Well, today unbelievably is new year's day and perhaps even more unbelievable, I will be hopping on a train in 3 hours to start travelling for 2 months! I'm sure you're all wondering though, what on earth has happened in the last few weeks? Time to tell a story or two I think...

I would love to start with the wedding I went to the weekend before Christmas, but just for sake of completeness, i will begin at the night before. On the saturday Kai invited be out for a banquet with a parent and 'all of the teachers'. Naturally, I said yes - one does not turn down a banquet easily! So after meeting Kai at the high school (in which we incidentally found out he had been accidentally locked inside...), we made our way to the most posh hotel in town.

Then it clicked. It was the same parent as last time...

At the very start of our time in Kuitun, a parent hosted a banquet, and may or may not have been trying to get a bit of Guanxi with the high school. Sure enough it was the same parents. And guess what happened last time? it starts with 白and ends with 酒. urgh...Baijiu.

So basically this meant by 12 o clock when we left, we were rather horrifically drunk on the worlds worst spirit. The perfect prelude to a wedding the following day!

On the sunday, I woke up at 6 for the wedding. I was still drunk. After getting ready, I stumbled a few blocks away to where Charles' house roughly was. Charles is Kai's good friend, and it was her sister that was getting married. (Yes, I'm aware of the one-child policy. Sister can sometimes mean close friend or cousin in China. It's hard to know what exact relation sometimes.) I called Kai up to ask him to come out of Charles' place to direct me to the right flat. Kai replied "umm, i'm still in bed."

Wunderbar!

Instead, Kai called Charles, who promtly bowled out of his flat shouting "TIM! TIM!" at the top of his voice. This was after all an early morning on a sunday. People weren't sleeping or anything.

Once we found each other he took me up to the flat where everyone was getting ready for the wedding. Chinese weddings appear to be a much more casual affair than British weddings. Other than the bride, groom and a few of the women, everyone was wearing very casual clothes indeed. I also just happened to come in in time for breakfast. i was told that this day also happened to be '冬节' or winter festival. What this entailed was eating dumplings for breakfast. If you don't, your ears will fall off, you know. Annnnd, being a wedding, there was alcohol. For breakfast. Not the most fun thing when you are still drunk from the night before.

Then the real wedding festiviities got going. The Groom arrived. traditionally, it seems, the groom is not allowed into the house until he has (of course, it's China afterall!) drunk a bottle of Baijiu. At the door, Some of the groom's friends clearly weren't sure if everyone had been woken up by Charles earlier, so they set off the longest, largest and loudest firecracker I have ever seen. We all then had to take it in turns to help the groom down the bottle of Baijiu. Unfortunately I had to help too.

Now, to actually get into the flat the groom and his group of followers must give gifts to the household. Traditionally I think it is meant to be four, but this wedding had two. Firstly, a giant supply of Baijiu and secondly, half a pig. The other half probably ran away at the sight of the Baijiu. After a lot of shouting and waving presents about, we were all let into the flat. We then simply waited a while for a long procession of expensive Mercedes to pick us up to take us to a nearby town (only 2 hours away!) for the main part of the wedding. Chinese weddings take place in the home town of each partner, and wherever their current home is. All in all, a Chinese couple can have up to three weddings!

This town was very very very small. So small that the name of the place was just a number (which I can no longer remember). The wedding ceremony took place in one of the most important buildings for the Chinese people. A restaurant. The ceremony itself was incredibly short. Kai, who was 'MCing' the wedding cracked some jokes, the couples said some words, some wedding books and rings were passed, and it was done. The majority of the wedding was simply a giant banquet.

Now, Kai had asked me to play a song at the wedding, but I really didn't feel up to it considering my state from the previous night. Despite that, He did manage to persuade me after the majority of guests had left. I've now managed to play German songs and Porcupine tree to Chinese audiences. Hardly conventional choices! According to one of the women at the table my voice is something that sounds a little like 'exotic', but the 'x' is a different letter.

Only saying that to remind myself of the awkward/hilarious time Kai got the said two words mixed up making for a rather strange sentence.

So that's a Chinese wedding!

I can't help but notice the time tick by, as I notice my train away from Kuitun draws nearer, so I will have to blitz my way through Christmas day and Christmas eve. I'm not going to lie, I just slept last night on New year's eve, so there is nothing to talk about there!

New years eve can be summed up in one sentence. Imagine this chanted outside a club at 2 on Christmas day in -20 degrees.

"we won a hoover! We won a Hoover!"

We believed that we had won a vacuum cleaner at a night club. Because that is how China rolls. The truth is that we won a steam cleaner, but nonetheless, eyes could be raised about winning such a thing at a night club.

Oh China.

We were lucky enough to have the guys from Fukang over for christmas, making for a fantastic couple of days. I could tell you all an unbelievable story from Christmas eve regarding one of our visitors, but I'm aware you guys back at PT read the blogs, and I don't think you want to know about this particular event. It's not bad, honestly - you just don't want to know about it.

The four of us certainly had a christmas eve to remember, with a visit to Jasper's, dancing at the club (Stephen and I really go for it on the dancefloor, not going to lie), Beer, Tequila, other drinks -possibly/probably. Oh and of course the steam cleaner. We had loads of our friends out too - John (xiang), Chao chao, Ray... it was a good night.

We even woke up the following day! For Christmas day, we headed over to Dushanzi to see the girls and have christmas dinner. Seeing as they are much richer than we are, they actually have the ability to buy and cook western food - which is wonderful for Christmas. Visiting them also meant we had the wonderful number of 8 foriegners to spend christmas with. It was a proper little family gathering! Not surprisingly there was a little tiny bit of drinking too, but luckily considering the earlier points in the week, it was kept to a minimum. I actually get very bored of drinking after a while, and Christmas day was no exception, considering the heavy drinking throughout the early part of the week.

The moral for any future vols reading this, try to dodge drinking when you can, otherwise you may end up drinking almost every night in China >.<.

So that will be my last blog until I find a computer on my travels for the next two months. If I don't manage to blog in that time, I will write a number of shorter blogs about each place I visit.

Keep on reading!