Sunday, April 3, 2011

Chinese Beer Garden Aficionados (Video)

A big part of Chinese culture is sitting at night at a beer garden; this activity starts after dinner and often goes until the early morning hours. The beer gardens are located outside restaurants or sprung up on sidewalks next to food tables and carts. It is common for the sidewalks in my city to be lined with beer gardens.

Beer gardens aren't a weekend thing, they're an everyday activity. As I have mentioned here before, it takes so long to do anything in my part of China, there isn't an expectation to do more than 1 or 2 things per day. For the Chinese in my city, sitting at night at a beer garden with family or friends is a really important part of daily life. Chinese culture is structured around relationships; this is part of building them.

Most volunteers took to this custom quickly and easily. The video below is not only a good example of the atmosphere of these places (notice the blue stools we're sitting on), but also of the amount of free time we had on our hands every day; I mean, do you have this kind of conversation unless you have A LOT of free time?? Or as R. succinctly put it: "We did nothing but sit around and talk nonsense for two years! No wonder readjustment [to America] has been so difficult!"

This beer garden had a mug of swizzle sticks on the table; every time you ordered a round, they removed a swizzle stick for each drink. At the end of the night, they counted up the swizzle sticks for your bill. It was a great, low-tech way to keep track of drinks in a place where tabs don't exist.

(The movie they're talking about is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.)

2 comments:

  1. I LOVE the concept of this....the conversation is really funny too. So much fun.
    I can see that you would have a hard time getting back to "American" life after that.

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  2. Awkward guy conversation eh. Never fails. One guy rubs it in and the other guy justifies it. Happens all the time.

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