Day 35: February 7, 2013 New Year's Dinner Minhang Campus

   I got to sleep in a little bit this morning, which was a pretty nice change. When I woke up, I went over to the café to grab some breakfast/lunch and then hung around the hotel working on some trip details. Before I knew it, it was time to get ready for our banquet at Minhang, which is where we will be moving in a couple of weeks. 

New Year's dinner with entire group and President of SJTU & faculty

Pinwheel of Death

  
     Right when we got there we practiced our performance for later in the night. It made us all a little nervous considering the practice didn’t go so well and the people watching didn’t seem very impressed. Not too much later we got seating assignments and got placed in the very far corner, which we thought was a bad thing but actually turned out to be really nice. We could actually hear each other talk and could be a little more rowdy than the people sitting near the middle surrounded by the SJTU staff members. The three graduates students at our table were all really nice, but one was a lot more outgoing than the rest. He immediately thought it would be funny to teach us dirty Chinese words which we thought was great and will definitely keep in our memory banks for future use. We did a lot of cheers and got the tables around us into it by tapping on the lazy susan with our glasses, which is apparently a very northern thing to do.  In China this is called gan bei, and when you cheers you finish your whole glass since the word is basically translated to mean bottoms up.

Pig foot!

     With that, the food started to come out and there was a night full of eating, talking, and tons of performances. We ate everything from bullfrog to bamboo and saw performances ranging from gangnam style to traditional Chinese dancing. Our program was actually the second group to perform and it turned out to be a hit. We started out with our dance troop doing a well-known Chinese dance with a mash up of American songs including YMCA, Cotton-Eyed Joe, and the Electric Slide. From there, everyone else joined in and sang Hail Purdue and then ended singing the Chinese friendship song called pengyou. Everyone was amazed that we took the time to learn the words and all joined in to sing along.

Our group performing

     The performance was followed by the first of many photo shoots of the night and then we returned to our table to continue socializing. After all of the performance were done, they had a fireworks show outside which was pretty shocking. Originally, we thought it was just people banging there tables trying to start a gan bei so we were pretty surprised when there were fireworks going off right outside of the dining court. Madame Ma, the president of SJTU, made sure to make it around to every table and when she stopped at ours it was seriously unbelievable. Within a few seconds, our entire table was swarmed by cameras taking pictures of only Madame Ma, Jess, and I. We could tell it was very political because Madame Ma picked up my glass just to cheers Jess for the picture and made sure to keep eye contact with the camera while shaking our hands. This was honestly one of the most overwhelming things I have experienced since I have been here but it was really interesting to observe first hand. When she left our table, the students said the reason they were so excited was because there are not a lot of girls at SJTU so it was rare to see 2 of us sitting next to each other. 

     After the chaos settled, they started raffling off prizes. A few people in our group won including Jess, Nathan, Zach, and even Dianne and Weiqi. Dianne and Weiqi both freaked out when their names were called because the prizes were supposed to be for students and Weiqi technically wasn’t even invited. They were pretty happy though when everyone got really nice prizes from speakers to hardrives and back up batteries. 

     When Jess returned to our table one of students decided to play a joke on her and tell her that since she won she had to gan bei with everyone at the table, which was probably 10 of us. He went and got her 2 tall beers and somehow managed to keep a straight face until about halfway around the table when Jess finally realized what was going on. She then made him gan bei with her and quit until Zach also won a prize so we told him he had to do the same. Many beers later, our table was definitely one of the most fun at the banquet but sadly enough it was time to head back to campus. The bus ride back could’ve taken all night as far as I was concerned because I would do anything other than study but unfortunately it went by even more quickly than the way there. The rest of the night was consumed with studying for my ME 375 exam and making sure to get a little sleep in there as well.

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