At the end of the first full week of school was teachers' day. It is a national holiday here. A few of my students brought me flowers. They are so sweet.
After work all the teachers went to a banquet dinner. They had it at a Howard Johnson's an hour and a half away from our school. I wasn't expecting much out of the banquet food. I've been to a Chinese banquet before and it is basically a lot of scary looking meat with faces. I got something vegetarian brought to me but I still wasn't a huge fan of it.
During the dinner there were a lot of speeches and skits in Chinese. The teachers from our department had to do a little skit and we were required to stay after work and practice for it almost every day for the first week of school. I have to say our skit was pretty lame but so were the others. One skit involved a bunch of guys dressing in drag... not sure what it had to do with teachers' day. Mostly everyone had too much free beer to notice the skits very much. I had a decent time chatting with my co-workers. The best part of the banquet was we each got a red envelope with small cash gift inside.
After dinner some of the teachers sang karaoke in a hotel board room. It was mildly entertaining but I only stayed for a short time.
I went to the hotel restaurant with a few people and bought some pizza just before closing time. The Chinese have a habit of putting some very unusual toppings on their pizza. My first week here I ordered a garden pizza. It came with kiwi and assorted fruits, in addition to cheese and tomato sauce. This time I requested no corn or other unusual toppings before they made it. It tasted ok.
Most of the teachers stayed over night at the hotel since they offered to put us up for free. In the morning we thought we were going straight back after breakfast. They announced during dinner (in Chinese) that we would be going to a museum. Fortunately, Karen translated for me so it wasn't a total surprise to me, but some people had no idea.
We went to the China Maritime Museum. It was sort of a cool place but a lot of the foreign teachers (myself included) were slightly annoyed that nobody told us the schedule beforehand.
They had a movie included in the museum that they said was 4D. I never heard of a 4D movie before so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Basically it was a 3D movie where your chair shook when a lot of action occurred, water sprayed you when it rained onscreen and little bursts of air blew on you if it was windy. It was actually pretty cool. It was dubbed in Chinese, but it was mostly an action film so I got the gist of it.
After the museum, all the western teachers assumed we were going home so we got back on the bus. They then proceeded to stop for another Chinese banquet meal. It was at a pretty place with lots of plants. I didn't bother requesting anything vegetarian, I just had soda and figured I'd eat whenever I got home. My friend Michelle who did try the food ended up with food poisoning and felt ill the whole week afterwards.
The whole thing was sort of nice but would have been a lot more pleasant if we had some sort of communication about how the day was going to go. I thought I'd be home by ten or eleven so I could spend the day with Danny. Instead we got back at four. The Chinese teachers were more of the mentality that we should just go along with whatever because the boss says so. It is funny, I had a different understanding of how a communist country works. A lot of the western teachers looked fairly annoyed by the end of the trip. It was sort of a cultural learning experience.
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