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Hello everyone, I should be blogging more often for the next month as its our holidays now and there will be a lot to say. OK, this blog will be about Christmas in China.
As you might expect, Christmas in China is very strange. I thought that they don't celebrate Christmas here, them being communists and all, but actually they do sort of celebrate it. Well the commercial aspects anyway. There were Christmas trees and tinsel in most shops which was nice and helped the Christmas feeling. however, there was no Christmas holiday in China for anyone except the foreigners like me, so its not really a celebration over here. The big Chinese celebration is New Years which occurs on 26th January this year.
The week leading up to Christmas, I still had to do teaching, which I was happy about because I wanted to do Christmas things with the students. The first few lessons I had to finish exams, which wasn't so fun, but the lessons Tuesday and Wednesday were Christmas lessons. I dressed up as an elf...yes I even wore the green tights lol, it was freezing! It went down really well with the students and they all wanted to take pictures of me lol. I told them the true meaning of Christmas, gave them chocolates and taught them some Christmas songs. Then we played some games, including pin the tail on the donkey/ reindeer lol.
On Christmas eve, they organised a big party. Some of the foreign teachers took part, but I didn't because I couldn't think of anything to do and I'm really bad at singing so I didn't want to subject them to it. The party was really nice though and the people who took part were very professional. It was wonderful. After the party, we went to get some Sweet and Sour and then headed off to a bar. The bar is very expensive and I realised why I had given up alcohol in China - it's too expensive. They charge english prices in China (where the average wage is 1/5 of England), so it's the equivalent of paying 10 quid for a single baileys in the uk (even though it only cost me 25 yuan or 2 pounds 50). We got home from the bar at 5am Christmas morning.
I got up about 11 Christmas morning and then we all went to a 5 star hotel for a Christmas buffet. It was so nice to have proper English food again - cheese and proper bread. And Chocolate Eclairs....mmmmm! We couldn't have Christmas dinner because they wanted 700 yuan (70 pounds) for that, so we just had the buffet, which was still 176 yuan! Afterwards, we went shopping and I bought a nice new laptop. It cost about 550 pounds. It is nice though - amd athlon 64 x2, samsung laptop, 2gb ram, 250gb hard drive and 1 year international warranty. Plus English windows vista. I was happy. After that, I went back to my apartment and phoned Home, It was nice to be able to speak to my family on Christmas day. Then I watched Home Alone 1 because it always makes me feel Christmassy when I do.
Since then, I havent really been doing much as it's been a holiday now. We had a nice meal and did some karaoke on monday night, which the English club paid for. But otherwise it's just been messing with my laptop and relaxing. Today is New Years and tomorrow I am off to Guilin for a few days. I will blog again when I return.
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