Bottoms Up

**Voice of Dr. Nick from the Simpsons** “Hello Everybody”….yesterday a few of the managers at work took the other guy (from work) and me out to dinner last night to this nice restaurant on the other side of town. It was a pretty nice place, we had our own room and all…very typical Chinese dinner: lots and lots of food, most of which was put on a giant Lazy Susan in the middle of the table (which makes me wonder who is Susan, and was she lazy…or a genius…seriously, a Lazy Susan is really just a buffet table where you don’t even have to get up to get food…Susan was probably fat…maybe it should be called a Fat Susan). Anyway, Dalian is “famous” (everything here is “famous”) for its seafood…which is most likely because it surrounded on three sides by the Pacific. Haha and every time I ask our translator what something (food wise) is…she either says “sea fish” or “sea vegetable”…sounds fishy to me. pun intended.

The funny thing about nice Chinese dinners, is that it’s traditional for everyone to toast each other – usually to “friendship” and how much you drink is directly proportional to how good of friends you are, so most toasts are “bottoms up.” Also, one of the favorite drinks is so called “white wine”…which is definitely NOT wine, it’s got to be about 50% alcohol. We were finally able to convince them that we’d toast them with coke or juice to their beer. Yeah, yeah, not too exciting I know, but you have to remember that everyone toasts everyone else…so I think I did about 10 toasts or more…so you can imagine that it’s best to toast with something other than alcohol if I actually wanted to make it to work the next day, haha. All in all it was a good dinner and now I have a bunch of new “friends,” lol.

What other news…oh we’re looking into finding a church in the area…and there’s always the Sea Shell Museum to look forward to…