Ode to the '90s and a bottle of Jack Daniels

The other night, went with a couple Beijing coworkers and had sushi and ramen at Isshin, this little place tucked away in a back alley of Wudaokou. Food was solid, though not extraordinary. Had potato salad, fried tofu in shoyu, 3 kinds of rolls and spicy miso ramen.

Last night, I joined Aki for Quiz Night at Lush, this Wudaokou joint stuffed to the gills with Americans and other foreigners (mostly students at Qinghua). I went in prepared to suck, because I'm never really good at these things. Had a pretty boring-tasting chicken burger and fries, but the ketchup was too sweet, as was the ranch sauce I asked for.


We sat down with a group of girls because there wasn't enough room to get our own table. All of them were from the college of William & Mary in Virginia, and all were studying Chinese at Qinghua. They were soooooo young, class of 2009! Sheesh. We decided to do the quiz as a group, naming ourselves "Quizmas."

Anyway, at 8pm, the quizzing began. There were 15 groups total, with more than 100 people total. The theme was "the 1990s," and there were five rounds: Movies/TV, History/Events, Countries, Popular Fads and Music. I was like, hmm, ok, I was a child of the '90s, so maybe we'd have a shot.

We ended up kicking ass on the first round, scoring 12 when the other teams averaged 4! The most memorable question was something like, "What 2 movies have the highest number of obscenities per minute in the 1990s?" I knew one of them HAD to be a Tarantino film (I guessed Pulp Fiction, which was correct). Our other guess was Goodfellas, but the actual answer was the South Park Movie. Other questions included stuff like "What was the popular hangout in 90210?" and "What actor said he was "the first post-Heston non-biblical action star in sandals.'?" (John Cusack--I was so sure of the answer because that's when I'd developed my crush on Mr. Cusack, watching every movie he was in and reading every article I could get my hands on).

The second round we scored a strong 11 points, correctly naming the Unibomber, Amy Fischer, Loreena & John Wayne Bobbit, the year of the Columbine massacre, etc. The one we missed was the Solar Temple sect that committed mass suicides in Canada and Europe.

We went a bit downhill from there, scoring 8 points on the countries (most of them obscure Eastern European), then 6 on the Fads (luckily the girls we were with were young enough to remember the Furby and Beanie Babies really well). The guy asked what the name of the Akita in Rent was, and from which story the dog leapt to its death as Angel played his drums (I was convinced it was 21st, but it was actually the 23rd). Finally, the music was the hardest as we had to name the artist and year it was released. But it was great to hear some old 90s hip-hop like Snow's "Informer," En Vogue's "Never Gonna Get It," 2pac and Dr. Dre's "California Love," and even Us 3's "Cantaloop."

Anyway. WE WON! First place! I couldn't believe it, I never win these things. But here's the proof:

And the bottle of Jack Daniels we won as a prize:

And my comrades-in-arms (excluding myself, as I was taking the picture):