2009-05-18 Basketball and duck hotpot

Today was Monday (I will refer to it in the past tense cause it's nearly tomorrow) and for me, Monday is basketball day. Every Monday 4pm at Eastgate courts, I engage in battle with my ex-students, friends and random Chinese dudes who want to take on a foreigner. After two years of playing ball in China, I finally came up against a dude who is better than me. I think this says more about the sad state of casual pickup ball at the university here than my actual basketball talents. Apparently this cat plays for the university basketball team. He was about 6', maybe 6'1, and the unusual combination of being both fast and strong (99% of guys here are either one or the other, actually... most are neither). Anyway, he was a bit of a dick, as evidenced by his arrogant demeanour and his use of a pretty offensive swear word everytime he missed a shot. I would say that were I eighteen and in shape again, I would have dominated him, but that would make me a sad old man... and that's something I don't really want to be.

After two hours of fairly intense four on four half court basketball, I took my sore back to KFC to meet up with Nicholas. From there, we went to a duck hotpot restaurant. Sounds a little odd, I mean I don't really associate duck and hotpot with each other, but it was very tasty. I was expecting the soup to taste more like duck, however, as it tasted like very delicious chicken soup, I can't really complain. After eating all the boiled duck, you can add extra ingredients in traditional hotpot fashion. We added beef, potato, spongy tofu, tofu skin (dried tofu noodles, very, very good), wood fungus and "Chinese cabbage". To be honest, the stuff came out of the pot tasting like normal hotpot fare, which is disappointing cause I was hoping for something different, but is good cause I like normal hotpot quite a lot. The place was definitely worth it just for the duck/chicken soup alone. Would go back.

Now I'm back at home and have a 听写 (tsk tsk tsk) that I'm not in the slightest bit motivated to study for. I think I'll go on Facebook and take some more silly quizzes.