Dinner with new Chinese friends

I was still feeling lightheaded and a bit sick yesterday, so I decided to eat some plain food and head to a nearby Starbucks for the day to read and relax. About a half an hour after I sat down at Starbucks a Chinese girl asked if she could sit across from me, and started asking me where I was from and what I was doing in Chengdu. I started talking to her about other things and found out she just graduated from college last year and now works at a small company doing intellectual property work. We talked about traveling and she mentioned that she has never been outside of Sichuan Province, but wants to go to Australia and plans to have time to do this when she is 40. However, until then she was talking about how all of her time is spent either studying for a test she's taking in a few months to be able to work at a bank or working. I asked her how she learned English and she mentioned that it was mostly through American movies. I asked her what her favorite movie was and she said, "do you know Nicolas Cage? He's my favorite actor, all of his movies are amazing, I watch them all." Midway through our conversation she got an English text message from a friend which she didn't fully understand so she wrote it on a piece of paper and showed it to me. It said, "if I rest, I will rust." She only knew the literal meaning of "rust" so I explained to her what the figurative meaning of that text was, and she seemed to agree with that text. She invited me to dinner later that night with her roommates and I told her I'd come.

I arrived at her apartment, a small, three-room apartment off an alleyway, and was greeted by her eight roommates. The living room doubled as a bedroom, with two beds flanking the couch, which also doubled as a bed. The other rooms had multiple beds, and the kitchen was out on their balcony. She told me her roommate who was the best chef was making dinner, and he made about nine dishes. I asked her if this was typical, and she said usually they ate about three of these dishes in one sitting, so I think they had gone all-out to welcome me. I had told her at Starbucks that I don't eat meat, so there were a few vegetarian dishes. The dishes that I can remember were: sliced pig's ear, pork with peppers, pork with a special fungus grown in Sichuan, stir-fried potatoes and peppers, tomatoes and eggs, dumplings, spicy tofu, vegetable soup, congee and watermelon.

We started talking in a mixture of Chinese and English, but they started telling me how they were so eager to practice their English, so we started only using English. They even started talking to each other in broken English, which was really funny. One really funny exchange between them was when we were talking about basketball and one of the guys said he was in the hospital for three days after getting a concussion playing basketball, and one of the girls turned to him and said, "I'm so sorry to hear that" in a way that definitely sounded like it was a memorized phrase, and everyone started laughing. For the rest of the night, people randomly would interject, "I'm so sorry to hear that." The same girl who used this phrase exclaimed "Oh my God" almost every five minutes even when someone said something really mundane.

Basketball was a really popular subject, and the guy sitting right next to me asked me if I played and then told me he was a "SG" so I said "oh, shooting guard" which made him really happy. He told me he was a huge Kobe Bryant fan and watches a lot fo NBA games on his computer. When I told the group I went to college in Minnesota, he yelled, "Oh, Timberwolves." They insisted on teaching me some Sichuan slang, and taught me how to say all of the dishes on the table and a few other things in their dialect. I have enough trouble with Mandarin and all of these changes were really confusing to me. They insisted I was a natural, but I had no clue what I was saying and I'm sure it was part of their hospitality. They then taught me a famous ancient Chinese poem about missing home, which they tried to get me to memorize but I failed miserably. The most surprising moment of the night came when one of them asked, "In America, do you have Chinese products?" I tried to hide my surprise, and explained that almost all of the clothes people wear and electronics people use are made in China, which made them all light up and feel a lot of pride about their country.

Throughout the night different roommates kept asking me why I didn't eat meat, and I found out last time I went to Asia it's a lost cause trying to explain the concept of Kosher to people here, so I just told them it was a decision I made, which was genuinely confusing to them. They really could not imagine an average person not eating meat I think. Another recurring theme was talk about how the United States and China are such good friends and they asked me if I had ever met the President. I told them not many people meet the President, and they said, "but I thought he is always traveling around meeting people around the country."

As the night wound down they asked me if I knew any Chinese music, and I told them that the only Chinese song I listen to is "Beijing Huan Ying Ni," which is a song that was produced ahead of the Olympics and we play in Chinese class. We fired up the music video on one of their computers and they all sang it. Four and a half hours after I arrived it was time to leave, we took a few pictures and then I headed back to my hotel for the night.

Our Chef preparing dinner

All of the roommates (except the chef, who went out for the night)

Me with the roommates

I had a tee time for this afternoon at a local course, but it has been raining constantly since last night, so it doesn't look like I'll be able to head out to the course today. Hopefully it clears up and I can get out early tomorrow before my train to Chongqing.