More night-time ping pong

It's nice to be back in Pingguo where at least they have electricity during the day. I've been playing a bit of table tennis recently at the table in the main square. This square is huge and has a great fountain and lights display some nights. Every night there is lots of dancing going on of various types. People just bring a couple of disco-sized speakers, hook them up to the mains and blast out music and start dancing. Then more and more people join in until you have up to 15 fairly well ordered rows of people following the moves of the people in front. It can start out pretty ungainly but as they learn the moves it can look quite good later on.

It looks to be about 80% women, understandably (even when the dancing is ballroom type), and a great many from the older generation. It’s a great form of exercise and is one of the reasons the Chinese are often so supple (well the women anyway).

Interspersed throughout the square you can see a few Karaoke places too. This gives you the opportunity to show the world how bad you really are at singing. No I didn’t. Understandably, this was almost uniquely populated with men.

But on to the table tennis. The Chinese all know how to play, and they all spin the ball and hold the bat like a pen (well most do). It’s quite disconcerting at first, but you can learn to read the spin and start to beat them at their own game. The problem was that we generally go at night, and the lighting is vastly insufficient for a game that relies on fast reflexes and good hand-eye coordination. One of the sides of the table was so dark it was twice as hard as the other to play on. But strangely I found after a while I could sense where the ball was and play reasonably well even when I could barely see the ball. I know how Luke Skywalker must have felt when he first felt the Force.

I’ve finally realised why I couldn’t keep track of the score before – the Chinese say the number of points against you, so if I’m beating Xiao Li 7-5 they would say it was 5-7 to me. Weird, especially as they couldn’t understand the English way – it seemed to really confuse them even though they score the normal way in badminton. I can’t get my head around how the Chinese can be so clever at the same time as being so illogical (though this is just to my mind...there is likely good reasoning behind it).