Summer is starting to break through here with arrival of mosquitoes, late but inevitable, and that questionable habit by Chinese men of shirts rolled up to just below the armpits to expose belly and chest. All day and night as you walk around you will see hundreds of guys, all shapes and sizes, tits and tums exposed to the elements and no embarrassment at all. How this keeps you cool is beyond me and this strange habit descends to an even lower level which you will more than likely see when you enter a restaurant………no top at all! From a foreigner’s point of view it looks dreadful.

Last Sunday night, after classes, we all went to a new restaurant that had just opened, it was a BBQ place. Really fancy and extremely well decorated with modern lighting and decor and hot plates sunk into the marble table tops. The food was delicious with a great range of meats, vegetables and mushrooms to choose from. To top it all off the beer was icy cold. After we had eaten there the Chinese assistants headed for home (well, it was 8pm for heaven’s sake!) and two young American male teachers and myself decided to check out a place just around the corner that had 3 very large home-brew tanks standing outside the restaurant.

Chinese beer is not something I would buy at home, that’s for sure, but some of the home brews have been quite good. This place was no more than 20 metres away from the restaurant we had just been to so we wandered in only to find that they had run out of beer! When you consider there were two 1000 litre tanks and one 500 litre tank you would be right in saying that three empty tanks represented some significant drinking. The patrons still sitting in the place, and it was quite full, were all drinking the bottled stuff – Tsingtao, Snow and Harbin.

So we exited amidst 20 “nihaos” and 43 “hellos” and lots of merriment and right next door was another place that had two 9 gallon kegs on tap! What luck! We sat down, the price was 20RMB per jug and the glasses were nice 10oz steins, another first in Daqing for me. You usually have to drink out of oversized thimble glasses. The pouring jug was a plastic Tupperware sort but, hey! you can’t have everything.

So there we were sitting in a restaurant on a nice warm evening shooting the breeze chatting about the usual stuff, women and work. Actually one guy is from Oklahoma and it was interesting to hear him talk about the tornadoes which at that time were headline news with destruction and death in that state. I looked to my right and in one of the private rooms there they were! Three Chinese guys with their wives or girlfriends, having a meal and a few drinks with all three guys not wearing shirts – at all. The guy nearest the door was one huge dude, not quite big enough to be allocated his own post code but you get the picture. Like a sumo wrestler complete with stretch marks and long pants he sat there drinking and smoking with his mates all in their sartorial spendour. Gross! To make matters worse, the big guy had a partner that would have been a candidate for Miss China she was so attractive and dressed well as were the other two women. The evening can best be summed up by using the words from an old spaghetti western: The Good! The Bad and the Ugly!