Now I, unfortunately, haven't been sitting with any pretty woman, per se, but in as far as this whole country (or at least this city) is a beautiful woman, I guess the analogy holds water.
I guess what I'm trying to do here is come up with a really long way to say I know I haven't posted in a while, and for those that have been waiting I am sorry. For those that haven't been, this is going to be a long one, so I'm sorry to you too.
But where to start?
My birthday. My first birthday ever outside of good old RS of A, and my first birthday in a few years without Mike, which was strange. Apart from that though, it was a great day.
Mike phoned me in the morning from S-Korea, and we had a good solid chat, which made my day straight off the bat. Then there were also the tons of emails, wall posts, instant messages, and other best wishes from everybody back home, which were magic.
At school, I had kept it fairly low key, but of course a few days before the day it popped up on facebook and so everybody knew. The day was pretty much filled with congrats on managing to live as long as I have (everybody else is in their early twenties). And then, surprise on surprise, one of my classes threw a party for me. We did a lesson a couple of months ago on the calender, and had been filling in everybody's birthdays. One of the girls wrote mine down, or remembered it, or something, and they organised a surprise party for me, complete with delicious cake and a gift (a bedside lamp). Suffice to say, I didn't give them any homework.
The evening, a few of us went to a restaurant, followed by a couple of drinks at a pub. All pretty chilled, none of the usual debauchery that these sort of events provoke.
Moving on to some debauchery though... Halloween. Now in SA, we don't really do a hang of a lot for Halloween, so it's not a holiday I know much about. But the Americans here (God bless their little cotton socks), really got into it. Anyway, long story short, we had a really Chinese style party, which involves games. One game. Basically, we got divided into teams, and then had to do a treasure hunt all around Xia pu (the suburb we live in), performing various tasks at various venues. Each team had two westerners in, and a varying number of Chinese staff. The reason for the westerners is that Chinese people don't really drink much.
Hang on, digression needed. Chinese people drink a lot, because when they go out, they drink, and they always go out. But a night out for the average Chinese guy would consist of maybe two bottles of Tsing Tao followed by some violent retching in the toilets. I'm generalising here, but not much. We are somewhat revered, and often greeted with wide eyes, for our ability to drink. Which really isn't much.
Back on story. Our team was myself and a French guy, Axel, along with about 8 of the Chinese staff. There were six stations around Xia pu, which we had to run between. This means that at furtherest, we only had to cover about a km between stations. Unfortunately, at each station, in addition to our task, we had to drink three bottles of beer (I may have described before that these are 600ml bottles, not dumpies). Axel and I each took a bottle per station, and the Chinese staff shared the other.
Again, a digression. At the time, that didn't seem like a lot of beer, but now, in the cold hard light of day, my maths is better. The whole trip took us about an hour, and explains a lot about the rest of the night.
Once we reached the end of the race, which was in a nightclub...
http://picasaweb.google.com/zak.wood/Halloween
That's enough. The next day wasn't a happy one.
And now, suddenly, I've run out of topic. I'm sure that some other stuff happened over the last month, but for the life of me I can't remember it right now. I will re-post in a day or two, once I have mulled it over.
Thanks again to all those who have sent me news and pics from back home - more are always welcome!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment