Hey everybody :hi: Im living in China and I just celebrated the New Years with my wife and her family. Her hometown is a tiny little city (by Chinese standards) in the Guizhou province. We had a fantastic time, ate some great food, and played a bunch of ma jiang. Some crazy **** went down and I told all my family and friends back home with this email. Thought y'all might like to read it too...hope you enjoy it!
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Hey everybody. I just got back from Elfs hometown Meitan and I thought you might like to hear some ... unique ... stories.
Elf and I went out late at night to party with some of her friends. The usual binge drinking ensued and we were soon hammered. (dont all stories start this way?) Around midnight we decided to call it quits so we headed home and went to bed. Sometime later at night I got up to go to the bathroom. I was half drunk and groggy from sleep as I stumbled into the bathroom. Elf's parents have a traditional "squatty" toilet, not our nomal western "throne" toilets. Basically its a porcelin pit in the floor that you balance over as you do your business. It takes some getting used to. After your done, there is a huge bucket that holds like 20 to 30 gallons of water, and a big plastic bowl floating in it that you use to ladle out water. So I finish pissing and I go to grab the bowl floating in the bucket when all of sudden I see it move. I think...I was really drunk so Im not sure. I went to grab it again and it DEFINITELY moved. I pick it up and there, chilling in the bucket of flush water, are 2 giant FISH looking up at me. Live, swimming fish. Apparently Elfs Mom put them in there to hang out until she cooked em for dinner later that week. Oh but wait, it gets better. The next night Elf and I go out again, we get drunk again and we come home. Elf goes to the bathroom and I get ready for bed in our room. All of a sudden she screams. Not a "oh my" kind of scream, but a blood-curdling "HELP!" kind of scream. I race to the bathroom and Elf is jumping up and down, shouting in Chinese and English, pointing at the toilet. One of the fish had jumped out and was buried halfway down the drain. We tried to grab it but its a HUGE ass fish, really strong (not to mention slimy) and it DOES NOT want to come with us. I think it knew it was destined for the dinner plate and chose the toilet drain instead. Anyway, Elf ran to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of pliers, and yanked the litter F-er out. Disaster averted.
Ok, one more. This one is even better, and looking back I still cant believe it. The next day Elf's mom made us dumplings for breakfast. She cooked a ton and we couldnt finish them all so she told us to take them upstairs to the roof and feed em to the chicken. I knew they had a rooster up there (Id seen him before and he crows every morning) but I had no idea chickens eat dumplings. Another day, another lesson learned. We go up to the roof to put the dumplings in its cage and we open the roof door, there is the rooster, staring at us and clucking away. Somehow he busted out and he was wandering free on the roof. We tried to catch him but he was a fast little bugger. We got him cornered but he jumped up onto this thin metal railing that circles the roof. His big feet could barely hang on, and with his fat butt hanging over the edge, every little gust of wind almost sent him overboard. We waited for him to jump back down to safety but instead he turned and tight-roped his way down the thin metal rail, clucking and flapping his wings and hanging on for dear life. Elf and I said shrugged and left him to his fate. Fast forward 10 hours. Elfs family was over and we were playing Mah Jong. For some reason the image of that fat chicken doing his highwire act came to my head and I just bust out laughing. Elf turned and raised her eyebrow so I said "Man...I cant believe that chicken this morning. That was CRAZY. How did he get out of the cage? How did - WHAT THE HELL WHAT THAT!?" Right then, in mid-sentence, I saw something fly past the window of the kitchen. Yeah, you guessed it ... it was our little feathered friend. The chicken had leapt off the SEVEN STOREY roof and crash landed on the roof of the maintenance shed next to us. Everyone looked at each other in disbelief, then we all ran to the window simultaneously. There we were, a foreigner, his wife, and 10 aunts in uncles, crammed into a tiny kitchen and looking out the window at this insane rooster that had just jumped off a 7 story building. I swear Im not making this up! 5 minutes later me and a couple cousins were chasing this thing across streets and down the back alleys of Meitan. "Hey mister...have you seen a chicken just now?" "Why yes, he just went down that road." (yelled over the shoulder) "Thanks!"
Only in China...
-Alec
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