Western Dinners with Foreign Friends

Friday night has officially been designated "Western dinner night." This plan was made by Janet after we took Kevin to the Western Coffeehouse, probably the closest thing to a real western restaurant in all of Zhanjiang. The menu is in English and the food is pretty good. The atmosphere is relaxed, unlike many of the places where we often eat. There is even a piano for entertainment.

The plan is to invite some of our different foreign friends to dinner at the restaurant each Friday night so we can relax and speak English without having to simplify our speech and strain to understand the other persons response. Eating the western food is also a plus! We hope that this way we can introduce some of the people we have met to other foreigners in the city, a way to bring together the foreign community here in Zhanjiang.

For our inaugural dinner, this past Friday, we had members from three different countries. Janet, Kevin and I were there representing the United States. From Cameroon, we had Irene, and from Wales (UK), Jamie. Irene is in her second year of teaching here. Unlike the rest of us, she divides her time teaching between a number of different schools and is leased out through a foreign teacher agency. Jamie is the newest addition to the Zhanjiang foreign teachers and he teaches piano at the Normal College. He previously taught English in the Ukraine and Russia for a few years.

It was good to be able to share observations on our experiences in China as well as classroom insights and stories. After dinner, Jamie took over the piano duties for a while. He quickly attracted a crowd of the Chinese servers who gathered around to watch. Having a special talent, Jamie is already "one-up" on the rest of us. Leaving the restaurant at around 9:30, the consensus decision was that it was too early to call it a night so we moved to a little bar near the Trust-Mart building (a central place to our lives in China). We joined the other eight to ten Chinese patrons inside, there is not much in the way of night life here in Zhanjiang.

Overall, the first western dinner night proved to be a great success and we are looking forward to future Friday gatherings and hoping that some of our other foreign friends will be able to join as well.