cambridge part 1: the penny drops

have had a terrific past 30 hours. Too much to write about in one entry, so I'm going to break it up into a couple of parts. (note: cambridge people, please correct me on any details I get wrong)

1) Formal hall (or, down the slippery slope)

went up to cambridge for formal hall at christ college on friday (formal hall can best be described as an official college dinner, invited guests allowed). Went up with zhicheng and two other friends, and all of us had dinner at christ with zhimin wanxian jixian zhen and rongxuan.

formal hall was tremendous fun. One of the endearing and often frustrating things about england in general and cambridge in particular is the fixation with obscure and amazingly eccentric traditions. This tendency to hurtle blindly down the same twisted back-alleys of history pervades many aspects of life, especially so in as august an institution as cambridge. When it comes to formal hall, tradition is upheld by things like saying grace in latin, and the amusing game of pennying.

pennying starts simple. The basic idea is this: if someone drops a penny into your wine glass, you have to drink all the alcohol in the glass. Ostensibly this is because one side of the penny bears the imprint of the queen's head, so by emptying the glass you save the queen from drowning. Of course, we all know that this is a half-baked excuse probably thought up by inebriated cambridge students to justify their continued drinking. Alternatively, people here might really love their queen.

anyway there were 3 bottles of wine for all of us. Some among us didn't really drink, partly out of a virtous desire to stay sober, and mainly because the rest of us were guzzling most of the alcohol as the pennying got serious. Yours truly was the first casualty (thanks, wanxian); and I was pennied 3 or 4 times in all, which meant i downed probably a third of a bottle. That wasn't too bad, considering that one of the other guys ended up toasting george w bush and going on at length about christianity to this bemused american girl sitting next to him.

a couple of the basic rules of pennying: 1) if you penny someone who's already being pennied, you have to drink his glass of wine; and 2) if someone pennies your dessert, you have to eat dessert without using your hands. Of course, being a helplessly ignorant (and by dessert time, pretty woozy) visitor, I was saboed a la 2); and someone managed to fall foul of 1) not once, not twice, but three times. When it rains, it pours indeed.

so, between the alcohol and the good food (dunno what the dessert was, but it was excellent), the stage was set for an extremely interesting night. More on that in the next entry....