Thursday night

OK, scrap whatever I just said about Chinese students. :-) I was over-generalizing, of course. They're wonderful, wonderful people! But the ones I saw Thursday night are probably the exception - I mean, they're most likely the richest of the students. They rent their own apartment which has three furnished bedrooms (a double bed, desk & cupboard), a common living room (with TV), a kitchen (with stove-top and fridge and counter space), and a decent-looking bathroom (not tiny). Each person (there are supposed to be three of them living there) pays 650 yuan (around $110 Cdn) per month. But one guy lives with his girlfriend (it happens in China too!), and one guy's too cold in his student dorm so he sleeps in his friend's room in this apartment. Nice eh?

Meet Kobe (yes, like the NBA player - where do you think he got his name?) in glasses and Yang Yang in blue. Their English isn't great but their hearts are made of gold. They're preparing the meal in Kobe's kitchen. Yang Yang sleeps in Kobe's room (bed? - didn't look like there was much room elsewhere).
Kobe's proud of Chinese food. He's from the south, GuangDong Province. Yang Yang's from Inner Mongolia, I think. I actually wanted to take a picture of the kitchen, just to show what it was like.
L to R: Liu Hao, Peter (Pan Guong Ron or something like that - the joke is that he's Peter Pan), and...I'm not sure, he never comes to class! But he is my student. Guys are very touchy-feely. They seem more physical with each other than with their girlfriends at times! But it's nice to see and doesn't shock me at all. Sometimes I laugh a little to myself when I see them caressing each other's thighs and holding each other's hands...but it's all cool. The funny thing is that they're really macho too!

The guys are sitting in the couch in the living room.

Yang Yang preparing the famous "Coke chicken".
We were really hungry!!
Kobe preparing the pork I think it was. We had pork and pickled cabbage. He seemed to know what he was doing. We went to the market beforehand (Kobe, Yang Yang and the anonymous student who never comes to class) and they seemed to know how to pick their vegetables and meat and I was pleasantly surprised by their ability to handle everything.
This is a typical Chinese stove-top, found in almost every apartment, including mine (although mine looks a little newer).
Liu Hao serving the soup.
Our dinner table. The table cloth was Korean newspapers. As you can see, we had plenty of dishes. The students must've spent more than an hour preparing the food. We had the Coke chicken, a pork dish and a beef, cabbage and tomato dish, and cucumber salad and thousand-island dressing salad and rice with sausage...it was all good!
A group of us at the beginning of a game where we pick a piece of folded paper on the table and whoever has the one with the heart (we look at our papers secretly) is the "murderer" and secretly winks at people who then know who the murderer is and can throw their paper down. The last person to hold their piece of paper has to guess who the murderer is and if they guess wrong, they are drawn on (mustache, tattoo, scar, beauty mark whatever it is...). If they guess right, then the murderer gets drawn on. At first we would put pieces of newspaper on our faces by licking the pieces and sticking them on our faces (luckily I didn't have to do that!) and then we decided to draw on our faces instead. I had a mustache and beauty mark by the end of the game. We must've played for at least an hour!
The whole group of us - there were ten of us. The girl on my left is called Eagle, she's in second year and is going out with Liu Hao. The girl in pink beside her is Peter's girlfriend (they're living together I'm pretty sure), and the couple on the right (my extreme left) live in the apartment together. They were sweet. The guy's my student but he never comes to class.
It was actually a birthday (I didn't know until the cake came out around 11 o'clock!). Liu Hao got to lick the knife...
The cake was super creamy and the birthday girl's boyfriend got a piece right in his face. His girlfriend (the birthday girl who's right beside him) was quite amused...

Until she got her own piece thrown in her face! Apparently it's customary to do this on your birthday and it's all in good fun. It was a fun evening. Started out a bit weird - I was watching skateboarding movies on a laptop (Yang Yang is a huge skateboarding fan) and watching a student basketball game that they had played the week-end before on the video camera. But then we ate and it was all good...

Got to go to class!