Celebrating Vietnamese and Chinese collaboration

On Thursday night, I was invited to a special singing contest at the university, put on to celebrate continuing ties between my university and one in Hanoi, Vietnam. There's about 20 Vietnamese students here, all in the same class, and all significantly better than everyone else at Chinese. They're also some of the nicest people I've ever met, so incredibly friendly.

I went with Clemens (German flatmate) and XiaoMing (one of my Chinese flatmates). Before we got there, XiaoMing was delving around in the breast pocket of his fake Adidas shirt, then offered me to have a look. Of course, he was keeping loose pieces of chewing gum in there. I mean, why use the packet? Actually the other day, we were eating a dinner together at the flat with some other people. A lot of Chinese food is bone and rubbish, so you can spit it out and leave it on the table. But where XiaoMing was sitting was a drawer fixed to the underside of the table, so when he wanted to spit something out, he'd open the draw, drop it in the drawer, close the draw and continue eating, with an expression that said this is the most normal thing in the world. I could not help bursting out laughing everytime he did it.

Anyway, the event was held in a small conference room in the foreign students' hotel, about 70 of so other students for the audience. All the desks that we sat at had snacks already laid out, including piles (literally, piles) of bird seeds that people here like to eat. All evening you could here the cracking of seed shells on teeth. If ever you managed to make even a slight dent in your pile, someone would come along and pour out a load more.

In between the Chinese and Vietnamese singing traditional songs, there were some party type games as well. One of these involed 8 people, in pairs, being blindfolded. One had a banana, and the aim of the game was to unpeel the banana, find your partner, then feed them the banana (all blindfolded). So you had these people wandering around, wafting bananas around in the air and poking other people in the eye/ear/nose with them. Absolutely hilarious viewing.

At the end, we had the obligatory mass photo session, I was fortunate not to get lockjaw. My friend suggested to the people around us we do a Mexican wave. To be fair, it was a beautifully excecuted, textbook example of a Mexican wave, but with only 4 participants in said wave, it lacked the emphaticness of, say, a Wembley stadium wave. However, my friend seem to think it was great, and insisted on another. Maybe it was the previous banana incident, but I thought this was hilarious as well.

Being a clever chap, it decided not to take my camera. Nice one.