Chinese Beers

China is a pretty large country and being so it boasts quite a few brands of home brewed beers. There is of course the most popular brand, Tsing Tao, but each region in this vast country has a handful of beers that the locals prefer over the others. Most recently I came across Double Deer Beer in the Zhejiang Province. I was having dinner with a colleague who had heard I could take down quite a few pints but had not seen the work of Avi first hand. He bragged that I could not possibly handle more Double Deer beer than him. In fact it sounded like a Double Dare to me. I do not enjoy drinking such large amounts of beer but I had to entertain the man. After about 5 bottles of beer and one pitcher of rice wine the poor bastard turned beet red and harassed some young waitress after which I had to walk him home.

Last week I was in the Shandong Province where the locals are known all over the country for their aggressive Gambai drinking style. I do not really enjoy beer after dark unless it is Killkenny but once again I had to enlighten my hosts. Between 3 men I believe we went through 3 crates of LAOSHAN beer with dinner.

By the end of the meal I could not balance in my chair. I was sober as a nun but my belly was so damn full of beer I could hardly think. My bladder was even fuller but I dreaded every god forsaken trip to the restroom. I kid you not when I say that certain areas of the wall were caked in feces. I don’t even know how I stood there for an extra 10 seconds to take this picture. After dinner we drove home, down the 2 kilometer street that made up the village I was in. The guy who was driving was so wasted that it took us 20 minutes to get home!!! I could have crawled faster than the guy was driving, but what a fucking experience.

Then a few weeks ago some friends and I went about an hour out of Guangzhou to eat some authentic Western Chinese food. I actually don’t know the name of the region this food comes from but the people there are mostly Muslim so the food is all halal consisting mostly of grilled meats. It is off the hook. They serve their own beer there as well called WUSU. It even has some sort of Arabic looking writing on it. But my Middle Eastern friend who was with us that night said they obviously have a very different Arabic dialect because he translated the writing as saying ‘shit in my pussy’.

Seriously, I could not even make something like that up if I wanted to. Can any of you other Arabic readers validate this claim? So its been a crazy week with a lot of city hopping around China. I am off again tomorrow to some idle location that time forgot but I hope to be back here for the weekend at least.