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I gave my 6th speech at Toastmaster’s last night, the project was about Vocal Variety.  I gave the speech as if the audience was actually members of another group I belong to, The Beijing Linux User Group, and that this meeting was one of our monthly meetings.

Fellow Linux Group Members.  Now, those of you who’s meeting tonight is your first, you may not know that our group has another passion in addition to Linux.  No, it’s not airplanes.  It’s not coin collecting.  And it’s certainly not Microsoft!

It’s Yang Rou Chuanr!

In fact, you could suggest the club be renamed to the Beijing Linux >> and Chuanr User Group!

One of the popular social activities our group partakes in outside of these monthly meetings is having dinner at an area Chuanr restaurant.  As leader of the Group’s Chuanr Committee, I want to tell you about a real exciting event that we’re working hard to plan.

The title of the event is: “The 3rd Ring Road Chuanr Challenge”.  I’ll repeat……

A Challenge?  You may be thinking “How on earth can you combine Chuanr, 3rd Ring Road, and a Challenge?”

Simple.  We want to make a complete circle along 3rd Ring road, stopping at each bus stop of bus route 300 Kuai (that’s 21 bus stops), and we want to sample the nearest Chuanr Restaurant to that bus station.

The Challenge is – can we make a complete circle, sample the Chuanr and other interesting dishes at each stop, all in one day?  And in the process, we’ll be rating the quality of the restaurants – from taste, to ambiance, to price.

There are 3 reasons why we are doing this event

First point: As Linux people, the love of meat on a stick is just inherently part of us.  We’re a social bunch and as we love Chuanr so much, we’ve built Chuanr nights into our social calendar.  On average, we get together for dinner twice a month to talk about Linux (among other things), drink beers, and feast on these great meat sticks from heaven!

So one day, I thought, “why don’t we take this one step further?”  It seemed the logical thing to do!

Second point: One of the goals of the Chuanr committee is to document as many Chuanr restaurants in the city as possible and provide that list of tried and tested restaurants to our membership as a service.

Normally, we have our Chuanr events on the North-Eastern part of the city – now, unfortunately not everyone in the group lives in the North-East.  So, we hope to get solid options for those who live in the South and the West of Beijing so that they can satisfy their urges of cumin and chilly coated lamb sticks wherever they are in the city and they can be sure it will be a quality restaurant.

Third point: It’s never been done before.  Really, why would it have been?  Who would be crazy enough to spend a day in between buses and small dirty Chuanr restaurants for the fun of it?  Well, nobody but us!

Does this kind of even seem interesting for you all?  I hope it does and I am sure we’ll have a good time eating the food we love, exploring other parts of the city we love, and spending quality time with the people we love.

Yes, we’re actually doing this event.  I gave this speech (well, something remotely similar) during our March meeting (I say remotely because I didn’t prepare and had a few beers before) and the event is actually scheduled for tomorrow, May 10.  !!

I’ll be sure to write about what goes on during the event, along with photos, etc.

Another similar in the pipeline: “Lao Beijing Hutong Bicycle Chuanr Tour” (Lao = Old, Hutong= alleys)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under China, Life, Toastmasters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.