Getting Acquianted

Who is my new housemate? The term "a character" was most likely invented for him.

I've known Matthias Meyer since the first day I got here. We, with Nick, went to an all you can eat and all you can drink barbecue joint just off campus the night of my arrival on September 3rd, and at 30 yuan a person or roughly $4.50 we've been back frequently. Following dinner we took advantage of the absence of open container laws and had a street party where thankfully I did not meet any of my students-to-be. After the beers for the street party were gone we made our way back to Matthias' house (where I am living now) and continued to imbibe all variations of alcohol. From what I can recall now there were shots of 1/3 Baijiu (the infamous Chinese grain alcohol nicknamed "white lightning" by many foreigners) 1/3 coke and 1/3 Soju (a Korean Rice wine along the same lines as Saki). There was of course more beers, some Fenjiu (a special kind of Baijiu special to Shanxi province) and several concoctions of which no one was really sure what the contents were, juices, wines, what have you. And so on my first night here I was convinced to drink sufficiently enough that on my first morning here I had to throw it all back up. I'll hock that up to a combination of jet-lag, a hang over, and an insufficient diet for the 48 hours preceding the evening, but that's still just an excuse.

Matthias, Anne and Daniel at Golden Hanz, the German microbrewery, Brazilian barbecue,Chinese buffet restaurant in Taiyuan.

Since after our initial debaucherous encounter Matthias' character has continued to evolve. He is German and as my first night would elude he loves his beer. He regularly asks Nick or I to order him 90 or 120 or even upwards towards 200 beers at a time from a local shop. These he drinks himself as well as grudgingly parcels out during his many parties. Part of his teaching curriculum is to invite his classes to his house (almost every night of the school week) to eat and drink and converse in German. I say he asks Nick or I because his Chinese is extremely poor, despite the fact that he has been here for a year already. From what he told me he used to attend Graduate School in Australia but was repeatedly failed on papers and the like because his English was not good enough. He was then told by a friend about the program in Taigu and decided to come here to teach German. Since then ironically he says his English has improved tremendously.

He is rather eccentric. Aside from the 200 bottles of beer, at 600 ml each, stacked across a wall in his kitchen he also has 20+ McDonalds hamburgers in his refrigerator. He has boxes of t-shirts to market his product the "Cuddle-Beer" which is essentially a thin beer koozie with a smiling face and pillow hands for the over sized Chinese bottles. He has an enormous beer belly, upon which he rests his cellphone which he slings around his neck on one of those key-chain straps that bro's in high school used to let hang out of their back pockets. When he isn't texting he enjoys using it to play loud German techno music every once in a while, at home or at a restaurant. He has over 300 people on his QQ lists(a similar program to MSN Messenger or AIM) that he has divided into 5 tiers which you may ascend if you talk to him enough, I'm unsure which one I reside in. He is 36 and has been in the military, worked as a nurse, managed a nursing home, managed his own hotel, has written 3 books and is now working with us in Taigu and calls himself the only real "taigu ren" 太谷人 or person from Taigu. At a whim he'll tell you how in Germany he would regularly drink, boot, nap for 20 minutes (sometimes under park benches) and then rally. I am extremely excited to see what this next month or more will bring to say the least.

I think in the future the other fellows and I will be making "Jesus Matthias" shirts and the next German Party is this Monday and I don't know how many more beyond that.