The New Years party

I went to my Chinese sponsor's New Years party and it was incredible. This is like their version of our Christmas parties so it was a big do. The other people in my group were trying to get me to sing a song in front of everyone. There were a lot more people than I expected (~250). We did sing a song together on stage, but it was a French song, and only one of us knew the words so we mumbled and it was really embarrassing.

We met the leader of the communist party and the leader of the labor union here and when he grabbed the microphone, it sounded like a Mao rally. Everyone was cheering and it was actually pretty fun and it was easy to get caught up in the atmosphere.

The funniest part was all of the drunk Chinese people. They have this thing called gumbay, which is their way of saying cheers and bottoms up. People kept coming over to our table and saying gumbay. Then we all had to cheers and finish our wine. I never had more than a half glass of wine poured, but we must have done that 20 times. And somehow (I don't know how), my wine glass was never empty. The waitresses would come by and pour you more without telling you, even if you were still holding the glass.

The authority who will be evaluating our product was so smashed. He kept gumboing us and told one of the guys on our team, that if he doesn't drink more, we would not get qualified. I went to the washroom and there were several people sick. It was so messy! The best part is that it was a family function. There must have been 30 kids under 10 years old.

The food was also ridiculous. We had so many dishes. I think the funniest was their favorite delicacy. They bring in a dish with a whole baby pig. There are no eyes on it, instead, they have maraschino cherries in the eye sockets. Inside the maraschino cherries, they stuck LED lights that flashed. So we had a dead pig with (alternating) flashing red eyes. It was so weird. Another weird part about that dish was that the only part that we were supposed to eat was the skin. The skin was precut so you could grab it with your chopsticks.

Afterwards we went for a beer at an irish pub downstairs in the lobby of the hotel. All of us were pretty drunk. After that I went back to work. :) I worked yesterday from 6:30 am to 4 am with my only brake being the drunk fest. It was one heck of a night.