Christmas and New Years in 1000 words or less.

I really must apologize for my tardiness in writing these blogs. I manage to get myself busy one way or another consistently over here in China, and end up making this journal kind of my last priority, when it SHOULD be one of my first! Alas, I've missed talking about our Christmas experience over here. It was great, to say the least. I won't go into horribly great detail about it, but I'll give you a quick synopsis... lesse...

Christmas eve we took our band of foreign teachers (minus Christina - she went home to America for the holidays) to the local western bar around town, King Hansens. We were greeted with many happy faces, a killer pizza for dinner, two new foreign faces (Christina and Benson, they used to live in Tongliao, but since moved to Dalian to teach, an American and a South African!) wonderful live music, and a host of familiar faces of people we know around Tongliao. All in all, it was an awesome night of celebration.

I'll also note that prior to this, on December 22nd, we were treated to a dinner with the Tongliao #1 Middle school officials. It was a blast, some of the food was weird, but everyone was having a great time by the end of it (bi-jiu seems to have this effect on dinners..).

Christmas day we spent opening each others secret santa presents! I got 'The Departed', a new coffee mug with Mr. Bean splayed across it (long story) and some new gloves! I was particularly excited. After listening to some serious Christmas tunes, we headed out for lunch with Gaowei in the north village. However, for dinner we were to attend a dinner we THOUGHT was being hosted by our gym. We were quite mistaken however, to find out the dinner was actually presented by one of the big, expensive hotels in Tongliao. Our gym decided that we were special enough to attend the big event and gave us free tickets to go! It was hilarious. Asian performances, a giant buffet, and free flowing beer. Our good friend Yuyu came with us to help translate a few things. The whole experience was grand!

New years was somethin' else too. On one nondescript day in December our boss, Mr. Zheng, gave us a call and told us that there was going to be a performance at our school on New years eve. He then told us we would be performing in it. That was it. PERFORMANCE?! That could literally mean anything. Luckily, we got a little info from the last year's foreign teachers as well as David, and we learned that this meant we could do a little dance or song for the school. Well of course we decided to dance, and chose the highly appropriate song, "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" by N'Sync, one of the better known bands in China. Long story short (and a few hours of practice under our belts), the dance went off without a hitch. I think the crowd particularly enjoyed the part when we laid down on the stage in a 'log roll formation' and had Neha (dressed as Mrs. Claus) roll across all of us while waving to the audience. We were born to shine. After the performance (in which many other teachers performed.. singing, dancing, an indian dance, a mongolian performance, a comedy skit that made NO sense whatsoever, and so on) we made our way to the school cafeteria to enjoy a school official endorsed dinner for all the teachers of Tongliao #1 Middle school. The food was probably the worst official dinner food I've ever had, but alas, it was full of good people and warm hearts. After the dinner (where Karaoke was the center of attention) all of the teachers were ushered back to the music hall for a DANCE PARTY!!! Turns out everyone gets together every year to dance to hilarious Chinese techno music for a couple hours. Anywhere else in the world, the dance would have been termed as 'really lame'. BUT NOT HERE! I believe the most fun part of it is the fact that even if people are horrible at dancing, they dance regardless just to enjoy themselves. This, combined with the absurdly fast pumping music, creates a judgement free environment for boogie-ing down. In this regard - I respect those wacky Chinese people.

So there is my Christmas and New Years tales in a nutshell. Sorry I blew through it so quickly. I want to write next about an adventure we took up in the most northern part of China. And I must write about this quickly since I'm leaving on my 1 month + long trip to ALL of China tomorrow morning! SO! Without further ado!
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