Just like the last post, the picture has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the blog!

On day 2 of this month of posting every day, i'll talk about how we spend our evenings at the weekend. We are already regular 'customers' at a western restaurant/bar called 'christian', and we will usually go there at least once at the weekend. I say 'customers' in inverted commas, as we're more just friends with the owner, Jasper. We never have to pay for drinks, so we don't even drain our rather restricting wage. Jasper never charges his friends for drinks, which is pretty impressive considering the majority of his customers are his friends. We do sometimes wonder how he manages to make enough money considering most of the drinks are just given away.

Now, I'm aware that PT warned of visiting bars in China, but Christian seems to have a different reputation to most Chinese bars. To start off with, it's not particularly seedy at all, with no rough characters that you wouldn't want to meet. I'm pretty sure at training we were told that you risk your 'guanxi' (face, or reputation) if you go to bars too much. The difference in Kuitun, is that everyone seems to go to christian. Older students, business people, young people, old people, off-duty police officers...even fellow teachers, but i've never seen one from my school there. I did get talking to an english teacher from No1 middle school there one night however, and last year had a volunteer at No1.

What about jasper then? The name suggests he might be a fellow westerner in Kuitun, but nope. He's a very Chinese guy, who happens to speak great english and who happens to like cooking western food. He's a great guy, even if he does have a drink that you risk setting yourself on fire if you drink it. He seems to know half the people in Kuitun, possibly because he owns the only bar worth visiting, which has been really handy for us in regards to meeting new people.

Every time we go, we meet new people and make new friends. Even better is that plenty of them don't speak much English, so we always have loads of people to practice Chinese with. That said, it's also nice that Jasper has one or two friends who do speak quite good English, meaning there is usually someone about to help us out if we can't handle the Chinese words flying around the room.

When we go to Jasper's, we never aim to drink much. The problem is that Kuitun is in China. In China, people don't really drink a little bit. You either drink nothing, or you drink a lot. And you will always be pressured into the latter of the two options.

For example, last night, we went to jaspers for maybe a bottle of beer, some games of cards and a chat with some friends. This was exactly what happened, until just as we were thinking about leaving for the night, we met a new group of people who invited us over to their table. This particular group wanted to make sure we would drink more, and one bottle of beer escalated quickly into a much less countable amount. These guys didn't speak much English at all, but for some reason the more alcohol I drink, the easier it becomes to speak and understand Chinese. Marcus and I managed to work out with some teamwork on the language front (and perhaps a few kindly offered English words from the guys) that they were all worked with computers. It also turned out that one of the guys' wife just happened to be Marcus' colleague. She was apparently an English teacher at No 1 senior school.

We stayed with these guys for maybe an hour or so until they left in a horrifically drunk state. The Chinese can handle their baijiu, but for some reason, not their very low percentage alcohol beer. Perhaps it is because the Chinese are not big fans of sipping alcoholic drinks. They like to down everything. They even prefer to down beer over drinking it normally, so it's lucky they don't use pint glasses...as that would be plain horrible.

Chinese drinking games are also pretty much unavoidable if you end up talking to a new group of people. Last night's game works like this. You have 6 glasses, all lined up. 3 have beer in them, 3 don't. Each glass is numbered 1 to 6. You then have to pick from 6 cards, numbered 1-6. If you pick a glass number without beer, you fill up the glass and the next person picks a card. If you pick a glass number with beer, you have to down the glass, and then pick yet another card. This carries on until you finally pick an empty glass.

This is why we usually hope for a relatively quiet night when we go to Jaspers...

If we happen to be still at Jasper's very late, we end up going for food with Jasper at one of the numerous nearby 24 hour restaurants. Unlike a 24 hour restaurant in the UK, these places often genuinely make good food. yesterday, we went to a 24 hour place, but took the food 'da bao', or take away, Had we escaped yet more drinking at this point? Of course not! This is China! So over Baozi (a type of dumpling), and Tofu and potato dishes, out came the dreaded baijiu...and lets leave Jasper and our average weekend evening at that!

before we went to Jasper's yesterday, we did have a bit of an embarassing moment on our search for a restuarant to eat at. marcus suggested we tried a pork restaurant he had passed a few times. this sounded like a good plan, as pork restaurants in China are amazing. So we walked into the restaurant, feeling rather confused to why it felt like somebody's house. We looked for the menu board, but there was no menu. We tried asking for a menu, to which the reply was a very very confused 'Shenme?!', 'What?!' Marcus decided it would be a good idea to call Kai for some help on what was going on...and we very quickly found out that our restaurant was in fact a pork shop and not a restaurant.

So the search for a new restaurant continued, and in the end we settled for something we know already and love. Dapanji, or big plate chicken. We really were treating ourselves though, as we usually never spend more than about 20 kuai on a meal. Dapanji is 55, but designed for more than one person. We did however have a giant meal for 27 kuai each. I worked out that we have a budget of roughly 50 kuai each day onour salary, and that is over half the daily budget on one meal.

You're possibly wondering what on earth big plate chicken could be right now. let me explain. Big plate chicken, is a big chicken on a plate. And that would be every bit of the chicken. My favourite bit is the comb of the head, but stomach is pretty high up there too. I'm pretty sure this dapanji had the heart, but i could have been wrong. As for chicken feet, they get a worse right-up in the west than they deserve, but they're a little on the boring side. They're just very very chewy with very little meat.

As for today, I have very little to write about. We got in very very late from our evening with jasper yesterday, so we lost the morning to sleep. Other than a trip down to our local diner style restaurant for some beef and potato rice, i've basically been sat in the flat. This is however possibly the first day I've had in China in which I have done almost nothing. And I guess I still wrote this blog in it ! This evening should be a little more fun though, as we are going to our supervisor's home for some home cooked food, and *sigh* yet more drinking. I'm sure you will be hearing about that in tomorrow's blog. And with that, I'll draw today's writing to a close!