Qunar had its big annual dinner / company meeting / quarterly review / new year’s celebration thing last night. Wish I had known my camera was in my bag. Highlights included

  • The shanghai team doing a song and dance and a guy drunkenly falling off the stage in the middle,
  • The song “Look at us” by Sarina Paris playing 3 times (if you haven’t heard this song, don’t, but if you have, try to imagine it in a ostensibly corporate setting. might help you get a feel for this event)
  • A secret santa component in which I received a huge box of instant coffee — i hope rayco will drink it, because i sure as hell won’t
  • Doing a toast to not drinking and driving(? weird thing to drink to, but that’s as best i could translate it. he kept saying “drink too much then don’t go home” in very clear chinese and very rough english; what else am i supposed to make of that, unless china has some badass maxim about drinking excessively and staying out all night)
  • A weird ceremony where people stood up sequentially according to which year they had started working at qunar — founded in 05 — and when he finished 2010 the MC jokingly goes ‘we have any 2011 hires?’ and everyone at my table forced me to stand up and give a big hello to the company’s two hundred and forty-five employees. Turns out that i am not only the only 2011 hire, but the only other white person employed by the company in any capacity aside from the CEO. Giggles all around.
  • A game where images would be projected onto a screen behind the stage, and whoever was on stage had to try to guess the image from shouted clues from the crowd — kinda like a guided, group charades, i guess — but the only two topics available were anime (i remember seeing fullmetal alchemist up on the screen, and being really confused) and fruit, which was nice because otherwise i wouldn’t have figured out how the game worked. there are only so many ways to describe and apple, though…
  • A raffle where the guy next to me won an itouch, and then in celebration got trashed and periodically screamed “加油！” literally add fuel, figuratively “YEAH! GO!” for the rest of the night at the charade and karaoke contestants
  • A bunch more stuff, but I want to go to sleep

Oh and then on my way home I ducked into a random shop to get some dumplings and it turned out that the girl who accosts all foreigners on their way out of the tiananmen subway station was there with her friends. It was a little weird, because I know pretty darn well that this girl makes money by leading foreigners into redonculously expensive coffeeshops and stuff (like, 20 usd for a cup of coffee. they’re like oh lets go get some tea, and they take you to a certain place and go in and just start ordering things and then when the bill comes you get rocked really hard. rayco told me to look out for these girls on wangfujing but i guess they’re at tiananmen too). Anyway I’d been brushing this girl off / ignoring her for the past week or so and then I go into this dumpling shop and there she is. So why not, I meet her and her friends, turns out they’re all 17-20 year olds who’re still in highschool. One of them took my number. So i guess i have some chinese highschool scammer buddies now. Yay?