Gan bei!

On day three we visited the Elementary/secondary School where Stacy worked as an English teacher. The school is massive and has a girls and boys dormitory where students from nearby islands come to learn and live. If you can believe it the junior and senior students begin study at 8:00 in the morning and continue until 9:00 at night! Then they sometimes go back to the dormitory and study as late as 12:00. Apparently you’re popular if you are the smartest student, not the sports star or cheerleader. There is very little emphasis placed on sports, but they love basketball. Can you say Yao Ming? After visiting the school we went out to lunch with two of Stacy’s co-workers, Ms. Orange and Louis. Ms. Orange name in Chinese translates to orange in English and coincidently she grew up on an orange orchard. They both were very sweet and insisted on treating us to lunch because it is respectable to pay for friend’s meals when they visit the island. That night another one of Stacy’s coworkers invited us to her home for dinner. Unbelievable! She cooked for 5 hours and there were over 20 dishes served! She continued cooking during the meal and the dishes were stacked on top of each other because the table was not large enough to hold all the food. Everything was so delicious, but it is still very difficult for me to eat the fish because of all the bones. It makes sense that they spit the bones on table. There’s just too many of them to stop and delicately take them out of your mouth. I’m getting better, but still not to the point where I can just chew and spit. Throughout dinner Stacy challenged the men to “Gambai!” It’s popular in China to fill up a small glass with beer and individually cheers each person sitting at the table. Only instead of cheers they say gambai which means bottoms up in Mandarin, and you have to drink all that’s in your glass. By the end of the meal and 30 gambais later, we headed for the islands only bar. Not much was happening at the bar, which is strange because it is the islands only bar, so we joined Stacy’s friend, Mr. Sugar, at a local restaurant. Mr. Sugar was voted the best looking man on the island…well that’s what his friends will tell you and you know what he was pretty handsome. When we arrived we found that he also had much to drink and kept whispering secrets in Stacy’s ear. We only stayed a short while because one of the girls at the restaurant was crying, which made all the other girls cry. Apparently her family did not approve of the man she loved and the tragic romance had brought all the women to tears. We thought it was best to leave and made our way to the islands only disco which is popular for it’s bouncing floor. Once there we ate sweet popcorn, drank more beer, and bounced on the dance floor under the flashing neon disco lights. We ended the night at a KTV station, which is often a private Karaoke room in a hotel. Inside the room were several couches, a table, and a large screen that played music videos while we sang. In China it is more common to have private rooms for Karaoke, rather than a stage in the center of the bar where everyone watches your drunken performance. Would have been nice to have a private room when I gave my superstar performance of “Like a Virgin,” at Friar Tucks in Chicago. There was also that one time at Carroll’s when Alex and I sang, “Straight Up Don’t Tell Me.” Well he sang, I screamed, thinking for a moment I was Janice Joplin, only because the act before us sang Bobby Magee and I felt inspired. Live and learn.