So, I turned 21 on Wednesday. The plan I mentioned in the last post to get everyone together and buy a bottle of Maotai fell through when I saw just how much even a small bottle costs. I could literally have bought enough of the cheap stuff to fill a hot tub. So instead I went onto Taobao (a Chinese site roughly similar to Amazon, which they also have out here, but cheaper) and had a look to see what drinks I could get from home. I wasn't disappointed - a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, two of Asti and one of Amarula came to a grand total of around £30, including delivery. China is incredible sometimes.

Anyway, after class (i was up drinking whisky till 5am on Wednesday morning, so unsurprisingly didn't make it in to the morning classes) I arranged with my class to all go out and have dinner at a Sichuanese place near me that I'm quite fond of - the same place that had the angry face for its hygiene rating that I uploaded back at the start of this year. The plan was for pre-dinner drinks at mine - remarkably Cantabrigian drinks given the booze on offer, including a bottle of champagne from my parents that turned out to be Bollinger(!) - and then on to the restaurant for a mountain of spicy deliciousness. It proved to be pretty much a perfect evening, helped hugely by the cake Coirle and Clio bought for me. Proper cake's unusual in China, so I'd not eaten any for months, but that was amazing cake, even if I did make everyone wait until the party to eat it, to the disappointment of all during class.

I'd meant to invite the Oxford and Edinburgh students to come out with us as well, but typically for me I left it stupidly late (I didn't even start getting Edinburgh students' numbers until 3pm!) so none of them were able to make it. That's what I get for not announcing my birthday weeks in advance with a megaphone, I suppose. To be fair, it had been the birthday of one of the Oxford girls the night before and I'd not gone out - too busy with plum wine, whisky and a discussion on Chinese drinking culture with Declan, my Chinese flatmate. Oh, and skyping my family too. Anyway, we got to the restaurant and when, inevitably, Happy Birthday was sung and I had to give a speech, I decided to go a little bit offbeat and recite a poem Declan had taught me the night before by Cao Cao, a warlord from the Three Kingdoms period that I'm so unaccountably obsessed by. When he wasn't exploiting the last Han emperor's weak will and lack of power base to rule north China in all but name, it seems he was something of a sensitive soul. Here's the poem, accompanied by a (pretty good) translation for those of my readership who aren't au fait with 3rd-century Chinese poetry:

對酒當歌， Drinking wine calls for song,

人生幾何！ Who knows if life is short or long?

譬如朝露， Life is as the morning dew,

去日苦多。 Past days many, future ones few .

慨當以慷， The melancholy my heart begets,

憂思難忘。 Comes from cares I cannot forget.

何以解憂？ Who can ease these woes of mine?

惟有杜康！ I know but one...the God of Wine!

There's a lot more than that, but that was all I had the time to learn. Plus it's a fairly good note to end on and the later stanzas are less to do with drinking and more to do with world domination. Supposedly he wrote this the night before a huge battle, which he ended up losing terribly and which cemented the south's independence from Han (i.e. his) rule. It's kind of funny to imagine him commanding thousands of troops with a hangover. Watch Red Cliff if you want to know more, or indeed if you don't; it's a brilliant film. Anyway, one thing I noticed was that when I recited the first line, all the Chinese customers in the restaurant burst out in applause. It was a little bit like when you see videos of concerts, and the guitarist plays the opening riff of a really popular song (*brag brag brag*). To be honest, I think they were probably more than a bit surprised to see that one of the silly drunken foreigners actually knew something about Chinese culture! I'd only found out about this poem when I asked Declan if China had any drinking songs, hoping to find an equivalent to that famous young man from Nantucket. Apparently, what Chinese drinking culture has instead is surprisingly good poetry of the kind I wish we'd spent more time learning in Cambridge instead of reading Du Fu bemoaning everything (he wasn't a particularly happy man).

After the restaurant (the bill from which for 11 people, added to the drinks I'd bought in, still came to less than a single bottle of Maotai) we went to the nearest karaoke place, hoping they'd have at least some English songs, or at least the Chinese songs we all knew. It turned out they had a really good selection, and you could even navigate between songs in English which helped. They also threw in a bottle of incredibly dodgy 'whisky' and around a gallon of iced tea to help it go down. Whisky and iced tea's a very popular combination in China; despite what you might think, it's actually very nice, possibly because it doesn't really taste like either of its ingredients. I remember singing lots of Queen, a few Chinese songs and (of course) Rebecca Black, before we ended up leaving at half 4. and I got to bed around 7. I actually heard my flatmates getting up to go to work before I went to sleep. Needless to say, Thursday and most of Friday were writeoffs.

Being 21 - I think I might be doing it right!