the picture to the left is frank's head in the foreground of the dining room. He is from the us originally but spent quite a bit of time over here, in Beijing as well as Singapore. Fun guy to talk with.

the food was pretty good. There was more Chinese wine. i poured myself a glass to try it and frank quickly advised me to stick to beer. i told him that i still wanted to try it he suggested that i "cut" it with sprite, making it sound like i was shooting up heroin. By itself it was awful. With the addition of sprite it was suprisingly palatable.

i am glad i learned about the sprite trick. After dinner everyone walked around to all the tables containing anyone they knew and drank a toast with them. Toast here means draining a full glass. i was lucky that i did not know that many people at that many tables. The directors had to stop at every table. The sprite made pounding a glass of bad wine not so bad. Also you could go pretty heavy on the sprite.

the pic to the left is the first real deal egg rolls i have seen. They actually had a thin layer of egg beneath the roll part.

after diner started wrapping up, the real fun began. They had a raffle again. The head of atc's son did a Wushu demonstration. There were many random games on stage.

one of the more interesting ones was what frank took to calling the Lao mai humiliation game. Lao mai means foreigner. Basically they called all the white people in atc to the stage. i was not called because i do not work in the atc. Frank and i sat there making fun of everyone else as they tried to sing a Chinese song they heard on a pair of headphones. The whole time this is going on frank keeps shouting dance Lao mai, sing Lao mai and i keep cracking up.

karma bit me in the ass for this though as at the end of the game they called me up and made me try to sing a song that sounded really familiar. Basically it was like a 20 year old playing tee ball. They gave me the easiest possible song they could. i could recognize the melody as familiar but had no idea what they were signing or how to pronounce it. After just laughing in the microphone for a verse the next verse came on in English and i realized it was happy birthday. Everyone treated me like a special needs adult after that.

the birthday was for the guy to the left. Tim. He is very popular in the atc and can apparently do no wrong. He got trashed before he had to get up on stage. Once up there he had to down something like 4 beers in rapid succession. i alternated between amusement at watching someone chug on stage and amazement that this was happening at a work function. Remember i had not seen the whole toasting thing yet.

after the chugging they gave out 14 awards related to interviewing and recruiting. i thought this was a little excessive until frank explained that the atc had conducted 2000 interviews in two months. This was after three written exams (of which they took the top 7-10%) and a phone screen. That is a ridiculous amount of interviewing and culling.

after dinner they had fireworks and i took many good videos. These fireworks were probably the best i have seen since being here. The most exciting part of them was Tim trying to help light them and running through the barrier to help.

after the fireworks there were a bunch of events you could go to. Movies, karaoke, swimming, game room, bowling, ping pong and probably a couple of other things i am forgetting. hua and i wandered towards bowling but once we got there it did not seem that good so we went back to the game room. This was even worse, the best game they had was a '87 knock-off of pole position.

we went to get foot massages instead after playing about three bad games. hua was amazed that the technicians giving us the massages had never heard about Microsoft. They knew all the hardware companies but very few of the software companies. That is because it is harder to pirate hardware. Interestingly the only software companies they knew about were ones that provide services so are basically unpiratable.

after the foot massage we headed back to the karaoke bar. We had to walk between buildings and at the stairs to the other building we found Tim and co. trying to hijack one of the hotel's cart / bus things. They could not quite do it so they just left it beeping in reverse backed up against the stairway.

karaoke was alright. i just ended up playing the dice drinking game with some people. It was awesome, we were drinking warm bud ice. Cold is a rarity here. Even at restaurants you usually just get less warm. It was fun hanging out and drinking. Towards the end of our time in this room a married couple came up that i ended up talking to for most of the rest of the night.

this was the second karaoke room we got shifted to after a while in the first one. i went to the bathroom and came back and could not believe that this was the number. This was the least fuzzy of the 20 or so pictures i took of the sign because i thought it was so funny.

the karaoke was not so good but it was cool because i was just chatting with the couple below. They were from Hong Kong so i was able to get a little different perspective on china after talking to them.

after this full night i went back to the hotel room and quickly fell asleep. Unfortunately as soon as i fell asleep i started snoring which meant that jay no longer could sleep. He ended up driving home at 3 am because i was snoring so loudly. Bodes well for whoever is coming to visit.