We hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a fun New Year's Eve.
Christmas finally came to China a week ago, but only because we took matters into our own hands and made it happen. After that appalling attempt at recreating Christmas by the Conference Centre on the 23rd, we both felt a little disoriented with Chinese Christmas. And to make matters worse, we were going to help (officially) organise and attend a similar party for and by our students on Christmas Eve! Needless to say, we were not particularly hopeful that this would indeed give us back that modicum of Christmas spirit that we had completely lost the night before! And had it been left to our students to arrange and decorate without supervision, the party would have been more like a love-nest-fest than a Christmas party!
There was a little glimmer of some Christmas spirit, though, when some of Anette's Students came to her office and presented her with a box from two of her classes. Inside the box was a lot of little messages wishing her a Happy happy Every Day (Christmas, we think) and thanking her for having been their 'best teacher ever'! Some of the boys took this opportunity to declare their undying love for her, even from one of the students who had been rather cheeky during the whole semester, and whom Anette had to send outside to cool down/wake up one day! Anette was very touched by this, and it lifted her spirits a little... at least until it was time to start decorating the venue, a local restaurant, where the party was to be held.
Smile – yes, that is her chosen English name, the president of the English Club, had been given £20 to buy Christmas decorations with. Mark and Anette went to the restaurant with the committee in the afternoon to help get everything ready. She produced a big box of decorations, and when Anette opened the box, she was dismayed to find nothing but pink balloons and 3 massive rolls of cello-tape and three rather shabby-looking Santas! Oh dear, Mark and Anette thought, especially when the students started to plaster the walls in pink balloons mostly in pairs, which Mark quickly pointed out looked like breasts – infantile perhaps, but necessary as the students had not noticed this themselves. The students were horrified, and were desperate to change this mistake to something less embarrasing. In an attempt to make it look a little bit more like a Christmas party, Anette went to the supermarket to get some tinsel and Mark went to get some snow spray in a can, so that we could at least try to rectify this Christmas-decor-disaster! Mark gave the students the snow-spray, and in big bold letters they wrote HAPPY DAY on the big windows accompanied by smilies and love hearts! Not exactly what we had had in mind! While Anette was hanging up the tinsel in the windows, and Mark was washing the windows and redoing the snow-spraying, the students had got hold of some of the tinsel and cut it into pieces, and hung it from the balloons, in order to make them look less sexual. We'll let you judge what the result looks like! Oh such innocence!
The students were very happy with the result, so Mark and Anette decided to just let it hang - at least it was a bit more 'Christmassy'!
The party itself was a great success. There was food, (soft) drinks and lots of Chinese party games, and of course ample opportunity for the students to take pictures of their beloved foreign teachers. We were not left alone the entire evening, and if we as much as looked at each other the students went wild and started snapping pictures of our romantic gazes! After we had led the party in a couple of Christmas carols, the students started chanting kiss-kiss-kiss, and we happily obliged only to be besieged by a hoard of paparazzi-esque students! And this went on for a long time. You need to understand what the attitude is like here, and how our students get to be so innocent, compared to their Western counterparts at least. This attitude was made obvious to us when Mark told us later that our boss had said to him that we really ought to have announced that this ‘kissing behaviour’ was only acceptable because we are a married couple...Seriously!
Check out the pics of Mark and Joe, and then double the number of camera's when we shared a little kiss...and you might get the picture! It was crazy.
After the party we, the teachers - Mark, Phil, Lee and us - went to our favourite Swedish bar for a few drinks before we then went to a night club and tried to forget that it was Christmas Eve, and that we were supposed to teach at 8 am the following morning - Christmas Day, oh yes, we didn't get Christmas Day off. We got home at 4 am, and decided that whoever felt the best in the morning would take the other one's classes! A little Christmas present from Joe, it turned out!
In the afternoon on Christmas Day, Anette started to make the necessary preparations for the planned Christmas Dinner that she would be cooking for 6 people, the same people from the night before with the addition of Mark's fiancee Weiwei. Mark had lent Anette his oven, as they are not standard in Chinese homes, and so a logistical nightmare began. Mark and Joe went to the Japanese Supermarket in Times Square to get some roast Chickens for the roast Dinner that Anette was so lovingly preparing in this tiny oven! They got 3 whisky-and sesame seedy-roasted chickens, and Anette taught Weiwei how to roast veggies UK style. Our guests arrived and were welcomed with a glass (or mug) of mulled wine and they were all waiting very patiently for the oven to cook this rather large quantity of different types of veggies - as ordered by Joe. We eventually sat down to a very nice Christmas dinner, and with old Christmas classics belting out from the computer, and as we all sang along to the 12 Days Of Christmas, the elusive Christmas Spirit finally arrived just in time for dinner, and a good night was had by all. Anette had bought and wrapped 15-18 little presents that we used in a Danish Christmas Game after dinner and before the Yule Log-dessert. This was a fabulous way to get presents, and it really felt like a real Christmas! In this game there are usually a couple of bogus presents. Anette had tried pass off a 2kg bag of jumbo oats from our cupboard cleverly disguised in a shoebox, as the jackpot present (and also because she didn't like the taste of them), which after much fighting unfortunately but rather ironically ended up with Joe. Mark was the lucky winner of some gourmet chicken feet - they were gourmet because the claws had been removed! Anette got the best presents, obviously, as she had wrapped them all herself! - Why nobody thought to steal mainly from her was their loss and her gain!
Funny thing, btw, was that the people in charge of decorating the square and the area around only seemed to realise it was Christmas on Christmas Day, so they put up some rather modern looking Christmas trees then, and they are still there! Well - they try..., don't they!
On Boxing Day Jeremy, Lynn and Isla came to visit, and Isla got her Christmas and Birthday presents from us. It was adorable seeing her manoeuvring her way through the wrapping paper, which was far more interesting than the actual items inside. We showed Lynn the Japanese supermarket - she, having lived in Japan most of her life, misses some of the luxuries from the land of the rising sun. Big success - needless to say that she loved it, and Jeremy seemed to be increasingly worried about his wallet! - Anette and Lynn were both fascinated by an apple being sold there at the meagre price of 8800RMB (£880)! It was a big apple and with a pretty picture on it, but still.... it was an apple! We finished the day off with some Japanese food, and then they headed back.
On New Year's Eve Lee reciprocated Christmas Day's dinner by taking us and Phil, Mark and Weiwei out to the most amazing Japanese teppanyaki restaurant right on the party strip here in Suzhou. Teppanyaki, for those who have not yet been fortunate to go to Japan, means fried stuff, but it is so much more than that. You sit down at a large hotplate, where your own personal chef cooks you anything your heart - and taste buds - might desire! We had the most amazing meat there - probably the best beef we've ever had. The chef cooks everything right there while you marvel at his impressive spatula-wielding skills and then while you are eating the first round of food that you've ordered, he cooks the next course. It was fantastic! Afterwards we returned to the same nightclub, Virus, that we visited on Christmas Eve, and a fun night was had by all. It only felt like New Years Eve during the last 8 seconds of 2009, which was a bit weird... but the 1st of January felt like any other 1st of January, so we suppose that order was restored!
When we return to work on Monday exams will be in full swing, and we will be very busy with marking and invigilating. Our students had their oral exams on Wednesday, and we each examined 45-50 students... it was very a long day! Exams and expectations are very different in China than we are used to, but it's kind of fun being on the other side of it for once!
In a month we will be off to the Philippines to (hopefully) take our Open Water and Advanced Open Water Diving Certificates during our two week holidays out there. We both feel that we need a break from the cold here, so swimming with whale sharks and diving with ‘Nemo-fish’ sounds like a great idea right now! It'll definitely be interesting!
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