New Year's Eve 2010 in China

This is what our table looked like as we saw out 2010 in Shenzhen. For the first time, I celebrated New Year's Eve not with friends or family but with people I know through work, many of them only from emails and Skype chats. As you can see, there's nothing like the usual salads or the other trappings of a Russian New Year. 1 January is barely celebrated in China; the real holiday is Chinese New Year. It was nice that so many people came to this modest dinner.

There's no point trying to remember what the dishes were called. Most are hard to pronounce, and some have no translation at all. The mainstay of a dinner like this is seafood, and there was plenty: shark-meat patties, prawns, all sorts of fish, several kinds of jellyfish, crabs, oysters and other sea creatures.

The men drink what's called Chinese wine, a fairly basic drink that is 55% alcohol. Why it's called wine remains a mystery. The women drink warm, strained juice made from sweetcorn. Nobody drank anything else.

The ritual is the interesting part. First everyone stands, welcomes the guest and drinks to him. Then comes a truly surprising game. A senior person stands up, challenges whoever is sitting opposite to a sort of duel, and proposes they each down a glass in one. The game goes on until someone is very drunk, and whoever lasts longest earns even more respect. Quite a tournament.