Our Boxing Day Bash

Merry Christmas everyone. I'm saying that rather half-heartedly, because it doesn't feel anything like Christmas. For starters, it's about 30 degrees too cold, and I'm at uni all week. But we did manage to squeeze in a little get-together on Boxing Day night at Fabien and Christelle's apartment.

For dinner, we had handmade dumplings (most of which fell apart when cooked), pasta, Beijing duck, cheese and bread, and chocolate fondue. Unfortunately, I was feeling really ill (my eyes were hurting - I didn't quite understand why until the following day when I couldn't open them for the blinding pain - my first migraine!) so I left before the chocolate fondue. Anyway, a couple of pictures:


Fabien's chocolate collection - his excuse? He's Swiss.






Christelle in the kitchen.



And IT SNOWED AGAIN! But not at all exciting this time, because a) it only snowed a tad, and b) it snowed during the night... Most of it had melted by mid afternoon again. At least now the eerie mist has lifted again.



I'm home in 25 days!

Hooters (yes, exactly what you're thinking)

On Saturday, a number of my classmates and myself sat the HSK exams - HSK stands for 汉语水平考试, and is a proficiency test for Mandarin. The only reason we sat it was because it was free - normally you have to pay around 5-600元, but they'd recently made some changes so we were able to sit it for free. It was split into two sections, and in total went for nearly 5 hours.

There is nothing quite like getting up at 7am on a Saturday to sit an exam that isn't even compulsory. It really takes something out of you. So... we went to Hooters. Now, for those that aren't aware of Hooters, it is an American institution comprising of meat, beer and buxom girls is little clothing. And a Hooters had recently opened in Beijing, so we thought it was the perfect place to celebrate a job well done on the HSK.

The food was great, service was very enthusiastic, and the entertainment... entertaining. Our waitress was a girl called Cice (pronounced C-C). I had the chicken caesar salad, which I was very excited about. We also ordered for the table 50 chicken wings, which we hardly made a dent in. Every half an hour the girls do a little dance in the aisles. Very entertaining. We even told them it was Hokky's birthday, and they made him get up on a stool while they sang Happy Birthday and embarrassed the hell out of him.


From left - me, Yumin (Chinese), Mega, Olly, Candy, Andri, Devi (Indo), Candra, Hokky (Indo)



All the girls in the place!

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

That's right - it snowed! (A few days ago). I would have blogged sooner to post photos, but I was unfortunately sick in bed with a feisty hangover that day, and my camera is out of batteries so I had to wait until one of my friends posted their pictures online! I am sneaky like that. And well, I kill two birds with one stone, because this picture is practically an entire class photo.



13 of the 18 people in that photo are Indonesian... Not surprisingly, my Indonesian has improved dramatically this semester. Our 'listening class' teacher is the lady in the middle, with the pink handbag.

Unfortunately, the snow melted almost entirely the same day. But I'm hoping for a pretty heavy downfall between now and Christmas so I will get my first white Christmas!

I ate meat with a knife and fork!

Yes, yes, very exciting. Today is/was Christelle's birthday - she's a Canadian/French girl (Quebec actually). So we all headed out to a relatively fancy restaurant called Annies for eats - what particularly interested us was their chocolate fondue (but more on that later).

I ordered the New Zealand rock of lamb with vegies, and oh my.... it was FAN-BLOODY-TASTIC. I took a photo, but it's only on my phone so you'll have to wait until I return home to see (which I'm sure you all shall). Watching Horacio trying to eat with a knife and fork was hilarious... The poor tyke could hardly cut his chops, but I'm sure with a set of chopsticks he could have worked wonders. For dessert, Mega and I split a cheesecake, and also had chocolate fondue. Chocolate fondue was clearly created on by God on the seventh day... It combines the decadence of chocolate with the goodness of fruit - a tad like the goodness of a crab, in the convenience of a stick (Dave Hughes fans will know what I mean, in reference to the fantastic-ness (yes, it's a word) of fish'n'chip shop crab sticks).

After dinner, Mega, Olly, Xavier and I headed to Club 13 - a club near university that I've been trying, unsuccessfully, for months to drag people to, but nobody is ever interested, primarily because the club specialises in metal, heavy metal and death metal. Tonight was a tribute to Dimebag Darrell - the lead singer of Pantera who was shot and killed at one of his concerts. It was really odd to see Chinese guys with dreads rockin' out to metal music, but lots of fun. And I am very glad I finally got some people to Club 13 - they all loved it so hopefully we'll get the chance to go back before I leave (tomorrow night is a Sgt. Peppers tribute night, so fingers crossed).

42 days to go, and 80 hours of class to go! Photos to come soon!