A Normal Weekend

Because this coming week is the last week of school, we only have to plan two real days of lessons, and the rest is reviewing, testing, and a party, so we ended up actually having time on the weekend to go out a little bit.

It was pretty fun. The normal weekend activity is to first get shaokao (chuanr) which is basically just meat/veggies/fish/bread barbecued on a stick with some spicy sauce. It's pretty taste, but it's better and cheaper in Beijing. Anyways, you end up just sitting outside under a small tent on this little stools that make all of the taller fellows (myself included) look ridiculous. It's pretty ghetto, and probably a very good way to get food poisoning, but it's a lot of fun.

After that we normally go to the one club in Lincang. I'm not a huge fan of clubs, but it's a lot of fun because pretty much all of the fellows go, and it's just a funny experience. Most of the foreign fellows (the Americans) end up dancing, and the entire club of Lincang people just end up staring. The YMCA song came on and people were literally video-recording the Americans who were doing this strange dance and singing along to this weird foreign song. Also, as a white guy in this club, if you try to walk anywhere by yourself in the club, you will literally be grabbed by Chinese men who will force you to take beer shots with them. There's no real way to refuse, because they will literally be hanging on to you, and forcing a cup of beer into your hand that you're supposed to cheers them with and then chug. (note: in Lincang, when cheersing, your goal is to get your glass lower than that of the person you are drinking with, so you end up essentially divebombing with your cup to be polite. It's....interesting.

Apart from that, I spend a lot of the time doing "interventionist dancing" to protect the female fellows by aggressively positioning myself to rescue them from unwanted attention. I've gotten quite skilled at extricating people from awkward situations. This whole adventure takes place in the smokiest atmosphere possible because people can smoke inside, so every single guy in the club will have a cig dangling from their lips the entire time (which they will also try to force on you, but are more willing to accept a refusal than with their cups of beer). All in all, it's a very interesting experience.

Finally, we end up heading back to our wooden boards to go to sleep. Good times.