Fêtes galore

Well, it’s been almost two weeks since my last post, and it therefore time to try it again. The main theme this time: celebrations, for these past couple weeks seem to have been full of them.

I guess it all started on my birthday (which was the seventh, FYI), which started out less than exciting, but ended quite well. As it was a Wednesday this year, I had to go out to YangPu (the far away campus) to teach from 8:30-12:30. This meant being on the 7:30AM bus…meh. While teaching, it started raining quite heavily, and it hadn’t let up by the time class was over. Having accidentally left my umbrella in a different classroom on the main campus the day prior, I had to walk about 10 minutes through the rain to get to the cafeteria sans umbrella (though with big head…sorry, reference is to a Chinese nursery rhyme). At said cafeteria, the server proceeded to drop my lunch, although he quickly apologized and got it for me again.

The evening, although getting off to a rough start, proved much better. After the restaurant at which I wanted to dine couldn’t guarantee us a reservation, before I taught my afternoon class, I went to a restaurant near my home and was able to reserve a whole room for the 23ish of us. The Chinese banquet we had there was exquisite, and I quite enjoyed myself. I’m not usually in the position to have a large group of friends together for my birthday, as I’m usually just arriving in a new place, so I was really quite happy. After that, it was out to our local pub (the Speakeasy), and to top off the evening, a trip to Windsor for some hardcore karaokeing until the wee hours of the morning. All in all, a good birthday.

The tenth was Teachers Day in China, which would have been nice, except not a single one of my students even wished me a happy teachers’ day…We did have dinner over at a friend/other teacher’s house, so we did at least celebrate appropriately amongst ourselves.

The eleventh was our next opportunity for celebration. That morning I woke up and turned on the TV only to find that about 75% of the stations were covering a THREE HOUR speech given by Hu Jintao in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the War Against Japanese Aggression (AKA, WWII). I watched some of it, finding the dramatics interesting. My favorite part: an elderly, uniform-clad man sitting in the audience with his fist on firmly planted on table in front of him and visibly asleep.

That evening was also another of my friends, Jen’s, birthday. Sucky day for a birthday, ay? Anyway, we went out to a Portuguese restaurant in Kundu (the party area) of town, and drama aside, had a good time. Being us, we then went to a club in the area called Top One, and again, rounded out the evening with a trip to the karaoke joint. We’re so predictable.

And most recently, the eighteenth this year was one of the two major holidays in China—the Mid-Autumn Festival. The day started at 10AM with about 10 straight minutes of air raid sirens. I might have been worried except that I had read an announcement posted at the entry gate to our apartment building saying that we would be celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the end of the War Against Japanese Aggression again this week with a minute of silence... How Chinese is it that the minute of silence was punctuated by screeching sirens? At the very least, they managed to make sure everybody was up at the time.

As you might know or be able to guess, the moon plays an important role in celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival which is also known as the Moon Festival. Thus, I didn’t do much anything exciting until the evening. Normally, if I were actually Chinese, I’d be headed to a family meal (much like the way we celebrate Thanksgiving in the US), but as I’m not actually Chinese (you’re surprised, aren’t you?), we ended up just having dinner with some Chinese friends, and then walking around Cuihu (Green Lake) park accompanied by 小熊 (Maurice, my dog). It was über crowded even though the pervading clouds obscured the moon for most of the evening. Luckily, there were enough little electronic lanterns playing “Happy birthday” that we could find our way through the night…