Xi Chong

Uttalas ganska lustigt nog tjing tjong.

Well, I'll finally take my time to write about my last weekend; One of Jane's high school friends was getting married, which basically means that he has been married for about 6-12 months already but has finally decided to have the ceremony and celebrate it with friends and family, and she invited me and Aaron to go with her to her home town, Xi Chong. We started out early on Saturday morning, the wedding party would be at noon on Saturday and the bus there should take about 3-4 hours so we had to have an early start to see the firecrackers and stuff, but our first misfortune come soon with the first bus leaving at 9am. The bus was quite funny though, err at least to me; the clock in the bus was set to Swedish time, so I was kind of happy.

So we were, of course, late and missed the firecrackers, but it was still quite interesting, a lot of people having dinner together, a few hundred at least, and balloons and a singer and stuff. Aaron and I still became a show by ourselves, a foreigner in a small town like Xi Chong seems to be a quite big thing, I so used to the staring now though so I hardly notice it at all. We got food and I tried to eat some of each, no matter how weird it was, but people still worried that both Aaron and me hadn't gotten enough to eat, truth is I really got enough. We got drinks too, a weaker form of the rice wine, that is only 38% Vol. and some bottles were water and I think others were watered, and the bride and groom toasted with us several times.

After the reception, like 30-45 minutes after we arrived, one of Jane's friends, who didn't drink, drove the groom's, or some of his family's, car to the hostel where Aaron and I would stay; Jane's father is a part owner of the hostel so we would stay there for free, thank you very much Jane's father. But when we came he wasn't there so we sat down and talked to Jane's uncle and aunt, that is Aaron and Jane talked and I sat there and tried my best to not look too stupid, we also spent about 30 minutes teaching me how to play Mahjong, which was really quite easy and fun once I got the hang of it, probably because I didn't lose any time.

The room we got was rather amazing, we are talking about a hostel after all but I still got a huge room, probably bigger than my current apartment, with an oversized bed, king size which is the name of one of the standards they use here probably according to the American bed standards, and a TV, AC and my own big bathroom with toilet and even a mahjong table, the automatic kind. This is all quite a lot for a hostel and it was the finest room they have, Aaron go the second finest, we got these two rooms because we are really cool, actually we got them because they are comparably expensive, mine is around 60 yuan per night and Aaron's about half, compared to something more around 5 yuan for a bed in a three bed room, so well I was happy.

As soon as we had gotten our rooms though we set out to explore the town, I still haven't really figured out how big buy my guess is around the same size as Lund, just that is the total opposite, where Lund has a majority of student's at an age around 20-25 Xi Chong doesn't have anyone at all that age, the city is a city for the young and the old, people in their primes leave either for university or for migration work in the east, where they can earn a lot more money to send home to their kids and parents, it is a cozy small town anyway, or maybe it is thanks to just that. We spent some time walking around, finding a square that seemed very central, but apparently it is quite newly built, on the shores of a tiny little lake where you normally could rent a small boat with a table on to play cards or mahjong, Xi Chong is even more leisurely than Chengdu, which is to say a lot compared to most Chines places that I've been to at least.

The non-drinking driver and his wife found us again now driving his own car, a small mini bus where the middle seat had been removed for him to transport the rice noodles he makes in his factory, with this car he drove us up the mountain at the verge of the town to check out the Buddhist temple and get a full view of the town itself. The temple was just like all the other temples but it was still nice to get a good view of the town and some fresh air, but when we got back to the car it was gone so we had to walk all the way down, which was also kind of refreshing. Once we got down we went back to the hostel to take a rest and I even managed to fall asleep in the very comfortable and warm bed, warm is important; China is a very cold place, not because it's cold outside but because it is the same everywhere, there is no place where it is even a little bit warmer, except my apartment of course.

Extremely tired now that I had gotten a feel for napping I still managed to go on when we went out for dinner with Jane's relatives, the food we had was even weirder than at the wedding and I was very careful with what I put in my mouth, my stomach was already a little bit too active and there was probably not a single normal toilet in a 200km radius, so I took good care not to eat too strange stuff.

After dinner we met up with Jane's friend again and went with them to the groom's family's home to see what kind of prank they would play on him, I'm not exactly sure I would call it a prank but it was still funny; they had the "newly"-weds doing all sort of embarrassing stuff, much like we do in middle school at times and high school when we are drunk enough, stuff that is not done in China except on occasions like this. For example they hid something inside the brides clothes and the groom had time find it, I think he was supposed to use only his mouth but I doubt he followed those rules, they were hidden under a blanket, next the groom did push-ups over his wife with a banana between his legs, and after that the bride ate the banana, funny funny.

Once all the fun was over we all went out and left the older and younger folks at home for their own entertainment and the younger crowd went to a KTV place close by, there we started drinking weak beer and sing. After about a hundred tiny glasses of weak beer I got unsober enough to make stupid decisions, the first was of course to sing, which was rather fun, the second to go find something stronger so I could make even more stupid decisions, which of course we did, we found a bottle of brandy and a bottle of Sprite and a local Supermarket across the street, or rather ally, and brought it back to share with our new friends. Drinking more of that stuff I started making several of the same bad decision and sung quite a few songs with both Jane and Aaron, never alone though.

People started dropping off in quite big numbers and somehow I managed to convince both Jane and Aaron that we should go to Nan Chong instead; a bigger city about 40km away that has clubs and Aaron has some friends. What I didn't know was that most of those clubs close at 1 or 2am and it was already after 11pm when we left, so we took a taxi, and not any taxi, this was Jane's dad's, again, taxi, it seems everything is his, so we got a fixed price and a taxi that would wait for us and carry us around wherever we wanted. We did arrive at a Chinese bar called Babi, it has a sequel here in Chengdu actually, where Aaron and Jane had been a few times before. but Aaron left us immediately for an upset friend in another place and Jane and I were both getting really bored. Until Aaron had us join him and his friend at a small bar somewhere that is. Tiny place but our spirit was somehow raised to the roof by it and we had a really good time for about an hour or so. We pretty much all half slept the whole ride, drunk and/or tired as hell and when we got back I was about to crash but managed to crash my phone into the floor first and had the speaker broken somehow, now I can only use the speaker phone when I use it.

We slept away the whole morning, we had decided the night before that we would, or rather Aaron and Jane would, wake us all up around 11am but it turned out that all the three of us thought that the other two wanted to sleep longer so even though we all actually were awake before 11am we didn't really get up until after noon. Before leaving we had a really nice breakfast, some rice porridge thing with spices that made it really nice and that finally cost us 8 yuan, together, and really filling too.

In the evening we all went back to my place and I cooked lasagna for us and finally I didn't sleep until 1 in the morning, truly a long long weekend, but good times, lasagna was great, creds to Hellen for coming up with that idea before I left Sweden.