Here’s the story of my first Chinese New Year party. Actually, this was the “End of the Year” party for the Microsoft Office. The director wanted me to prepare an inspirational speech and tell them more about me because, as he indicated, many of them haven’t been exposed to someone with a wide range of interests like music, climbing, and so forth. Well, I’m kind of confused by that request now (I’ll try to straighten out my confusion on Monday) because it wasn’t a “work” environment. The alcohol flowed freely, people danced, yelled, played games, ate, laughed. It was one of the best office parties that I’d been to ever, certainly the best of all the Microsoft ones (I recall a couple of good GeoGraphix ones).

I rode with Greg, my austere Polish friend that I play tennis with, and his wife and young daughter. Their driver first took us to the wrong restaurant. Apparently it had the same name. Notice the name of the hotel that was next to it:

The real restaurant was another huge complex – many rooms full of people that we walked through until we arrived at ours. Along the way, we passed tanks of crabs, fish, lobster, these huge weird mutant lobster things, shell fish, giant alien snails coming out of these shells. Greg said these were quite tasty but seeing them scurrying around or sitting still as a rope of rough gelatin pouring out of a shell made me think otherwise.

Well, the food was excellent; I recognized most of it. Actually, I didn’t eat that much because everyone (including me) kept wandering around. I drank red wine most of the time, but some folks had me try “Chinese wine” which is this clear hideous moonshine liqour. But, folks were drinking it in shot glasses in the “Gan bei” style – bottoms up.

Here’s the software team:

After dinner, the staff cleared away an area for games, talks, and singing. We had a new girl join the group this day and she was the first person to get up. She actually sang a capella in front of everyone and thought nothing of it. The week before, people kept coming up to me at work saying how they’d heard how I was a musician and were looking forward to me playing at the party. I was always surprised to hear this and they looked even more surprised that I would not be playing. Now I know why they were so surprised. It’s customary for folks to get up in front of a crowd and sing or play or talk. They don’t think twice about it. I find this funny because in the office, they are much more reluctant to talk. In fact, I would say they are very shy. But, in this sort of setting, they were cracking jokes, caterwauling off key to loud applause, and dancing. See, that’s why I was so surprised about this speech. I must have really misunderstood what the director was wanting. Ah well. I was announced in Chinese by someone saying “OK, who knows what this song is?” as they played “Living in the Now” by FT. That was my cue to get up and talk. Well, I wasn’t about to give a motivational speech in this environment so I instead just winged something about how impressed I was with the Chinese enthusiasm for learning English and now…merrymaking! Well, it was half-baked and the mic kept going out…oh well. Oh yes, and I got requests to say “Happy New Year”, “Bottoms up!”, etc. in Chinese. Next time I suppose I’ll have to play and maybe even sing.

Here’s a movie of various scenes from the evening. See fo’ yo’self.

Comments: By the way, comments are still broken, but I’ve narrowed down the error and have support questions out to various places. I upgraded my blog to version 2.1 of WordPress which broke several other things…you get what you pay for I reckon). Hopefully, the comments will be straightened out soon.