NEW YEARS - Year of the Wine

Happy New Year, everybody! And an especially warm happy new year to all my fellow oxen. Let's take this year and ride it hard!

I finally assented to actually going out to a bar for New Year's instead of staying home and playing with my DS like I wanted. In general, I hate the bars here, because 'bars' as I know them don't really exist here. Instead, they only have clubs, clubs where you have to pay $5-6 for the local, normal, possibly formaldehyde-spiked beer. For a wide-eyed kid fresh from Urbana, this is unacceptable. Anyway, we paid about $20 each for unlimited beer and theoretically unlimited pizza, which was OK by me. I paid only about $14 for the bottle of champagne I'm doling out in the above photo. It was called "Kelly's Promise," which seems a lot more reliable than the "Kelly's Revenge" line of wines I found in the states.

One of our friends, Harry, spent pretty much the whole night trying to solve a Rubik's cube, or a "magic cube," which is what we Americans call Rubik's cubes according to Chinese textbooks. The party was on the roof of a mall for some reason, which is why we all look like we're freezing. I still don't understand why we were on the roof - there weren't even fireworks!

The party was pretty hopping. I can't believe how many foreigners were there! There were even lots of non-Americans, including a German guy who was pissed off that all the Chinese people yell "Hello!" at anyone who is white. The guy walked around spitting out, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch! Sprechen Sie Deutsch!" I would be annoyed, too.

There was a pretty good magician traveling around the party. To be fair, I was also pretty drunk and easily impressed. Anyway, here he is trying to solve Harry's Rubik's cube.

Here you can see the "pizza" section of the party. The pizza was awesome, but it came out at an excruciatingly slow rate which could not satisfy the sizeable crowd. If you were drunk enough to not notice that you were hungry, like me, it was all right, but sober people like Andy spent a lot of time in the line. At the end of the night, Andy managed to make friends with the pizza makers and make HIS OWN PIZZA, which was supposed to be a face or something I guess? I got a piece that was pretty much only onion beard, so I vote for less funny pizzas and more tasty pizzas in the future.

Also, I had to ask Andy what the title of this post meant, and he explained that the word for wine (jiu3, 酒) is the same sound as the word for nine (jiu3, 九). But they're different characters. So there you have it!