delicious, as is Coconut rice! Last and least of all we went out to a supposed "hip hop" night at Club G+, but it was a let down... they played two songs that were to be considered "hip hop": Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls and 2 live Crew's We Want Some Pussy... i'm ashamed to admit how excited i was to hear these atrocities of songs but in comparison to the bad, really bad, techno house music they were welcome to my ears! The next day we tried to eat something resembling mexican food, but except for the existence of sour cream i could have sued them for false advertising in calling what i ordered a "burrito", no beans in the whole joint! So what i ended up eating was a tortilla full of lettuce, tomato, some cheese and sour cream! We called it a draw in the end because that's the first time i've had sour cream in two months... don't underestimate the importance of sour cream to me!
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