Funniest weekend of my life

I am just recovering from what is probably the funniest and most bizarre weekend of my life. Before I get to that I should provide a quick overview of my week.

I'm staying in a Martial Arts Academy in Fujian province and learning kung fu. There are about 15 students and most of them are studying Shaolin kung fu. Two others and I are studying what's known as 'internal' martial arts rather than Shaolin external. It's less physically demanding and much more mentally demanding. It involves getting into really painful and awkward stances and flowing movements. The idea behind it is that power comes from the inside and you cause a lot of damage with minimal physical exertion. We're learning a mix of Bagwa, Tai Chi and Sun Shi in the mornings and in the afternoons we learn weapons training, my weapon of choice being the trident. Our teacher, Dong, is absolutely high on chi. He is NEVER without a smile on his face and is always laughing. He is also incredibly strong despite having never worked out a day in his life. He has taken numerous roundhouse kicks to the stomach and just laughed at it. He's also managed to bruise a student's arm all over just by practing blocking techniques with her. He has built up such a legendary status among us students that he's seen almost as some sort of deity. He's an amazing dancer, too.

Anyway, to start with my weekend. On Friday all the students move from the academy to the local town, stay in a hotel for the weekend and get incredibly drunk. It was one of the students birthday as well, so there was a huge party at the local bar that night. I didn't stay there long unfortunately as I was shattered and I paid the price; I have a nice shaven bald spot on the back of my head now for being the first to fall asleep.

Saturday was the most bizarre day I have ever experienced. Around lunch time a bunch of us headed out to a local fast food restaraunt to get something to eat. This place is quite off the beaten tourist track and apparently the students at the academy are the only westeners these people have seen so we thought we'd leave them with a good impression of what English people are like, show them our customs and traditions and such. So somehow it was decided in the middle of a fast food restaurant we should all take our shirts off and a couple even stripped to their boxers. We collected our food topless and began to eat it before we decided to have a spontaneous seance in the middle of the meal, so about 7 topless westerners just started holding hands, heads bowed and hummed for about 20 seconds before slamming our hands back down on the table. The staff were giving us some strange looks at this point so we tried to get them involved and convince them this was what all westerners did so we asked them to bring us plenty of black pepper sachets and just opened them and started rubbing them into each others hands, pretending it was a good luck custom back home. We weren't allowed to put food in our own mouths either, so we either had to feed the person next to us or try and throw food across the table into someone's mouth. It was custom to wave at anybody who passed by, of course. Next we all got up from the table at the same time, lined up against a wall at the opposite side of the restaurant and just stood there for 10 seconds before sitting back down at our table but in different places. At one point we nearly convinced one of the staff members to join us, we got him to sit down with us and he started unbuttoning his shirt before he got scared and ran back behind the counter. We did get his hat though, so we passed that back and forth between us. This whole thing lasted about an hour and if the Chinese didn't find western customs strange before they bloody well did now. Looking back at it I can't imagine what the hell the staff were thinking. A bunch of white people come in to their restaurant, start taking their clothes off and throw food around while humming and rubbing pepper into each other's hands.

The stupidity wasn't over yet, so after saying goodbye to the staff in the restuarant we put our clothes back on and decided to head to the local bar, owned by the academy owner who was interviewing 4 Chinese girls for waitressing jobs. We thought we'd show them our western customs so we came in, sat down, took our shirts off and ordered a beer. Bearing in mind this is only about midday. We made a big ceremony about removing our left shoe and placing it in the corner of the room before sitting back down. I had a picture of a camel on my phone and we tried to convince the girls it was our god, so we started bowing to it and I played some Mongolian music I'd picked up that we hummed and prayed to. We then stood up, held hands and started swaying for some reason. It was pretty obvious 3 of the girls were weirded out by it all, one even ran off. The fourth one though was well up for it and started joining in with all the stupid things we were doing, though at this point she was probably very drunk.

We put our shirts back on and decided to go to the local massage parlour for an afternoon. The fourth girl even decided to follow us for some reason, so we just started taking the piss completely and kept asking her 'why' in Chinese all the time. This eventually extended to everyone else so we just started shouting 'why' to everyone we passed and nodded like we thought it meant hello or something. The madness didn't stop in the massage parlour but it was a really relaxing massage and we managed to have some basic conversations with our masseuses and even picked up some more Chinese from them. After messing about with the staff in their we all calmed down a bit, went for a meal at the steak house and finally hit the bar that night. Didn't _completely_ calm down though, because at some point in the night everyone was dancing to Thriller topless and some locals even joined in. I'd brought along a Mandarin phrasebook which got passed around the bar as people just picked out the most random phrases possible to tell locals. I remember at one point about 3 students just wondered around the bar shouting 'I HAVE AN INJURY' in Chinese for absolutely no reason.

It was a bloody madcap weekend and the same wil probably happen next week, but right now I need to go and pick up some supplies before we all head back to the academy.