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With the official date of St. Patrick’s Day (unless you want to accept the Catholic church’s authority on a matter such as the correct date for a saint’s feast) falling on Monday, the opportunity for celebration fell over the weekend and stretched across the weekend. On Friday, the school sponsored a ‘welcome’ dinner for foreign teachers (even though almost all of us are returning from the previous semester) at the absurdly posh hotel down the street from the campus of Shengda College. Just blocks away from a wide public street where vendors sometimes set up grills right beside overflowing sewers is a hotel where tables feature motorized lazy susans with goldfish swimming in large central bowls and private rooms contain leather couches and TVs in addition.

Saturday, a smaller group of foreign teachers headed into Zhengzhou. After finding a restaurant that featured a rather high quality curry, we headed over to the Target bar, a place popular with foreigners where a Che Guevara flag was joined by an Irish one hanging from the lantern-lit second floor. We remained on the bottom floor (closer to the bar), next to a white brick wall covered with pictures from around China (with people’s face disturbingly annotated to include horns and missing teeth, suggestive of a contempt for the native people of the country made more nauseating by the prevalence of older and poor people in the photographs) and various scrawled names and phrases. I contributed a four-line poem in ball-point which I like to imagine was completely at odds with the spirit of most of the graffiti, but perhaps I am not as rebellious as I like to think.

We returned late, after a trip to McDonald’s (where all I could order was orange juice), having confirmed once again that it’s much more difficult to get drunk when you’re paying for your own alcohol. We also had a brief run-in with a security guard when we walked through the construction zone on the site of what used to be the main gate (rather than walk an extra ten minutes to use the southern one), though this was resolved when we continued on our way towards the foreign teachers’ residences. At least, unlike on New Year’s, the cab didn’t drive us all the way to the wrong college on the other side of town.

Related posts:

1. 24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Teaching Culture by Patrick R. Moran
2. Unhappy China
3. Celebrating the Fourth of July?
4. Job-Hunting and Crash-Dieting in China
5. China Traffic – Henan Province
6. Watching The Graduate in China
7. Things That No Longer Surprise Me About China
8. The Foreign Language Building
9. Ringing In 2008
10. The Plumbing Saga

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