Being in the most international lab on our floor does have a lot of perks. One of them is you get to have lots of celebrations. Our latest lab outing was to celebrate the Chinese new year at Tao's house. Tao is my fellow postdoc in our lab and was very kind to prepare a feast for us on the Chinese new year, for the year of the Rat.
We had some great traditional Chinese food, obviously washed down with Coca-cola. Damn westerners.
and a good laugh playing table tennis after. Not shown here is Tao kicking my ass at table tennis.
All in all it was a great evening and it reminded me why science is a nice field to work in, because it truly is a international field. Anyway to the second point of my post; not lost in translation. As part of the celebrations, Tao, his wife and those originally from China tried to explain what was going on to those not from China. Firstly the food was all explained, although I was slightly disappointed that the promised goat actually turned out to be lamb (do like eating new animals). After this the bread was passed round. One bread roll contained a red bean, the person who found this would have to tell a love story.
As the bean wasn't found the first time round we started to talk about new year in our different countries. Andres playing the wag asked what I did. Obviously not wanting to regale people with my ASBOesq antics I did eventually get round to Big Ben. Tao, then told is the story of why there is no year of the cat. We then played a little game of guessing what brings or chases away good and bad luck. Not good news if you bought shoes in the last few days. While Chinese characters baffle me, one of the things cool things is that they all came from pictures originally. Here are the symbols for the animals for each year, you can sort of see em, well kinda.
Anyway I digress. Back to the bread. We were on the second round and still nobody had got the bean. It turns out Tao had forgot which one it was in and not cooked it. So we all made Tao tell the story of how he met his wife. Well actually Tao and his wife had to tell it. The story goes. Tao and his wife both helped the same person out on the same day but in different ways. So the person took them to dinner and after they played poker. Tao lost and had to make breakfast for his wife to be. As the dorms were not co-ed he had to drop it off with the porter, but saw her at a bus stop the next day, they had a drink and hit it off. The best bit was them telling this story. Tao's wife was telling it in broken English (she doesn't get to practice very much) and Chinese (we had lots of translators) but you could tell how embarrassing it was by the look on Tao's face. This was especially apparent when she let slip that during all this Tao had a girlfriend. Communication is not always verbal.
As the bean wasn't found the first time round we started to talk about new year in our different countries. Andres playing the wag asked what I did. Obviously not wanting to regale people with my ASBOesq antics I did eventually get round to Big Ben. Tao, then told is the story of why there is no year of the cat. We then played a little game of guessing what brings or chases away good and bad luck. Not good news if you bought shoes in the last few days. While Chinese characters baffle me, one of the things cool things is that they all came from pictures originally. Here are the symbols for the animals for each year, you can sort of see em, well kinda.
Anyway I digress. Back to the bread. We were on the second round and still nobody had got the bean. It turns out Tao had forgot which one it was in and not cooked it. So we all made Tao tell the story of how he met his wife. Well actually Tao and his wife had to tell it. The story goes. Tao and his wife both helped the same person out on the same day but in different ways. So the person took them to dinner and after they played poker. Tao lost and had to make breakfast for his wife to be. As the dorms were not co-ed he had to drop it off with the porter, but saw her at a bus stop the next day, they had a drink and hit it off. The best bit was them telling this story. Tao's wife was telling it in broken English (she doesn't get to practice very much) and Chinese (we had lots of translators) but you could tell how embarrassing it was by the look on Tao's face. This was especially apparent when she let slip that during all this Tao had a girlfriend. Communication is not always verbal.
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