Mahjong...so fong (fun)!

This past Sunday we had the pleasure of learning how to play this traditional game at Grace's (Chinese staff person) apartment. It is clear that it will become an addiction. We feel that it could make a very fun drinking game too, should the Chinese decide maybe they wanted to go that way. In our Chinese class today we learned all the pieces.

There are 136 tiles in total. There are 2 categories: Suits and Honor Tiles. In Suits there are bing (pies), tiao (bamboo) and wan (characters meaning the value of 10,000). In Honor Tiles there are feng (winds: North, South, East and West) and hong zhong (red dragon), facai (green dragon) and bai ban or bai lian (white dragon). We are slowly learning the rules, but it is quite a challenging, complex game. We did manage to win one hand though. When you have three of a kind you yell, "Dur!". We are invited to Lisa's (another Chinese staff member) apartment this Saturday where we will be putting out skills to the test again. We are going to teach you all how to play when we come home because we will be experts by then.