The xth English Table
After a series of midterm tests, I came back to the Chung Chi English Table yesterday night. That was by far the most awesome one I had ever attended.
Since I got nothing to do and hadn't carried my watch, so I arrived at the Staff Club at around 6:20 p.m. (which was unexpected). As a result, I was the first one here, after a couple minutes, some other exchange students also shown up. Since we all got nothing to do, I chatted with a guy called Beldon who happened to be sitting on the same table. He told me he was from Hawaii (in US) and currently studying Finance and International Business (wow, CUHK was filled with Americans this semester) . His mom was from Hong Kong so he could speak Cantonese, but he couldn't write them though. And then we chatted a bit about this and that, and it was a surprise he also knew Jacob and Sumba, who were also exchange students in Computer Science from the states. Speaking of which, Kong Yang (another exchange student in CS, but he's from Japan) also shown up and we sat in the same table for the third time! We discussed a bit about the Discrete Mathematics class (mostly about I'd been skipping class again) and after some time, our table had already been filled with people, and out of coincidence, my another friends Klam and Geoffrey was also sitting here too.
Consequently, when I looked around my table, it was filled with dudes (correction, there was a girl between 10 of us, apparently she was the luckiest girl there!) some of us were complaining about that but I thought it was fine, cause we could talk without considering much about manners. That night's topic was "Movies", so we played a game called Charade. It required us to pick a piece of paper (with a movie name on it) and we could do anything (except talking) to let people guess what that movie was. It was a heck load of fun, some of the movies were quite easy, like Harry Potter (just pull out your wands and play, boys!), Matrix (that bullet-dodging scene is classic!), Star Wars (again, just show'em your (glowing) wands), but some of them were hard as hell. For instance, César (a very fun French guy here, and he swore he would never talk to me again when I mentioned I hadn't seen Les Miserables before, luckily, he changed him mind when he knew I had read the book, phew~) got a really hard one. He waved his hands around his head and his chest, and acted like he was shooting an arrow, after a couple minutes, we gave up and asked for the answer. It turned out it was that cartoon "Brave"! What César was trying to express was the movie was about a "redhead" girl (with "breasts") and "a bow with arrows"! Suddenly it was all clear now. Mine wasn't easy too, I also waved my hands around acting like my palms and chest could shoot stuff. Then I acted like I was holding something and smashed around. And of course, the closest my table could get was Iron Man. But, the answer was "The Avengers", I was mimicking both Iron Man and Thor!
According to the normal English Table routine, we were gonna eat and one local student from each table would be chosen to give an impromptu speech before desserts were served. But this time, they tweaked things a little bit and the chosen local student had to pick an exchange student to act out a scene from a movie! The guy Justin sitting next to me was our lucky winner! So we all watched how he picked his partner like it was a cable show. There were only 3 exchange students here, and Yang really put himself out there by stating the fact that he was from Japan and his English was not good (that was hilarious when he said that!), which left us Beldon and César. And after 5 exciting shoots of Rock, Paper, Scissors and BAM! César was our guy!
It seemed like Justin didn't really watch enough movies and the suggested choices on the paper were absolutely doing no help (Titanic, Twilight, Little Mermaid, and Transformers? You got to be kidding me!) I liked watching movies, so I was all about helping. However, I had been quite into Seth Rogen recently so the movies popped into my mind were "This is the End", "Superbad", "Pineapple Express", "Knocked Up" and ... "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"... so I was no help either. After a bit of conversation, the choice was finally settled. Although Justin had no idea what Sherlock Holmes was all about, but it seemed like it was the best we could have.
After César had given a crash course about Holmes to Justin, he let us join the cast too. I'm not bragging, but we'd got an international cast and a well-detailed set here:
After a brief discussion of the script, we all thought we were just gonna wing it, so there we went, giving the best performance of our lives! I recalled the following story based on my memory, but it was more or less real close to what we actually did.
So Dr. Watson finally came back to his apartment under Mrs. Hudson's request. And Mrs. Hudson looked really desperate when she told Dr. Watson Holmes'd been locking himself in his room again doing all kinds of weird stuff for 3 months already. As usual, Dr. Watson felt obligated to clean up Holmes' mess and comforted Mrs.Hudson he was gonna take care of it. When he opened the door, he was already prepared for walking into an area even worse than a dumpster, but then he saw his dog Gladstone lying on the floor looking like his life was hanging by a thread. So the first thing Watson did was patting his pet with guy love and shouting at Holmes, who was playing his air violin (just because air guitar was too mainstream), "Holmes, how many times have I told you? You can kick him, you can punch him all you want, but you cannot doze him off and get him high?" And of course, Holmes ignored Watson and even proposed for further experiment. Watson was relieved when his dog "came back to life" again but still warned him to knock it off and stating these kinds of outrageous behaviors had to be stopped. It looked like Watson had pushed Holmes' buttons again, he shouted something like "It's for science! We can make good use of the result and scientific development prosper! What you know is not science, you are not even a scientific person!" And Watson stated it was his dog. Holmes corrected, "It's our dog. And Mrs. Hudson, bring me back some tea." turned around to the window. Watson tried to make a threat and asked if Holmes was worried if the tea would be poisoned. Holmes answered with a big fat NO! Already out of his mind, Watson tried to digress Holmes to wear him down (while putting the chairs on the ground into place, without doubt it was a forced habit), "Can you just get a life? Go outside and do stuff?" Holmes quickly responded, "I get a life? You get a life!" Watson answered confidently, "At least I've got a wife." Holmes fought back (and knocked down all those chairs again), "Your wife is a demon. All women are demons, they should never exist!" Watson digressed again, "What are you doing?" Holmes locked his eyes through the window and said with his typical contemptuous face,"What do you think I'm doing? I'm observing people, elementary my dear Watson." When Watson tried to talk to him again, Holmes finally opened the window and let the wind blow in. He shouted, "I can't hear you, the wind is so good, can you feel the breeze? It's too noisy, I can't hear you~~" And scene!
We literally didn't know what was going on (let alone the audience, ha!) when we performed, but we already gave our best shot. And César was abso-tively, posi-lutely the star. He was a born showman. I considered myself really lucky I was able to respond his lines (I was really nervous and forgot to fake an English accent too) and didn't wreck his spectacular performance. He looked really natural, and into his character (have I mentioned he smashed the table when he discussed the script with Justin? probably the Great Sherlock Holmes was already in that time, ha!)
After the show, César handed me a bowl of dessert and I thought he was proposing a toast (I probably wasn't thinking straight), so I grabbed my teacup and clinked the bowl, that moment was like someone was trying to high-five you but you were thinking about pounding fist. That was really awkward! But after all, that night was still awesome and one of the most memorable moment of my English Table experience.
Hope to see you next week, César and Justin!
Kev
Since I got nothing to do and hadn't carried my watch, so I arrived at the Staff Club at around 6:20 p.m. (which was unexpected). As a result, I was the first one here, after a couple minutes, some other exchange students also shown up. Since we all got nothing to do, I chatted with a guy called Beldon who happened to be sitting on the same table. He told me he was from Hawaii (in US) and currently studying Finance and International Business (wow, CUHK was filled with Americans this semester) . His mom was from Hong Kong so he could speak Cantonese, but he couldn't write them though. And then we chatted a bit about this and that, and it was a surprise he also knew Jacob and Sumba, who were also exchange students in Computer Science from the states. Speaking of which, Kong Yang (another exchange student in CS, but he's from Japan) also shown up and we sat in the same table for the third time! We discussed a bit about the Discrete Mathematics class (mostly about I'd been skipping class again) and after some time, our table had already been filled with people, and out of coincidence, my another friends Klam and Geoffrey was also sitting here too.
Consequently, when I looked around my table, it was filled with dudes (correction, there was a girl between 10 of us, apparently she was the luckiest girl there!) some of us were complaining about that but I thought it was fine, cause we could talk without considering much about manners. That night's topic was "Movies", so we played a game called Charade. It required us to pick a piece of paper (with a movie name on it) and we could do anything (except talking) to let people guess what that movie was. It was a heck load of fun, some of the movies were quite easy, like Harry Potter (just pull out your wands and play, boys!), Matrix (that bullet-dodging scene is classic!), Star Wars (again, just show'em your (glowing) wands), but some of them were hard as hell. For instance, César (a very fun French guy here, and he swore he would never talk to me again when I mentioned I hadn't seen Les Miserables before, luckily, he changed him mind when he knew I had read the book, phew~) got a really hard one. He waved his hands around his head and his chest, and acted like he was shooting an arrow, after a couple minutes, we gave up and asked for the answer. It turned out it was that cartoon "Brave"! What César was trying to express was the movie was about a "redhead" girl (with "breasts") and "a bow with arrows"! Suddenly it was all clear now. Mine wasn't easy too, I also waved my hands around acting like my palms and chest could shoot stuff. Then I acted like I was holding something and smashed around. And of course, the closest my table could get was Iron Man. But, the answer was "The Avengers", I was mimicking both Iron Man and Thor!
According to the normal English Table routine, we were gonna eat and one local student from each table would be chosen to give an impromptu speech before desserts were served. But this time, they tweaked things a little bit and the chosen local student had to pick an exchange student to act out a scene from a movie! The guy Justin sitting next to me was our lucky winner! So we all watched how he picked his partner like it was a cable show. There were only 3 exchange students here, and Yang really put himself out there by stating the fact that he was from Japan and his English was not good (that was hilarious when he said that!), which left us Beldon and César. And after 5 exciting shoots of Rock, Paper, Scissors and BAM! César was our guy!
It seemed like Justin didn't really watch enough movies and the suggested choices on the paper were absolutely doing no help (Titanic, Twilight, Little Mermaid, and Transformers? You got to be kidding me!) I liked watching movies, so I was all about helping. However, I had been quite into Seth Rogen recently so the movies popped into my mind were "This is the End", "Superbad", "Pineapple Express", "Knocked Up" and ... "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"... so I was no help either. After a bit of conversation, the choice was finally settled. Although Justin had no idea what Sherlock Holmes was all about, but it seemed like it was the best we could have.
After César had given a crash course about Holmes to Justin, he let us join the cast too. I'm not bragging, but we'd got an international cast and a well-detailed set here:
Sherlock Holmes Messing Around in His Room
A César Dro Production
Starring
Cesar Dro as Sherlock Holmes
Justin Lai as Mrs. Hudson
Geoffrey Hung as Gladstone
Kevin Lai as Dr. Watson
Klam Lee as the Window
Chairs as Chairs
After a brief discussion of the script, we all thought we were just gonna wing it, so there we went, giving the best performance of our lives! I recalled the following story based on my memory, but it was more or less real close to what we actually did.
So Dr. Watson finally came back to his apartment under Mrs. Hudson's request. And Mrs. Hudson looked really desperate when she told Dr. Watson Holmes'd been locking himself in his room again doing all kinds of weird stuff for 3 months already. As usual, Dr. Watson felt obligated to clean up Holmes' mess and comforted Mrs.Hudson he was gonna take care of it. When he opened the door, he was already prepared for walking into an area even worse than a dumpster, but then he saw his dog Gladstone lying on the floor looking like his life was hanging by a thread. So the first thing Watson did was patting his pet with guy love and shouting at Holmes, who was playing his air violin (just because air guitar was too mainstream), "Holmes, how many times have I told you? You can kick him, you can punch him all you want, but you cannot doze him off and get him high?" And of course, Holmes ignored Watson and even proposed for further experiment. Watson was relieved when his dog "came back to life" again but still warned him to knock it off and stating these kinds of outrageous behaviors had to be stopped. It looked like Watson had pushed Holmes' buttons again, he shouted something like "It's for science! We can make good use of the result and scientific development prosper! What you know is not science, you are not even a scientific person!" And Watson stated it was his dog. Holmes corrected, "It's our dog. And Mrs. Hudson, bring me back some tea." turned around to the window. Watson tried to make a threat and asked if Holmes was worried if the tea would be poisoned. Holmes answered with a big fat NO! Already out of his mind, Watson tried to digress Holmes to wear him down (while putting the chairs on the ground into place, without doubt it was a forced habit), "Can you just get a life? Go outside and do stuff?" Holmes quickly responded, "I get a life? You get a life!" Watson answered confidently, "At least I've got a wife." Holmes fought back (and knocked down all those chairs again), "Your wife is a demon. All women are demons, they should never exist!" Watson digressed again, "What are you doing?" Holmes locked his eyes through the window and said with his typical contemptuous face,"What do you think I'm doing? I'm observing people, elementary my dear Watson." When Watson tried to talk to him again, Holmes finally opened the window and let the wind blow in. He shouted, "I can't hear you, the wind is so good, can you feel the breeze? It's too noisy, I can't hear you~~" And scene!
We literally didn't know what was going on (let alone the audience, ha!) when we performed, but we already gave our best shot. And César was abso-tively, posi-lutely the star. He was a born showman. I considered myself really lucky I was able to respond his lines (I was really nervous and forgot to fake an English accent too) and didn't wreck his spectacular performance. He looked really natural, and into his character (have I mentioned he smashed the table when he discussed the script with Justin? probably the Great Sherlock Holmes was already in that time, ha!)
After the show, César handed me a bowl of dessert and I thought he was proposing a toast (I probably wasn't thinking straight), so I grabbed my teacup and clinked the bowl, that moment was like someone was trying to high-five you but you were thinking about pounding fist. That was really awkward! But after all, that night was still awesome and one of the most memorable moment of my English Table experience.
Hope to see you next week, César and Justin!
Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hudson
Kev
The xth English Table
Reviewed by Kevin Lai
on
5:21:00 AM
Rating:
Reviewed by Kevin Lai
on
5:21:00 AM
Rating:
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