Brass, Bacardi and Being Beautiful

The nice weather is back. Clear blue skies yesterday and today, warm but not too hot and a pleasant breeze - mustn't grumble!

I went into class yesterday afternoon wearing a skirt, a skirt I hadn't worn before and was surprised (though a little pleased!) to hear choruses of 'beautiful' from my students. That's why I'm teaching in China and not in the UK...

Anyway, enough of my ego. What's new?

Not much. We still haven't been paid (two weeks late now), though this has never happen to R before, both times he's taught here. We have been told we'll be paid tomorrow, but we were also told originally we'd be paid on the 12th. Hmmm.

Went out on Saturday night for the birthday of one of the other foreign teachers. We went to a bar called 'Brass', of which there are two branches in PX. It's a Western-style bar, or as close as you get to it in this part of China, serving coffee and waffles, amongst other things. We went there for dessert (waffles) and drink. Actually, we drank their Bacardi supplies dry. Now this isn't as bad as it sounds - they only had one bottle and you tend to buy spirits by the bottle here and share them. Oh well... The other branch of Brass didn't even have a single bottle last time they went, but have since phoned to say they've got plenty in...

One interesting thing, we started off in a kind of booth by the window on massive comfy chairs. We then bumped into a former PXC teacher and his girlfriend, so had to move to a bigger table. We ended up in what was more like an alcove room with curtains that you could pull across. Every time a waitress came with food / drinks, she closed the curtains. And then we opened them again.

It's something different about China. In restaurants you'll have the main seating area and then private rooms. When I'm with other foreigners we always just go for the main area, but with Chinese people we'll offen end up in one of the private rooms. Not sure what the attraction of them is really. In fact, the whole Chinese dining experience is different. Many more people are able to eat out here as it is much more affordable. It's also much noisier. You go into a restaurant in Britain and people will generally speak fairly quietly and not draw attention to themselves - right? Well here, the volume tends to be much louder, with shouting being the norm, alcohol is drunk, but quickly and in the form of 'toasts', and when it's hot the men roll up their t-shirts and get their stomachs out (to cool down, presumably). Maybe that's why they have private rooms...