The fellows in the picture for this blog are myself in the middle, Marcus on the right, and our Supervisor, Kai, on the left. Kai's invitation to eat at his home is the focus of today's blog - day 3 of national blog posting month.

I said at the end of the last blog that we were off to Kai's house for a meal and some drinking, but it turned out to be a rather interesting evening. Yes, it was a great evening, but at the same time the interesting part wasn't exactly a highlight of my time in China...lets just say i remember some of last night.

So our home made banquet at kai's house we were given one of our favourite meals -Hotpot. The way hotpot works is that you have numerous dishes of raw food, which you then throw into a boiling vat of either soup or oily sauce mix. You let it cook in the bubbling cauldron of food, then eat it once it's done.

We were wondering how you could cook hotpot at home, considering the soup needs to be heated to boiling all the time, and needs to sit in the middle of a table. The hot pot restaurants have a special heater in the middle of the table, or supply you with individual boiling pots. It turned out Kai owned some sort of special super heating hot plate, that did the trick.

We were joined also by Kai's wife, Nicky, and three friends of there's - gavin, charles, and Gavin's wide, who didn't say her name. (or if she did, her name was lost to the Baijiu incident...).

They all have studied English, hence the English names, so although we also spoke some Chinese, English was the main language of the night.

Now. What exactly causes you forget a whole half of a night, when you weren't even noticeably drunk? The answer is simple. Baijiu. China's favourite spirit, and also one of the most terrifying drinks known to man. I still hold that I was not drunk. I cannot however remember the second half of the evening. I only remember being at Kai's house, eating hotpot, and drinking a little bit of Baijiu. We weren't even downing the Baijiu as is tradition at Chinese banquets. But the big pointer that i did indeed blackout from the Baijiu is that apparently we went to KTV. I don't remember that at all! I also woke up trying to remember if we took that taxi home or not.

So that was my evening. The moral of the story is, don't drink Baijiu. If someone offers you either Baijiu or absinthe, take the absinthe - it might make you go blind, but it's probably still safer...

If I don't like baijiu, how come I keep on drinking it? In China, drinking is some important to the culture, that you don't just say no to a drink. And in winter, or at banquets, Baijiu is always the drink.

I also just mentioned KTV. Let me explain KTV from a previous experience, as I don't remember last night's visit. We went to a KTV with Jasper, after a friend of his got married. It was the couple's after-marriage party (which on a side note, Chinese people can have as many as three weddings to celebrate one marriage), and we were taken along to it. At KTV, you essentially book a private karaoke room. The Chinese are mad for it, and Kuitun has KTVs all over the city.

At the KTV party we went to with Jasper, they also happened to play some pretty strange games because of newly married couple. Apparently a wedding party in China, it's ok to whip the groom with belts for every mistake they make in their strange games. For one such game, the groom had to do press ups over the new bride, and if his press ups weren't good enough, two belts slam down onto the poor guy. And this was considered a fun game by all, except for me and Marcus who were feeling rather confused by the whole thing.

As for today, despite blacking out, I had no hangover whatsoever. I never do. So I got up around 10 and started my day. Admittedly I had a very very lazy morning, but i headed out into the city later.

I would usually cycle into town, but my bike had been left at Jasper's on the friday evening. My walk into town consists mainly of passing restaurants galore. All the streets have absolutely tonnes of family run businesses. The majority of shops in Kuitun outside of the centre are family business restaurants or family run food shops, with a sprinkle of other shops dotted among them.

One of the shops I really like passing, because of the fantastic smell, is the nang stall on a street called Wusu jie. Nangs are the Uyghur minority's version of naan bread, and there is always one in our apartment. A very large nang costs about 3-5 kuai depending on where you buy them, and they are always amazing.

If I walk into town, I usually look around at all the shop names -as it's great practice for learning characters. it doesn't take long to realise that characters aren't as complicated as they look, and a lot of the time, even if you don't know a character, you can sometimes recognise a character that is probably related to it in some way.

My first stop in town was to get some food, so I went to the first restuarant we ever went to in Kuitun. One thing I thought about today, was how when we first arrived in Kuitun, my limited knowledge of characters meant I couldn't understand the menus past knowing whether or not it was rice or noodles. Now I can already read half of the menu there - and at most restaurants I can read a few dishes easily. That's pretty amazing for only living here two months. Today I went for a dish called 'ding ding chao mian', which is roughly ' fried chopped flat noodles. I'm pretty sure it's an exclusively Xinjiang dish, but i'm not sure. There is a lot more tomato in Xinjiang cooking than other regions, so the majority of xinjiang food has them in it.

I also had a surprise when I bumped into the girls from Dushanzi straight after eating food. They were about to go for lunch themselves, so I followed along without eating.

The place they went to was actually a western style place which means one very important thing. They had real coffee! So despite the horrible pricetag of 32 kuai, i just had to have one. Real coffee is a hard thing to find in Xinjiang, so it's worth spending if you happen to find it. As for western food in Kuitun, there are one or two places, but i avoid them. Chinese food is way better than Chinese imitation English food, and When in China, why on earth would you want to eat Western food all the time anyway? Maybe it's nice occasionally, but I stick with Chinese food generally.

I then spent a little bit of time just wondering around the centre of Kuitun, picked up my bike from Jasper's and bought a pestle and mortar. I'm trying to improve my Chinese cooking a little, and to make Chinese sauces, a pestle and mortar is quite useful. I shall see tomorrow if i can make a better sauce now that I can grind ingredients up a bit.

So as you can see, if you discount our evening with Kai, which was fantastic (at least what I remember), this weekend was pretty quiet and lazy. That, I believe, is a miracle after the madness of last weekend!

I did spend 2 and a half hours prior to to writing this blog on lesson planning, but lesson plans can wait until tomorrow's blog.

I'll write again tomorrow then!