I can’t really tell you a great back story to this picture. It’s a bunch of my Singapore based friends enjoying Sichuan hot-pot. I could tell you how I told everyone to just carry on chatting, but how Dinah (in the red dress) couldn’t help but give her best ‘facebook smile.’

I could make up a story about how Damien from France (far right), was telling us about innovations in baguette making world. How Parisian bakers have found a way of combining the French people’s love of bread and cigarettes in the world’s first baguerette – a baguette that you can smoke.

Or, I might fabricate some nonsense about how Hana (front right) was not actually in our group of friends, but was in fact an anthropologist, from the nearby University of Fèi Huà, there to study how many bowls people of different nationalities use when eating tricky hot-pot meals. French – Damien – 1 bowl. German – Lisa (front left) – 23 bowls.

In the end though it’s just a few of my friends and fellow couchsurfers from Singapore having a meal together. From the front left, Lisa, Dinah, Yolande, Su, Loring (aka TED), Damien, and Hana.