Chinese Dinner

Last night we had yet another fabulous dinner party. The girl here from China cooked like 5 different courses with duck (of course), dumplings, some crazy eggplant thing (with enough garlic to make my breath stink for weeks), fried rice and I can't even remember the rest. Food just kept coming and I just kept eating. I helped do some chopping for her and I think I still have raw duck in between my nails today after pulling apart duck fat for an hour yesterday. I am getting way too comfortable with having duck and duck fat in everything. (Side note: we had beans the other day, Andrew asked how they were so good and Brigitte listed a couple ingredients and the last was duck fat.) Anyways, there were 10 of us for dinner, but 2 were kids and we still managed to go through 6 bottles of champagne, at least 4 bottles of wine and then some 30 year old cognac that they found in the basement. I'm pretty sure something was floating in the cognac and it looked way sketchy, but I drank it anyway. A couple from England joined us and I have already promised to come back and help them build their house next year. One of the best and most inappropriate points of the evening was Philippe's impression of how the Chinese talk. There is no way to explain to him how bad that would be to do in public, so let's just cross our fingers that he doesn't do his impression outside of the house. I nearly shot champagne out of my nose multiple times when this big French buy pulled his eyes and started shouting in "Chinese." I really wish I could speak more French so that I could understand Philippe better, he's one of my favorites for sure. All we ever do is confuse each other, drink and giggle. He sang to me at dinner and it was a bunch more "Chinese," with my name thrown in and a couple random words in English that made no sense. It was a great song though, I wish I could have recorded it. That also reminds me of my first day here. Philippe looked at me, started singing "Blue Eyes" and shaking me because he liked my eyes. He really loves to sing, as you can tell I'm sure. I need to write Philippe a song one of these nights and play it on the air piano (his favorite). And tomorrow morning we are off to Bordeaux for a couple days. Look out vineyards, here I come!