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It's less than a week until Christmas now, so I figured it was about time to write about all the pre-Christmas preparations and celebrations in Jiujiang so far. First up: Christmas decorations. We put up the bulk of these at the beginning of December, after an intense shopping session at Walmart. We'd just been paid for all the tutoring sessions we'd done with Rainy, so we basically spent all the money we'd earnt from that on tinsel, Christmas trees, baubles, fake snow, stockings and Santa hats. Since then, we've been adding to the decorations at every opportunity: I received a parcel of decorations from home, and we've been churning out paper chains and paper snowflakes whilst watching Desperate Housewives in the evenings, so the house actually looks quite good. The other day, one of Nicole's classes gave her lots of Christmas cards for the two of us, so we have a wall devoted to these as well now. (My absolute favourite cards were the two that for some reason quoted Westlife "You Raise Me Up" and told us that we were their "best gift". So weird, I loveit.)
Christmas has also been brilliant for filling up lessons, as we're both running pretty short on lesson ideas at the moment. I've shown every class in every grade a powerpoint about Christmas (Nicole kindly loaned me her laptop again). I spent absolutely ages collating photos of Christmas decorations, dinners, lights, Father Christmas, snowmen... and realised about two hours before my first lesson that I hadn't even mentioned the nativity story. Oops. In the end, I taught my seniors the nativity story and just flashed a photo of Jesus on the board for my juniors and told them it was his birthday. I thought I should probably at least teach them his name properly (they all know who he is, but they pronounce his name "He-zoo"), but leading 60+ kids in chanting "Jesus, Jesus..." until they got it right felt pretty weird. The big winners in the powerpoint were any bright, sparkly photos - Christmas trees, houses with Christmas lights - and a set of photos I found on the Daily Mail website (don't judge me!) of children crying when they visit Father Christmas. I thought the Father Christmas photos were quite funny, but my students were absolutely dying laughing, especially the youngest ones. One boy was nearly crying, thumping his fist on the table and everything, when I showed them, and in one of my Junior 1 classes a group of children ran up at the end of the lesson asking if I could put the pictures on their memory sticks for them. I also included one or two photos of my family putting up our Christmas tree in previous years: one was quite a cute photo of Ali and Dad carrying the tree in, cue lots of compliments about how pretty my sister was; one was a photo of Ali grinning like a maniac next to the finished tree and I am not kidding, one boy shouted out in disgust before hiding under his desk in embarrassment. Each of my Christmas lessons also included a class sing-along of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". Most of the students knew the tune and the first verse, so teaching them the rest wasn't too difficult; then I'd insist on the whole class standing up and singing along toether. Most of my classes were nice and enthusiastic, which made things easier for me, but I forced even the surlier students to join in by just singing the same lines at them persistently until they joined in. HAHA. One of my Junior 2 classes picked up the song much faster than anyone else and were also appropriately cheerful and festive when singing it, so I asked them if I could film them. Unfortunately, the filming process was beset by technical difficulties (aka I accidentally took a 2 minute long film of the floor instead of them, then the projector with all the words on turned off mid-song) so I ended up asking them to sing it about 3 more times. They were so good about it that I promised to bring them sweets next lesson, and I've uploaded one of the videos of them singing onto this blog. I tried filming a Junior 1 class as well, but they were significantly distracted by the camera and spent most of their time fighting to get in front of it/pulling peace signs/jumping up and down instead of singing. This video's on the blog too!
Outside of school, I'd say the most interesting thing this month has been last weekend's visit to Nanchang, where we met Beth, Cat, Rob and Dan. We are still passport-less over here, and beginning to worry about the fact that the Chinese government has now had said passports for over two months, but we still managed to get to Nanchang and book a room for the night at a very nice hostel (all credit to the others for this, they organised the whole thing). We were only in Nanchang for just over 24hrs, but I still managed to spend basically a whole month's wages there. Yes, a whole month's wages in one day - it was glorious! Most of this was spent in an amazing shopping mall over the river, where Beth, Cat, Nicole and I headed straight after lunch. This place is absolutely enormous but only half-built. Apparently it's all reclaimed swamp land and was completely empty only a few years ago, but now there's a super-snazzy shopping meccah here, complete with H&M, Zara and Starbucks, amongst other things. They also had lots and lots of Christmas decorations, although whoever was responsible for hanging all the mini Christmas trees around the railings had put them all up upside down. We spent hours - and I spent obscene amounts of money - in H&M, explored the rest of the mall and splashed out on the festive specials in Starbucks, where we met and immediately befriended a nice British couple who live in Nanchang. (Not seeing many non-Chinese people is beginning to affect us and we get quite excited whenever we see a foreigner. As in, turning, staring, pointing in the street. Not good.) After that, we had real pizza (!!!) at Papa John's, went shopping in Walmart and spent the evening together back at the hostel. Just getting out of Jiujiang for a change of scenery is always fun, and it was obviously really good to see the others again, so I consider all the money well-spent. We also had a lovely opportunity to argue with a taxi driver who ambushed us outside the station and tried to get us to go with him, paying a stupid amount for a reasonably short journey. The "lovely" isn't sarcastic, I genuinely enjoyed shouting at him in Chinese, telling him what the real price should be and then storming off to find another cab. I felt particularly smug after our new cab driver dropped us off with the meter reading EXACTLY what I'd told the other driver the journey should cost. Such a pro!
Back in Jiujiang on Sunday afternoon, we joined one of my Junior 1 students for her 13th birthday party. She is honestly the cutest kid EVER and after all the presents she's given me, and all the trouble she'd taken to invite me to her birthday, I really didn't feel like I could say no. Nicole was invited too, so we met Jenny, her best friend Becky, and a university student called Ashley (coming along to help with communication, as a favour to Jenny's mum) outside school and went shopping together. Jenny kept trying to buy us things and although we tried to say no each time, we still ended up with a drink, a McDonald's ice-cream and a Ferrero Roche each. Then she took us to a Western-style restaurant in town, which I suspect was chosen for our benefit, where we met her parents and grandparents, who were all incredibly friendly. We all ordered steaks which, for ultimate Western-ness, came served with pasta (aka yi da li mian, literally "Italy noodles") and Nicole and I spent the meal chatting with Jenny, Becky, Ashley and another friend called Mindy who arrived later. At first, the girls were worried we wouldn't want to talk during the meal because they've heard that English people don't like to talk whilst eating, but we assured them this wasn't true - at least, not always. After the meal, Jenny's birthday 'cake' was brought to the table: a Christmassy chocolate house from one of the fancy bakeries. The candles wouldn't stick into the chocolate roof of the house, so Jenny ended up stuffing them down the chimney, then we all sang her Happy Birthday whilst she clasped her hands and swayed to make her birthday wish. Very cute! We gave her our present (a box of chocolates and a pair of gloves), Becky gave us each a pretty keyring/clock charm and they walked us home. I know, I know, we're both 19 and we're their teachers, but we were walked home by 13 yr olds. Role reversal at its finest!
That brings us pretty much up to speed. We had Monday and Tuesday off this week as the students have exams, so I'm spending my classes for the rest of the week on bumper Christmas quiz type activities - and wearing my novelty Christmas tree earrings, naturally.
Shengdan kuaile!
(Happy Christmas!)
xxx
PS. I've found a tiny shop/stall thing that sells *really* good mini-cakes. I tried to buy some for me and Nicole the other day and the guy told me I could have them for free, so it's my new favourite place. FREE CAKE!
- comments
Jim Free cake. You're so shallow and just like Granny!
GrannyAnnie Do so enjoy your blogs - keep them coming. We'll all be thinking of you on Christmas day and hopefully manage to skype you. Take not notice of what your Dad wrote!!!!