dinner with guzhen

so lucy let us know yesterday that thursday night we were actually going to have dinner with the government... um what?
well i thought that it was us american teachers and a couple of others from our kindergarten school and in a room with some government officials. i thought it was going to be a little dinner party and just kind of awkward.
yea.
turned out to be totally what i did NOT expect.
but.
it .
was.
awesome.

so we get to this restaurant and its this huge bangquet room with dozens and dozens of round tables full of people! there was probably around 200 people there. turned out to be more of a banquet for the teachers of guzhen sponsored by the government. even though there were plenty of people there, rest assured we were noticed. yea, we definately were noticed when we walked in. we sit at a table with our head mistress of our school we teach at. it was pretty neat. the table next to us was full of the kitchen people and we waved to our chef (who is pretty much our friend now). there were teachers, police officers (including the guards for our apartment and the school who waved to us when they saw us) and of course government officials (but they were at the tables at the front of the room on a raised up platform type space.
it was definately an experience. so we're sitting and waiting for the food to be served and for pre-dinner apetizers we had nuts (whole ones to be cracked), coconut flavored nuts (which i'm pretty much addicted to now) and sunflower seeds (flavored in the only way we've figured out to describe it, china). there was tea, a bottle of hard liquer, a bottle of wine, a bottle of orange shasta and a bottle of coca cola for each table on a huge rotating serving platter on the table. we of course drank the coca cola and had two more bottles brought over.
the best part: the food. afterwards lucy explained that she does not like guangzhou food, she likes wherever she's from food better. her taste is more flavors and spice and they mainly eat chicken, pork and beef, and guangzhou, she said, is about health? but after i tell you what we ate you will def be as confused as we were.
in order we recieved the platters on our rotating serving circle:

• duck (and they are polite enough to put the cooked head on the plate too)
• shrimp (whole, i'm really good at peeling of the head and tail, some of the little guys even had some pinchers on them. this was good with some garlic butter sauce they had)
• crocodile (they were polite enough to cut it into pieces but left the scales on. lucy says you eat the scales if they're soft, not if they're hard.. they were all hard)
• donkey. yes. donkey. i ate donkey. (its really tough)
• chicken soup (more of a broth)
• pidgeon wings (which again, they were nice enough to leave the cooked head on the plate. chantelle almost murdered me when i picked one up and had it talk to her and then had it visit her on her plate. haha)
• fish balls (looked like meat balls made of sausage)(these were really good!)
• corn and cashew mixture (i pretty much downed 3 little soup bowls of this stuff)
• some vegetable that looked like celery but was not
• some vegetable that the closest we can describe it to is a potato, it was not good)
• pork ribs (the normalest dish we had, and yes, normalest is a word)
• somewhere in there we got a bowl of white rice (gasp! what a shocker)
• then these sticky rice like circle things filled with some goop that tasted good
• wierd shaped noodles that seemed to be in a soup of corn-syrup-ish stuff? idk it was too sweet, but not good sweet
• and then to finish the night of, orange slices and grape tomotoes.

haha. oh china. so turns out doesnt matter what kind of meat it is, i pretty much think its s'all good. yea it was wierd, but i tried everything and pretty much loved it all, yes even the donkey and pidgeon wing. i didnt scarf it down, i had my bite, enjoyed it, then moved on to the next dish.

the most humorous thing of the night was that i gagged and had to spit out only 2 things into a napkind. one was i accidentally mistook a whole garlic glove for a water chestnut. not pleasant. and then there was a really really bitter cabbage/kale like vegetable that invoked my gagging reflex. so of all the things to spit up, those were the two. it made me laugh.

okay now for the highlights.

so there are just tables and tables of old chinese men (like 40's and 50's) and we see them all just staring at us, callie had one wink and wave haha. so we're sitting and enjoying our meal and lucy says that we're going to go up to the government and toast them (more like etique for inviting us and so forth). ha. okay so we walk up to their table (past about 10 other tables) and EVERYONE is watching us and they see where we're going and one table breaks out in applause and then another and another and so forth til we are all just laughing nervously and our faces are beet red. so we greet the Governor of Guzhen and some other official and they thank us for helping with the education in Guzhen and we shake their hands and we toast. it was pretty neat. and of course walking back was a treat with thousands of eyes on us. lol.

then throughout the night everyone's smoking (makes me appreciate the clean air laws in american a whole lot) and of course everyone's getting their own amount of alcohol in them. haha. so we see periodically throughout the night a table of men would stand up and they'd do a shot. it was pretty funny because we just got to see all of these people just get drunk. our guard (drunk) came over and toasted our health (we joined in with our coca cola), our driver (head mistress's husband actually) came over and toasted us with a bunch of his buddies. Some guy SOOO drunk started talking to callie. it was pretty hillarious. and then everybody seemed to leave all at once (we figured out it was because the food was done and they stopped serving alcohol, go figure) so our table just so happened to be on the way towards the exit. so we have everyone just walking by our table either staring at us or giving us a "hello" or "goodbye". we figured out that when people see us they love to use their american phrases they know on us, just because they can. so get hello's everywhere. we figured out we're going to come back to america and feel severly attention deprived. so everyone (drunk as the dickens) is stumbling out saying random stuff to us as they pass and we smile and chuckle and give them a good ol american "hello" right back. its pretty entertaining. then we're just waiting for our bus to come back (one from the school drove us, its more of a van) and three police officers come up to us, and yes they are also very very very very very drunk and they say something to lucy and lucy says "they want to know if you want to karaoke with them" haha. we just kind of laugh and politely decline. it was funny because the headmistress very subtely was telling us to say no. we told them that we dont drink and we dont want to hang out with a bunch of drunk people, but another time, sure! (ha, yea.. right..) it was just amusing because they kept asking and the head mistress had to politely but firmly try and get them to leave.

so thank you guzhen (.. government?) for a very very enjoyable night. def one we'll remember.

and we leave for Sanya, Hainan tomorrow (pretty much china's hawaii) and then Guilin. we'll be gone for a little less than 2 weeks. be ready because you know there will be pictures, stories and the like. :) adu.