Raised in the South. Made in China: The First Annual Baijiu Challenge

A few of the guys in my program put together a scavenger hunt around Beijing titled "The Baijiu Challenge". Baijiu is basically this clear horrible smelling liquor that they sell here. The scavenger hunt included going to tourist sites, eating weird food, doing random activities, and of course going to bars. There were 8 teams divided into groups of 4 and each team had one person who spoke Chinese well (clearly that wasn't me). We all thought it would be a great way to see the city and have fun. And boy did we ever!

My team, the Party 动物's (animals), started our night off to an interesting start. In my last blog I mentioned how scary it was to cross the street but for the first time I felt more frightened being in the car. Our taxi driver literally hit about 5 pedestrians. And it wasn't a slam on the breaks type of almost hit. It was more of a "oh shit, that was your foot? Sorry" type of almost hit.

Luckily, our first stop of the night was Wudaokou which is a bar district close to our school. We had to visit four bars and do various tasks at each bar such as get 5 numbers, ganbei (the Chinese version of cheers) with strangers, smoke a hookah, etc. . If we completed all tasks you got an extra 100 points. Perhaps the highlight of Wudaokou was watching Charlie (my teammate) eat stinky tofu. I will include a picture of what stinky tofu looks like. Fortunately, I can't include what it smells like but it is very apporpriatly named. Thanks to Charlie's heroic efforts we scored a sweet 200 points for that!

Our next stop was touristy sites. We realized that Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and Mao's tomb were all in the same area so we headed that way. For visiting each of these sites we scored 300 points. A few of the random tasks that we did there was buy a team costume, take a picture with a Chinese baby, buy a Mao souvenir, and take a picture with a guard (which is very challenging). Of course, some of our precious time was lost to people wanting to take our picture.

Our third stop was what we hoped to be a strategic move to put us into first place. We headed to Chaoyang which is another drinking district. None of us had ever been there or knew where it was but if we went to all four bars there we would score 500 points. We knew we were risking it but decided to head there anyways. Perhaps we should have known it wasn't going to turn out well when we got off the subway and asked people where the bars were located but all we found out was we were in the business district. Luckily, my team member Blaire was able to use her Blackberry and googled one of the bars (gotta love technology!). We found out the bar was a good 15 minute cab drive but we had no other choice. What we didn't realize was that none of the other three bars were remotely close to this one. So basically, we took three taxi's to get to three bars and never made it to the fourth so we didn't get our extra 100 points. Our strategic move turned out to be a bust :(

As our deadline was quickly approaching (midnight) we headed to our final destination, Sanlitun. Sanlitun is the most popular drinking district. Now I know what you're thinking (Mom), this scavenger hunt included nothing but bars! Well that was slightly true but because we had such minimal time to do each task we didn't even get the chance to sit down and have a drink. So to say the least, after 5 hours of running around the city we were tired, hungry, and ready for a beer. We arrived to Sanlitun and quickly did our final tasks there. Around 12:30 we started to find the other groups and the rest of the night is history. 4 days later we still don't know who won...

It was truly a great night and I don't think any of us will ever forget it! Thanks to Brice, Dan, Alex and the rest of the boys for organizing it! I've included a few team pictures. Enjoy!

Just some stinky tofu. You literally can not imagine how horrible the smell is!