Chapter 1

Dice and Drinking Games

        China has an entirely different drinking culture compared to Australia and many other Western countries. Where as in the West the focus is around talking, dancing and communication, although this does exist in China it is more focused on playing games and encouraging everyone else in your group to drink more and have fun. The most common of these games played in the many bars throughout the amazing country that is China are dice games and a version of paper scissors rock.

        This is the easiest place to start because it where any typical night of drinking in China starts, you and your group of friends get to the bar a bit before 10pm and you sit down and order a dozen bottles of beers or more. This may seem excessive and not at all good for your health, which is true, but it part of the Chinese culture of sharing and mimicking the American mentality of excess. These drinks are followed by packed of peanuts of chips of some kind and then shortly after is when the dice games begin being played. The easiest way to describe these games is like the dice game from Pirates of the Caribbean, each player must guess how many of the certain numbered dices are on the table altogether, while only knowing what is under your cup of dice. Losing this game, as in any drinking game just involves the loser consuming more alcohol.

        The most amazing story that I ever have from drinking games is when some Australian friends and I are at a nightclub in Nanjing. We have been coming to the same nightclub every weekend for the past five weeks we had been in Nanjing, so we didn’t really have a problem with getting free drinks as we knew the manager and most of the staff. It just so happens that at around 11pm one of my mates Sam meets a Chinese man and goes off to join his table to play this dice game. My friends and I think nothing of it and expect him to come crawling back to our table in five minutes, so we continue to drink, dance and have a good time. It is not until we return to our table half an hour later when we find Sam, the Chinese guy and two bottles of thousand dollar whiskey on our table which we were told Sam won through the drinking game. Between the twenty Australians who were out that night we finished off both the bottles of the whiskey and all ended up crawling back to the hotel or catching taxis one hundred metres round the corner because we were to drunk to walk. And this was our lesson that whenever you get asked to play drinking games with Chinese people you have never met, it is always a good idea to say yes.